TWITTER APPOINTS PARAG AGARWAL AS CTO

Microblogging platform Twitter has appointed Parag Agrawal as its chief technology officer, according to an update on the company's website.

Agrawal, an alumnus of IIT-Bombay and a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University, succeeds Adam Messinger. Messinger had left the organisation in late 2016.

As the CTO, Agrawal is “leading technical strategy for the company and overseeing machine learning and AI across our product and infrastructure teams”, as per information available on Twitter’s website.

Agrawal had joined Twitter in 2011 as an Ads Engineer and has since then led efforts on scaling Ads systems, as well as creating and deploying a platform for online machine learning.

Prior to joining Twitter, he did research in large-scale data management with collaborators at Microsoft Research, Yahoo! Research, and AT&T Labs. Agrawal had taken over the role of CTO in October last year, following an announcement made internally at that time.

A Twitter spokesperson said Agrawal is focussed on scaling a cohesive machine learning and AI approach across the company’s consumer and revenue product and infrastructure teams.

“Parag has played an integral role in our technical strategy throughout his tenure at Twitter, including spearheading our efforts to make the Home timeline more relevant using machine learning and incorporating a more rigorous approach to data analysis in product development,” the spokesperson added.