Ananth Sankar: Advisory Board

Dr. Sankar is a Principal Staff Engineer at LinkedIn, where he works on machine learning problems in the areas of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and multimedia processing. This work feeds into LinkedIn’s search and recommendation systems, as well as content classification.

During his career, Dr. Sankar has worked in the areas of speech recognition, natural language processing, display power management and search and recommendation systems, the common denominator being the development of innovative machine learning algorithms targeted for real applications.

Before joining LinkedIn in 2018, he held senior research and leadership positions at Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Yahoo!, Nuance Communications, SRI International, AT&T Bell Labs, and also founded a startup called Moxair, Inc. He has given several invited talks, has over 50 refereed publications, and holds 11 patents.

At UC Santa Cruz he is advising the NLP MS program. In the program, he has guest lectured and, as an advisor, brings the perspective of someone who frequently hires engineers that do applied research and development in the areas of NLP and machine learning. The program is also a chance for Dr. Sankar to experience his fondness for academia. He began his career as a lecturer at the University of Pune in India and has taught various NLP and deep-learning related classes at Stanford, UCLA, and USF, and guided a PhD student at Stanford.

Dr. Sankar holds a PhD from Rutgers University (1991), and an MS from SUNY Stony Brook, both in Electrical and Computer Engineering. He received his B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from I.I.T. Kanpur, India, in 1986.

When he isn’t working on cutting edge research, Dr. Sankar enjoys music. He’s an amateur guitar player and singer, and is fond of bands like The Beatles, James Taylor, and Pink Floyd.