Polly Allen

Polly Allen is an expert with more than 20 years of experience in software development, creating and managing engineering teams, and leading cross-functional teams of scientists and engineers. In her role as Principal Product Manager at Alexa AI (Amazon), she led projects at the intersection of science and technology. Her specialization focuses on the application of natural language processing technologies: search and navigation, text understanding, and generation. In 2020, Polly led the development and launch of the first automatic web content summaries for Alexa, based on transformer models similar to those underpinning ChatGPT. Sitting at the intersection of product management and machine learning, Polly is an active advocate for diversity, inclusion, and equal opportunities in the tech industry, striving to make AI accessible and understandable to more people. She is also an experienced angel investor, a former corporate director, has advised startups, and has spoken at conferences on topics of product management, ethics, and DEI in artificial intelligence. Polly earned a master's degree in software engineering from MIT and the University of Victoria, as well as an MBA from the University of British Columbia.