Evelyne Viegas

About

Evelyne Viegas is a Technical Advisor at Microsoft Research. She drives the research explorations strategy, working collaboratively with the external research community in academia and government research agencies worldwide. She focuses on the beginning of the innovation lifecycle, nurturing a healthy pipeline of innovations. Starting by scouting and understanding the external space of research efforts, she develops a few promising opportunities into a basket of collaborative research explorations that are then validated through experimentation, potentially leading to further, larger investments.

Prior to her present role, Evelyne worked on catalyzing research ecosystems to accelerate research impact through strategic collaborations and partnerships, working in partnership with the academic community, engineering and business groups, industry partners and government agencies worldwide. In the new AI era unlocked through Foundation Models, she developed a global research network, the Accelerating Foundation Models Research (AFMR) initiative with her team,  to engage on solving some of the greatest technical and societal challenges of tomorrow to ensure that AI is aligned with shared human goals, values, and preferences, AI-human interactions are improved via sociotechnical research and create positive benefits for people and societies worldwide, and that scientific discovery in natural sciences is accelerated through knowledge discovery, hypothesis generation, and multiscale multimodal data generation.

Prior to Microsoft Research, Evelyne worked as a Technical Lead at Microsoft delivering Natural Language Processing components to Office and Windows. Before Microsoft, and after completing her Ph.D. in France, she worked as a Principal Investigator at the Computing Research Laboratory in New Mexico on an ontology-based Machine Translation project. Evelyne serves on international editorial, program and award committees.