Nikko was an early pioneer on the Alexa project, beginning his role at Amazon without knowing what he would be working on. “I saw it as an opportunity to start something completely new,” he says. 

In his time at Amazon, Nikko has developed a distributed machine learning system for training deep neural networks for Alexa. His broad experience in the speech recognition field — from writing applications to core speech recognition systems and theoretical research — enables him to see the big picture and contribute a high level perspective to technical discussions. 

“Alexa is on the forefront of the new user interface revolution that we are in the midst of,” he says. “It you want to be part of that, Amazon is the right place to be.” 

Nikko received a PhD in Speech Technology from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and completed his post-doctoral work at MIT. Outside of work, Nikko enjoys spending time with his kids and skiing.