Dr. Prem Natarajan is vice president for Amazon Alexa, leading a multi-disciplinary team to make Alexa a trusted AI assistant, advisor, and companion for everyone, everywhere.

His team’s product, engineering, and scientific advances have improved how customers experience Alexa through advances in speech recognition and speech synthesis, natural language understanding, computer vision, entity linking and resolution, and related machine learning technologies. Dr. Natarajan and his team are now focused on advancing generalizable AI, combining the best of human-like intelligence with machine learning to accelerate the future of ambient intelligence – where the underlying AI seamlessly blends into your environment, connects heterogeneous services and devices, and adapts on your behalf to provide greater utility.

Prior to Amazon, he was senior vice dean of engineering at the University of Southern California, where he led nationally influential DARPA- and IARPA-sponsored research efforts in biometrics, face recognition, OCR, natural language processing, media forensics, and forecasting. Prior to that, he served as executive vice president and principal scientist for speech, language, and multimedia at Raytheon BBN Technologies.

Dr. Natarajan is a well-recognized thought leader in AI and a keynote speaker who is frequently interviewed by publications like CNN, MIT Tech Review, Economist and Fast Company. In 2022, he was honored by the IEEE as a Fellow for his contributions to conversational AI systems, spoken language translation, and home voice-assistant systems. He is the author and co-author of more than 200 published papers in research areas such as speech recognition, machine translation and computer vision. He also holds several patents in the field of conversational AI and machine learning. He received his PhD and master’s degree in Electrical Engineering at Tufts University, and a bachelor’s degree in Engineering from Savitribai Phule Pune University in India.