Dr. Mar Gonzalez-Franco is a research manager at Google AR & VR where she works on creating a new generation of Immersive Tech. She leads the Blended Interactions Research and Devices team (BIRD), in their work they explore multi-device and multi-modal futures enabled by ML and AI. From foundational work to full products. Before that she was a principal researcher at Microsoft Research where she open sourced some of the most used avatar libraries like the Microsoft Rocketbox. Her work transferred into the release of Avatars in Teams that was awarded Times invention of the year, and it is to date the largest deployment of avatars in any productivity platform, available to the 270 million users of MS Teams. In 2022 she was awarded the IEEE VGTC Virtual Reality new significant researcher award.