Hassan Sawaf has been with Amazon since September 2016. This January, he joined AWS as Director of Applied Science and Artificial Intelligence, driving the science and technology behind products like Amazon Lex, Amazon Comprehend, Amazon Translate, Amazon Transcribe and other machine learning services. Before that he worked in the automatic speech recognition, computer vision, natural language understanding, and machine translation fields for 20+ years. In 1999, he cofounded AIXPLAIN AG, a company focusing on speech recognition and machine translation, which he sold successfully to AppTek Inc. in 2004 joining as Chief Operations Officer, AppTek in turn eventually was acquired by SAIC in 2010. Hassan also spent his time at SAIC as Chief Scientist for Human Language Technology, where he worked on multilingual spoken dialogue systems. In 2013 he joined eBay, established the Machine Translation and Cognitive Computing team, and later lead the Artificial Intelligence team behind various language technology and computer vision innovations at eBay.