Winner. Scientist of the Year 2022

Preeti Goel

Academic title, degree: Ph.D.
Fields of science: Computer Science
Research interest: Big data and processing, machine learning at scale, data and location privacy
Career Development: Experienced
Organization: Microsoft
Position: Principal Group Engineering Manager
City: Kirkland, Washington
Country: USA

Preeti Goel has a Bachelor of Tech in Computer Science, a Master's degree from IIT-Kanpur, and a Ph.D. from the University of Melbourne. Her research topic was building privacy-preserving models for applications such as ride-sharing, and she has published articles in major journals such as IEEE and ACM.

Dr. Goel has led multiple projects in Google Ads Forecasting, a demand-side platform (DSP) for programmatic ads, that is one of the biggest DSPs with 200K+ advertisers and one of the world's highest QPS (serving more than 10 million queries per second). She has led teams across geographies in the U.S. and functions (engineering, product, sales, UX, research). Dr. Goel built the forecasting engine which predicts advertisers' spend based on historical data and helps them define the potential spend based on their settings. Forecasting supports the top revenue contributor to Google; in 2011, the revenue Google Ads generated was $210 billion (www.statista.com). As part of this work, Dr. Preeti Goel has advised the biggest advertisers (90% of revenue is generated by the top 10% of advertisers), such as Netflix and Geico, to ensure their advertising spend. Since GDPR and Cookie deprecation, the challenges for forecasting and Ads overall are humongous as advertising is based on cookie identification. Dr. Goel was part of the leadership team tackling this challenge and building Ads the right way, which was a cross-org effort across advertising, chrome and audience teams.

In Microsoft, Dr. Goel owns multiple business scenarios, one of them is to enable actionable insights for leaders/managers for making meetings more effective (docs.microsoft.com). She works on cutting-edge research, including analyzing data in a privacy-preserving way and working on machine learning algorithms that work at scale. She filed a patent (Meeting inclusion and hybrid workplace insights (MS# 410843-US-NP) with the Patent Office on 12/31/2021) for deriving insights out of Outlook meetings data. This work is now being integrated into the VIVA insights product with a team of 16 engineers implementing it.

Dr. Preeti Goel is also an active member of the Microsoft-wide leadership team, brainstorming and building the future of a rich trustworthy ecosystem for Microsoft.

Dr. Preeti Goel has 15+ years of professional experience and a Ph.D. in Computer Science. Her areas of expertise include big data and analytics, machine learning, privacy-preserving algorithms, and data collection.

As part of her career, she worked in various leadership roles in some of the biggest organizations in the world, solving the hardest big data and machine learning problems in a privacy-preserving way in organizations such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Adobe in India, Australia and US.

Currently, Dr. Goel is a Principal Engineering Manager with software engineers, team leads, and engineering managers reporting to her. She works on Microsoft Viva, which is one of the top announcements made by Satya Nadella about how it addresses collaboration, well-being, and learning and makes employees successful and productive emphasizing privacy-protected insights and recommendations. She has invested in multiple big bets for Viva Insights, which have a roadmap till 2025, and her influence is beyond her current organization.

Dr. Preeti Goel leads the 3-party integration of building the partner ecosystem to leverage and create products with Microsoft’s derived insights with a focus on privacy. She started this project in July 2021 and made a roadmap for the next few years where she would be leading this project and collaborating across four different organizations and teams. She leads the privacy initiatives of sharing data with leaders/managers and partners by building systems with the right authentication and authorization by investing in aggregation, de-identification, and differential privacy solutions. Her research focus on privacy enables Dr. Goel to lead this area which is a critical focus area for Microsoft Viva Insights.

Besides technical thought leadership, she is also passionate about mentoring people and ensuring the right processes are followed to enable productivity and team success. She is a strong advocate of diversity and inclusion in the workplace and invests in several initiatives in Microsoft and outside.