Formerly hired at Amazon, Stasior will help bolster Siri

Oct 16, 2012 07:21 GMT  ·  By

William Stasior, a former Amazon executive with an impressive resume, has taken up a new stint with the Cupertino, California-based Apple Inc. to run its Siri division.

According to All Things D, Stasior has been in charge of Amazon’s search and advertising unit, A9. He has also been an AltaVista executive (and co-founder). His CV mentions brief tenures with the likes of Oracle and Ntcentives, as well as his activities at Amazon in 2003 when he handled the company’s search & navigation division.

His new role at Apple will revolve around Siri, the voice-powered personal assistant on iDevices running iOS 5 and, more recently, iOS 6.

Siri is still a fledging service, but it has improved visibly over time, enabling Apple to remove the beta sign recently.

However, the Cupertino giant is also known to have lost a couple of talents in its Siri division, including Adam Cheyer, who co-founded Siri (the voice recognition software company) before it got snagged by Apple, as well the former Siri CEO, Dag Kittlaus, who fled in late 2011.

In other words, Apple can use all the manpower it can get to maintain Siri. And hiring William Stasior is probably just part of the effort to bolster this division.

It’s also worth mentioning that with Stasior’s experience in search and advertising, Apple could use him to strengthen not only Siri, but also the flawed iOS Maps. The company could even consider his input over at the iAd division.

Stasior has a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science acquired in July 1997.

He has a thesis titled "An Interactive Approach to the Identification and Extraction of Visual Events" and he has done research focused on developing an advanced multimedia system for the support of computerized interpretation of video data.

He also has a minor in VLSI and computer architecture and his Graduate GPA is 4.7/5.0.