India, August 3, 2023 – Audio Series platform Pocket FM announces the appointment of Pannagadatta K. Shivaswamy as the Director of Artificial Intelligence (AI). In this role, Pannagadatta will spearhead the company’s AI initiatives, shaping the future of content personalisation and enhancing user experiences. Additionally, he will be responsible for overseeing the integration of voice assistants and content analytics, and playing a pivotal role in advancing Pocket FM’s Generative AI capabilities.
With an impressive track record in the AI field and extensive expertise in machine learning, recommender systems and personalisation, he brings a wealth of knowledge to Pocket FM. His strategic vision and technical prowess make him an invaluable addition to the company’s tech leadership.
With over 14 years of experience, Pannagadatta held significant positions at leading internet organisations like Netflix and LinkedIn. He specialises in large-scale machine learning and deep learning, focusing on personalisation, recommender systems, ranking, and search. Shivaswamy’s recent research interest also covers topics such as fairness, interpretability, calibration, causal inference, reinforcement learning, and LLMs.
“We warmly welcome Pannagadatta to lead our AI innovation,” said Prateek Dixit, CTO and Cofounder, Pocket FM. “His extensive AI experience and deep understanding of the audio entertainment industry resemble our stature of work as we continue to innovate and enhance our platform. We believe his leadership will accelerate our AI initiatives, including voice assistants, audio analytics, content analytics, and delivering personalised and immersive audio experiences to our users.”
Panngadatta will spearhead Pocket FM’s AI strategy, driving innovation in content recommendation systems, voice assistants, and audio analytics. He will work closely with the engineering and content teams to develop and deploy advanced AI models that revolutionise the way users discover and engage with audio content.
“I am honoured to join Pocket FM and have the opportunity to contribute to the growth and evolution of the audio entertainment industry,” said Pannagadatta K. Shivaswamy, Director-AI, Pocket FM. “Pocket FM has already established itself as a frontrunner in the entertainment space with a completely new audio series category, and I look forward to leveraging AI’s power to enhance its capabilities and create immersive experiences for millions of our users.”
In addition to his contributions to machine learning, he authored over 25 publications, presenting papers at prestigious conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, KDD, WSDM, RecSys, JMLR, and JAIR. The impact of his work is demonstrated by over 1600 citations. Additionally, he holds six issued U.S. patents, showcasing his innovative thinking and problem-solving abilities.
Besides his professional excellence, he actively contributes to the academic community, serving on program committees and reviewing papers for renowned conferences and journals, including FAccT, KDD, NeurIPS, ECMLPKDD, ICML, AAAI, JMLR, and MLJ.
Pannagadatta holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Columbia University and a Master’s degree in Systems Science and Automation from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, in addition to a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering from S.J.C.E., University of Mysore.
