Nicoletta Colosio

Having worked for over six years in the technology and software sector, I have substantial experience in leading and guiding mixed teams of engineers to consistently and reliably deliver high-impact results. My main expertise is in the AI domain, with the creation of tooling for supervised fine tuning of Large Language Models, Knowledge Graphs, and Ontologies.

I currently work to deliver customer value by guiding cross-functional programs from conception to launch for the entire Alexa organization (Amazon AI). I have experience in breaking down complex projects into manageable tasks, anticipating bottlenecks, providing escalation management, evaluating trade-offs, and balancing customer and business needs with technical constraints across a broad array of stakeholders.

Technical Program Manager II. Amazon AI – Alexa, Cambridge, UK. - 2021-present

Significant Achievements

i)  Managing of tooling development for fine-tuning LLMs used for Amazon AI.

ii)  Led the launch of Alexa Entities, a function integrated with the Alexa Skills Kit framework, allowing developers access to the Alexa’s knowledge graph.

iii)  Led a redesign of Alexa ontologies to facilitate the interoperability and reuse of information across all Amazon organizations.

Responsibilities and Skills

Scrum/Agile Development: own and lead sprint ceremonies for teams of up to twelve engi- neers.

In charge of project communication both for internal stakeholders and external customers.

Define and report KPIs in weekly, monthly and quarterly business reviews.

Facilitate project delivery: liaise with stakeholders to remove blockers, reach agreement, evaluate trade-offs involving time, scope, and cost.

Knowledge Engineer II and I. Amazon Alexa, Cambridge, UK. - 2017-2021

Significant Achievements

i)  Led the creation of a new Alexa ontology from scratch.

ii)  Led process improvement and community building around this ontology: created and ran courses to educate software developers about knowledge representation; defined a review and bar raising process to ensure contributions meet the expected high-quality.

iii)  Orchestrated ontology alignment among three Alexa knowledge graphs. Developed the mappings allowing for interoperability of the different graphs.

iv)  Develop new answering techniques to improve the quality of good answers that Alexa provides to customers.

Responsibilities and Skills

• API design: definition of actions, arguments, responses, and data formats to query Alexa. • Representation of various knowledge domains: art, literature, politics, geography, etc.
• Creation of templates and tutorials to represent knowledge in the schema.
• Fluent in writing and reviewing RDF/OWL code.

• Educating peers on knowledge representation and how to “think about data”. 

Linguist. Verified AB, Stockholm, Sweden. - 2016-2017

Performed language analyses to determine the regional origin of refugee status applicants. Focused on on Arabic, and Tigrinya speakers.

Designed and delivered training for newly hired linguists and analysts.

Managed incoming requests from the UK Home Office and other EU immigration offices.

Responsible for prompt delivery of language reports.

M.Sc. in Linguistics and Language Didactics. 2015-2018 Stockholm University, Sweden. Dissertation: “Testing explicit and implicit knowledge in second language acquisition”. Relevant subjects: Statistics, computational linguistics, syntax, typology, language education, phonetics.

B.A. in Humanities and Literature. 2010-2013 University of Padova, Italy.
Dissertation: “Teaching Italian as a second language to foreigners in Italy: approaches, methods, and teaching aids”. Relevant subjects: general linguistics, sociolinguistics, Italian literature, theory of literature, philology, history, Latin literature, Latin.