I’m a Senior Applied Scientist in the Generative AI space at Microsoft. I own the Smart-Reply Microsoft Research project est. 2020, that saves ~294,000 hours/year by generating solutions to human queries leading to ~$3.6 Million savings/year. I work on representation learning and controllable models for structured, human-aligned NLP systems. Outside of office hours, I collaborate with the CSS group at Microsoft Research NYC. I studied Computer Science at IIT and Columbia.

I am fortunate to have collaborated with some leading researchers including Kathleen McKeown, David M. Rothschild, Smaranda Muresan, and Ching-Yung Lin. I serve as an advisory board member of an NGO since 2021, working on AI-assisted education and upliftment of underprivileged slum children. Some learnings from my extensive experience in Big-Tech Research can be found in AI Blog.

Use my updated calendar scheduler for research meetings.

Curriculum Vitae

2026: [Aug] NLP Paper on Causality in preparation with Kathleen McKeown
2026: [Aug] Traditional+LLM NLP Paper in review for submission, with David M. Rothschild
2026: [June] A preliminary research appears in a workshop at ICML 2026
2026: [May] Patent: USPTO approves 18/182149 - granting US 12,632,482
2026: [Feb] iBERT selected as an Oral Talk at EACL 2026
2026: [Jan] Invited Talk: Agentic Layer Arbitration, Pals of Autonomous Agents Meeting, Microsoft
2026: [Jan] Foundational NLP Model - iBERT accepted to EACL 2026 Main, with Kathleen McKeown
iBERT—interpretable BERT (demo, pdf: See page 16): general-purpose model (9700 lines of code)
2025: [Nov] NLP Paper published in EMNLP 2025 Main Proceedings, with Kathleen McKeown
2025: [Oct] Agentic NLP Paper in preparation, with David M. Rothschild
2025: [Jun] Patent: USPTO approves 17/981293 - granting US 12,321,701
2024: [Mar] Fourth promotion in three years at Microsoft as a Scientist
2024: [Feb] Public Release of Event-prediction:Dynamics 365 Offering - led the delivery
2023: [Jan] Third promotion in two years at Microsoft as a Scientist
2023: [Jan] NLP Paper accepted at WWW’23 (acceptance rate 19.8%)
2022: Two invited talks delivered at Columbia University, and NIST
2022: [Sep] Ranked #1 in NIST (US Gov.) TRECVid on Multimodal Language Understanding (DVU)
2022: [Jul] Invited Talk at Columbia University (PDL - Engineering) on becoming an industry researcher
2022: Research Mentor for a Microsoft Research (MSR) NLP PhD Summer Intern
2021: Invited talk at NIST for my work on long form datsets - multi-modal semantic inference
2021: Ranked #1 in ACM Grand Challenge on Multimodal Semantic Understanding in long-form datasets
2020: Three peer-reviewed research papers published with external collaboration
2019: Honored as Class Marshal: Columbia Class of ‘19 for “demonstrating achievement in academics”
2018: Featured in Uber AI's blog for going above and beyond
2015: Hour-long session with Director of Research, Google: Peter Norvig; “Limitations of Deep Learning”

Hobbies: I am a Violinist, Pianist, Portraitist, run Half-Marathons, dance Salsa, and solve Rubik’s Cube.
Discipline: Workout 4 days/week since past two years; hold orange-belt in Shito-Ryu-Genbu-Kai Karate.
Banking: Was a macro delta wall-street banker earlier - with each trade ranging between $5MM-$50MM.

Highlight Papers:

Highlight Demo:

Low-Resource Interactive Visualization

Efsun Sarioglu Kayi *, Vishal Anand *, and Smaranda Muresan

(* Co-First author)

LREC, Marseille, France, 2020

Contact:

CV