Sasidhar Kasturi is a Principal/Director in the Azure Machine Learning group at Microsoft, where he leads the vision and execution of open-source model (OSS) customization experiences. His work encompasses Fine-Tuning, Synthetic Data Generation, and Distillation for NLP and Vision models. He spearheaded the incubation and development of a platform for onboarding and serving open-source models on Azure, enabling scalable and seamless integration for global customers. With professional experience spanning both the US and India, he has contributed to key advancements in AI and Machine Learning. In previous roles, he was part of the AI Core Conversation group, contributing to core components of the Cortana Skills Kit. Prior to that, he worked with the Relevance team at Bing, Hyderabad, where he applied Machine Learning techniques to improve Bing search result relevance and developed machine-learned models for various Cortana experiences. Specialties: Machine Learning, Big Data, Data Analysis, and AI-driven product innovation.