Microsoft Ireland
Paul is a Principal Engineering Manger currently running the Natural Language Experiences engineering team in Microsoft’s Dublin campus. This team is responsible for providing hundreds of millions of users, all over the world, with scenarios that align with the company’s mission to “empower every person and every organisation on the planet to achieve more”.
Paul and his team try to enable those people and organisations to leverage natural language in order to create better content and represent their ideas in as impactful a manner as possible, through the Office applications. If you use any of the Microsoft Office products, you will have used some of the output of Paul’s team. Prior to working on natural language, Paul was responsible for the Office Consumer Subscription workflows and the Office Add-in Store, as well as many features focusing on the global reach of Microsoft products.

Description:
This is a software practitioner’s journey in enabling features and experiences, that leverage natural language, as applied to Microsoft Office. Office includes the globally recognisable software brands of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote and more. The Office engineering team in Dublin are focused on bringing scenarios that leverage natural language processing to the diverse set of Office users all over the world. The talk will examine, how we do this, in practical terms, and consider the topic from the following areas; The journey from rules-based language models to deep-learning models The value that services play in unlocking value across end points and platforms The importance of compliance and privacy Highlight some actual high-level end user value that these models unlock