Portrait of Sasa Junuzovic

Sasa Junuzovic

Principal RSDE

About

I am a Principal Research Software Design Engineer (RSDE) in the MSR Ability group led by Ed Cutrell. This is my second tour with Microsoft Research, and I am excited to be here.

How did I get here? I received my Bachelors of Math from the University of Waterloo in May 2004 and my Computer Science Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina in May 2010. In 2010, I became a post-doc researcher in the Nexus team in Microsoft Research led by Kori Inkpen. My work focused on remote collaboration in the consumer space. In 2012, I joined the team as a full-time RSDE. While I continued to work in the consumer space, I also started to consider enterprise meetings. In 2014, I moved to Microsoft Research Next to join Zhengyou Zhang and his MIX team to create a novel AI product for meeting rooms. In 2017, as that project gained traction, the team graduated out of research and into the newly formed Business AI group. Unfortunately, shortly after joining Business AI, re-orgs began, our project was stopped, and we became a part of the Ambient org. Soon after that, Ambient was absorbed into the new Cognition org in Cloud + AI, and the MIX team was scattered throughout the Vision Services group in Cognition. During these re-orgs, I worked on computer vision based AI systems, mostly on single and multi-camera person tracking with RGB and RGBD devices. Now, I am back to my roots.

Where do I hope to go? I have always been passionate about CSCW and HCI and building systems in these areas. In the Ability team, I will focus my energy on these same areas but from an accessibility perspective.