From iHARP to Microsoft: this summer, one of iHARP’s PhD candidates, Tolulope Ale turned research into real-world innovation

This summer, iHARP PhD candidate Tolulope Ale brought his expertise to Microsoft as an intern.

Here's how Tolu summed up his experience: "This summer, I had a fantastic internship experience, supported by the Microsoft mentorship program, which helped me connect with colleagues at every level. I built an LLM customer-engagement chatbot using Semantic Kernel and Azure AI Foundry, with two key features: Brand Persona (responses tailored to a specific brand's voice/tone) and Conversation Style (Brand Persona, Casual, and Gen Z modes selectable by the user). I demoed the solution to my team, a data science group, leadership, and a broader cross-functional audience (DS, SWE, PM, and PMM), and it was very well received. A standout aspect of the design is its easy configurability for new brand use cases with minimal code changes. I also implemented evaluation for each LLM component and added a latency tracker to monitor performance end-to-end."