{"id":1184,"date":"2018-02-02T21:58:38","date_gmt":"2018-02-03T02:58:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sense.com\/consumer-blog\/meet-george-zavaliagkos-senses-new-vp-technology\/"},"modified":"2025-06-20T12:00:37","modified_gmt":"2025-06-20T16:00:37","slug":"meet-george-zavaliagkos-senses-new-vp-technology","status":"publish","type":"consumer-blog","link":"https:\/\/sense.com\/consumer-blog\/meet-george-zavaliagkos-senses-new-vp-technology\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet George Zavaliagkos: Sense\u2019s New VP of Technology"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s not every day that the manager of a 300-person team of data scientists, engineers and linguists at Amazon chooses to move to a 50-person startup in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As an expert in speech recognition and unsupervised learning, George Zavaliagkos led the Alexa team in the development and training of cloud models to improve Alexa\u2019s skill and language capabilities. George thrived in such a unique opportunity in the field, \u201cI loved working on a product that everybody knew about and loved,\u201d he remembers, \u201cAnd I loved that my daughter could finally explain to her friends what I did at work.\u201d<\/p>\n

The connection between speech recognition and load disaggregation<\/a> isn\u2019t new to Sense, of course. \u201cDevices in the house do not work in isolation \u2013 you observe the signal from all of them at once. It\u2019s just like trying to solve speech recognition problem with dozens of people talking at once.” In his new role as VP of Technology for Sense, George is most looking forward to analyzing the critical mass of data Sense has already acquired. \u201cDisaggregation technology is a tough challenge, but for a data scientist there is nothing more fun than trying to crack a tough but data-rich problem and provide value to our customers.\u201d<\/p>\n

More than ten years ago, George headed up research at eScription, a company that provided computer-aided medical transcription services. As an industry incredibly reliant on accurate and efficient transcription, eScription proved to be so valuable to medical enterprises that it was acquired by Nuance for $400m. Although now commonplace, the technology George worked on at eScription was at the forefront of the field and provided a solution for a major point of weakness for medical professionals across the board. George did some work with Nuance\u2019s research collaboration with IBM that would eventually bring IBM\u2019s Watson analytics to healthcare. At Nuance, he also led the development of their voicemail-to-text product and was responsible for their cloud-based speech recognition solution that would later power Apple\u2019s Siri.<\/p>\n

George\u2019s love for building technology from scratch led him to Sense. Smart home technology, anchored by a few established products, is exploding with new innovations every year. George views Sense as \u201cbridging the gap\u201d between smart devices and a fully smart home. \u201cI was once driving with my wife, and she asked me how long it had been since we left the house,\u201d he remembers. \u201cI opened Sense, looked at when garage door had opened-closed, and voila, there I had the answer. As simple as it may seem, working through data science problems is that much more exciting when you can see the results before your eyes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Aside from the great intellectual challenge of device detection, George is excited to work with the team at Sense. After consulting for Sense and several other startups, he especially admired the exceptional people and diverse backgrounds of Sense\u2019s data team, as well as CEO Mike Phillips\u2019<\/a> impressive track record. With an already impressive team of data scientists, George is excited about the imminent improvements to device detection on the horizon.<\/p>\n

When he isn\u2019t immersed in algorithms and load disaggregation, George enjoys science fiction, playing bridge, and spending time with his family. Originally from Greece, he completed his undergraduate years at the National Technical University of Athens<\/a>. He left Greece citing a weak tech economy, and chose Northeastern University<\/a> for his PhD in Speech Recognition where his colleague, John Makhoul, was an adjunct professor. Makhoul was also the chief scientist at BBN Technologies<\/a>, opening an exciting research opportunity for George. \u201cI got to work on machine learning before it was even called machine learning,\u201d George says. \u201cMy first project was on neural networks. I\u2019m very lucky I got to work on technologies that, twenty years later, are reshaping the world that we live in.\u201d<\/p>\n

Interested in learning more about the Sense team and how you might fit in? Check out the latest job postings.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

George recently joined Sense from Amazon\u2019s Alexa team to lead the direction of Sense\u2019s machine learning developments and data science projects.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":1185,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"1","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","footnotes":""},"consumer-blog-category":[8],"content-type":[13],"featured":[],"class_list":["post-1184","consumer-blog","type-consumer-blog","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","consumer-blog-category-company","content-type-article"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nMeet George Zavaliagkos: Sense\u2019s New VP of Technology - 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