Kristen Summers
Operating Unit CTO, Microsoft Federal
This year, Kristen Summers is especially proud of how her team builds on Azure’s strong data and artificial intelligence capabilities to create solutions that enable customers to get more out of their data.
For example, the company’s Federal Customer Success Unit has combined cognitive services into a capability that analyzes video in near real time, providing an impressive range of information: recognizing faces, identifying sentiment, recognizing objects, transcribing text from audio, and automatically identifying and translating foreign language content as it occurs in the video. The result gives the viewer a comprehensive summary without having to wait.
“I love how our team collaborates with engineering for new capabilities that are focused on government needs and missions,” Summers said. “For example, we are collaborating on how to make sense of large, unstructured collections of text and image material, and through new approaches to combining and de-duplicating content across modalities, we gain a fresh, holistic understanding of the collection and its significance.”
Why Watch
As Summers’ team members look to the future, they’re laser-focused on expanding how they help customers get the full value of all data. They’re excited about combining AI and analytics with collaboration tools for a seamless experience as customer teams work together to understand complex situations. The team is also focused on next-generation AI capabilities and using deep neural networks for large foundational models as well as trustworthy and responsible AI.
For example, through its strong relationship with OpenAI, the team is looking at how to apply OpenAI’s large language models to some of the biggest challenges government personnel are working to address. The Azure Responsible AI dashboard illustrates how the team is helping customers ensure the trustworthiness of their models built by data scientists as well as the ones the team provides them.
“Kristen’s government industry understanding and forward-thinking approach to bringing cloud and AI capabilities to bear on behalf of our customers’ toughest challenges is really unmatched,” said John McNiff, operating unit leader at Microsoft Federal. “Her thoughtful approach, deep expertise, and trust built over time are foundational to the success and collaboration she continues to drive – both with our extended team at Microsoft and among government and industry partners.”