Who We Are: Aparna Lakshmiratan

Aparna Lakshmiratan is a Program Manager in Microsoft Live Labs.  Live Labs aspires to blend research with world class engineering to invent and improve the technologies powering the Internet.  Aparna came to Live Labs in 2006 and works is accountable for setting, coordinating, and achieving milestones for Live Labs Research projects.  Her role also includes managing the lab’s mutual dependencies and accountabilities with the product groups.

Aparna joined Microsoft in 2004 as a technical product planner in Microsoft Office responsible for opportunity analysis, development of customer engagement programs, feature prioritization and competitive research to drive features for Office 2007.  In this role, Aparna drove efforts for Office (sp. Word) to address the legal vertical market, and the “Office Platform Study” to create a framework to analyze the Office partner solution landscape.

Prior to Microsoft Aparna was a Scientist at Imagen Inc., a startup in Boston.  Aparna was part of a small team of scientists providing an end-to-end solution for Teradyne’s next-generation post-place automated optical inspection systems (OPTIMA 7200).  The Imagen technology provided image analysis and object recognition functionality to `test’ visual objects collected in a composite image of a manufactured circuit board. The images are analyzed for defects and for manufacturing process trends that indicate future defects. Several of the Optima 7200 OPT systems, jointly developed by an integrated team of Imagen and Teradyne engineers, are in use by electronics manufacturers in Asia and North America.

Aparna got her Masters and PhD in Computer Vision from the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  Her thesis focused on Learning Visual Concepts for Image Classification.