Written by Nirmal Gala
For many consumers, “Siri” is the name that comes to mind when they think of a virtual technology assistant in their daily lives, but for Samsung users, it’s “Bixby.” Using artificial intelligence and complex machine learning models, Bixby can help its users anticipate weather events, find products in their area, and even suggest events to check out on a certain weekend. It can absorb communication and commands via text and voice, making it adaptable and useful in a number of settings.
Bixby’s popularity has been rising in recent years. Samsung invested money and programming resources into Bixby’s development, boosting its ability to compete with Siri and similar tools. Avinash Madasu was a senior software engineer that used natural language processing to help Bixby reach new heights. During his three years on the team, Avinash was able to develop and deploy an entity recognition model within Bixby while maintaining the data security guidelines required by GDPR.
While working diligently on Bixby itself, Avinash also mentored interns from India and Korea, helping them gain valuable industry experience while supporting their contributions to Samsung overall. Effortlessly able to juggle multiple demands at once, Avinash was awarded Samsung’s Citizen Award in 2019 and 2020. His research helped take the organization to the next level by improving how it served its customers and directly enhancing one of its most important products: Bixby.
Coming out of his undergraduate studies at the National Institute and Technology Tiruchirappalli and going straight into Samsung as a critical engineer was challenging, but Avinash was excited by the opportunity and worked diligently to make a major impact in a short time. After Samsung, Avinash headed to the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill to pursue a master’s degree in computer science. As a research assistant at the university, he spent time applying grounded natural language instructions to automate web navigation under his professor, Shashank Srivastava.
Grateful to UNC Chapel Hill for taking his research capabilities to a new level, Avinash has progressed as a software engineer and is now solving some of the most complex problems in the field today. In one of his co-authored papers that was published in ACM Multimedia, Avinash proposed a new framework for video retrieval that uses dialogue instead of traditional text systems. This innovation allows users to develop a back-and-forth speaking history with technological devices using a model that pulls in visual and linguistic cues to retrieve videos. Not only does this methodology boost retrieval accuracy, but it performs better than non-interactive video retrieval systems.
His uncanny ability to look at the current technology landscape, find gaps and challenges that exist, and fill those gaps with new technology helps set Avinash apart from other software engineers. In 2023, he was awarded the National Young Scientist Award and the National Award for Outstanding Researcher from the International Institute of Organized Research. Selected from a pool of more than 4,500 applicants, Avinash’s impact on the artificial intelligence field has been recognized time and time again as he takes his rightful place as a thought leader in the industry.
Interested in diving further into knowledge grounding, embodied navigation, and RoboNLP, Avinash will continue pushing the envelope as a computer science expert. Nowadays, people are impacted by technological tools on a daily basis, yet they rarely understand the hard work put into the industry by researchers and developers like Avinash. In order for humanity to thrive in the future, we need people like Avinash forging the path ahead. His leadership, passion, and innovation will certainly take him far in his professional career, but when it comes to technology, his work will benefit all of us.