Portrait de Simra Shahid

Simra Shahid

Researcher II

À propos

I am a Researcher II in Microsoft Research’s PROSE group. My research focuses on getting people the information they need, in a form they can act on, when it matters most. I study how user’s domain, culture, and expertise shape what counts as «useful,» then design adaptive systems that bridge those gaps. I’m currently investigating how AI can act as an “attention-debiaser” to uncover missed opportunities in data visualisation and scientific discovery.

Before joining Microsoft, I was a Research Scientist on Adobe’s Media & Data Science team, contributing to projects all the way from early research to product launch. My work on document-recommendation, conversational-assistant, and personalisation pipelines now supports various products in Adobe including Adobe Customer Journey Analytics, Experience Platform, Marketo, and the Community Platform.

  • Conversational assistants: We reduced routine load for sales and marketing teams by automating answering common questions, booking calls, and routing harder issues or edge-cases to human agents. The stack combined retrieval-augmented Q&A, chat summarisation with guardrails, query standardisation, and improving dialogue-flow design.
  • Content strategy: We connected granular attributes of content (text and images) and connected to audience signals to rate content assets, highlight competitive gaps, and guide marketers toward higher-impact content choices (Catchy Content and Content Tensor).

Recent Research Projects:

  • Scideator and Idea Novelty Checker: an LLM-powered workflow that helps researchers combine concepts across disciplines and check novelty against the literature.
  • «How to Take Back Control of Your Data«:  techniques to limit large language models from memorizing sensitive customer data without access to model weights. [Blog] [Paper]
  • CoPrompter: User-Centric Evaluation of LLM Instruction Alignment for Improved Prompt Engineering. [Blog] [Paper]
    A tool to help prompt engineers compare their LLM responses using a user-editable checklist and automatically flags where LLM responses fall short, giving prompt engineers a fast, systematic way to refine alignment.

Selected Recognition:

  • Outstanding Young Engineers Award. One of seven in Adobe to receive this award.
  • Innovation Ambassador. National-Level Award, given to five entrepreneurs in India by Government of India and the
    Deputy High-Commission of Canada-India for advancing “Blue is Your Clue” proposal to an international stage in Canada.
  • Recognition from Indian Prime Minister and Singapore Health Minister (Link).