Maria Alvarez is General Manager of Shared Engineering Services in the Artificial Intelligence and Research Division at Microsoft. She is responsible for a team that supports Bing, Ads, Microsoft News, Maps, and Microsoft Research. Her team provides engineering tools and services for security, privacy, accessibility, compliance, design, user research and content. They also enable, accelerate and influence the empowerment of every engineer at Microsoft through learning & insights and foster a customer-obsessed product development community. Additionally, Maria is the executive sponsor for the AI+Research Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging (DIB) Council that drives organization-wide strategic DIB initiatives.  She believes in the value of D&I and is a strong advocate for building a diverse work force and an inclusive culture. Maria is a technical leader with almost 30 years of experience. She held technical positions at Symantec, HP, CoCreate Software, Yahoo and served as CTO of Panda Security in Spain before joining Microsoft in 2011.  Maria has an M.S. in Computer Science from California State Polytechnic University.