Dan Vann Email & Phone Number

Duvall, Wa, Us

Redmond, Washington, Us

- Senior Applied Scientist in Microsoft Research (MSR) as a part of the Fairness Center team.- Developing a centralized framework that enables teams across the company to identify, measure, and mitigate Responsible AI issues across various Microsoft AI products and services. This framework includes creating central resources used to evaluate Microsoft AI systems before deployment and were also shipped as an external offering in Azure AI Studio safety evaluations (https://aka.ms/Safety-Evals-Blog).- Helping drive Responsible AI best practices and corporate policies through close collaboration based on the research being done in Microsoft Research, practical application being implemented by AI product teams, and standards being established by the Office of Responsible AI and CELA.- Identified and measured Responsible AI issues with GitHub Copilot (powered by OpenAI Codex), Bing Image Creator (powered by DALL-E), and Bing Chat (powered by GPT-4) and evaluated proposed mitigations.- Worked with the Bing and Azure OpenAI product teams and researchers in MS Research to create a taxonomy of AI harms, investigate existing and new Responsible AI issues related to foundational large language models (e.g., GPT-4, DALL-E, and GPT-V), and report findings to Microsoft's senior leadership team.

Redmond, Washington, Us

- Senior Software Engineer in the org responsible for Cortana, Microsoft's virtual assistant.- Helped shipped Cortana-powered Teams Voice Skills (TVS) across various Microsoft Teams devices for shared rooms and personal use.- Investigated opportunities to improve language understanding capabilities across different Cortana experiences.- Point of contact for Privacy and Security compliance reviews to ensure certain Cortana services followed regulations and mandates.- Served as a Responsible AI champ for Cortana and a member of AETHER Fairness and Inclusiveness Working Group, which is the advisory body for Microsoft leadership on AI ethics and effects.

Redmond, Washington, Us

- Part of the US Xiaoice team responsible for the Microsoft Zo chatbot.- Responsible for a significant portion of the real-time language understanding components of the product that handled content moderation of offensive and sensitive content and powered customized user experiences.- Drove processes and reporting associated with identifying, measuring, and mitigating issues that affected conversation quality by analyzing and visualizing conversational data using Power BI, Application Insights, Kusto, and Data Lake.- Collaborated closely with internal and external partner teams to help deliver unique user experiences tied to chat conversations.- Invented a pattern matching technology built from scratch that has significant performance and functional improvements over regular expressions (RegEx) (http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2018/0232598.html).- Invented an approach to Natural Language Processing (NLP) that detects complex English phrasal patterns and extracts entities from plain text examples (http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2020/0082017.html).- Invented a scalable approach to indexing and searching large repositories of patterns that allows for efficient, optimized text matching.- Implemented an approach for understanding text-based user intent that leverages both rules and statistical models and utilizes a feedback loop to incrementally improve precision and recall.- Developed customized .NET desktop tooling that dynamically visualizes managed code for team members of varying technical levels.

Redmond, Washington, Us

Developed a distributed, dynamic, real-time monitoring framework based on .NET and Azure that was used across various teams in Application Insights. The framework recorded historical data, raised alerts, and collected in-depth telemetry that was used for reporting and root cause analysis.

Redmond, Washington, Us

Significant contributor to the multi-process, UI automation architecture used by the teams responsible for the XAML and HTML designers in Visual Studio and Blend for Visual Studio.

Redmond, Washington, Us

Developed UI test automation and created test plans that validated the XAML designer layout features in Visual Studio.

Sunnyvale, Ca, Us

Developed an online, real-time monitoring tool that consolidated and normalized operations data from different sources across the company.

Pittsburgh, Pa, Us

Undergrad researcher for "Valerie The Roboceptionist", one of the world’s first robot receptionists: http://www.cmu.edu/cmnews/extra/040219_valerie.html