Rukmini Iyer

Distinguished Engineer, Bing Advertising Marketplace & Serving, AI & Research Microsoft

Dr. Rukmini Iyer joined Microsoft in 2010 to advance conversational understanding for personal assistants and moved to Bing search advertising in 2012 to accelerate machine learning in the advertising product. Her strong technical leadership and deep collaboration with partners has helped Bing Ads achieve exponential product growth over the past 5 years. Her team currently manages key infrastructure and algorithmic components from core NLP efforts for query and ad understanding, to machine learning of user and advertiser signals to incorporate into the ad auction, to managing the online auction.

​Prior to Microsoft, Rukmini earned her PhD in Electrical Engineering from Boston University in 1998, working in speech recognition and NLP for the first 10 years at BBN Technologies and Nuance, and distributed ML and AI to improve online revenue and user experience at Yahoo. Her current interests include practical applications of reinforcement learning, improving long-term success of small businesses in Bing Ads ecosystem, and growing product teams that fundamentally embrace AI in design and development.