Ariya Rastrow is a senior principal scientist for Alexa AI. Ariya joined Amazon in 2012 as a founding member of the team that launched Amazon Echo/Alexa. He has served as the technical lead responsible for developing speech recognition and deep learning technologies for Alexa AI. Ariya’s main focus has been building low-latency, far-field ASR systems from the ground up, that have been deployed in a variety of settings (at-edge and in-cloud). Ariya did his PhD at the Center for Language and Speech Processing (CLSP) at Johns Hopkins University. He has more than 15 years of hands-on experience in AI and has published extensively through international conferences and journals. He has also been awarded 35+ patents for his work in AI and in developing Alexa.