Faculty Summit 2015 - Microsoft Research

Susan Ariel Aaronson is research professor at The George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs and the former Minerva Chair at the National War College. Dr. Aaronson’s research examines the relationship between economic change and human rights. She is currently directing projects on digital trade and digital rights, repression and civil conflict, and rethinking labor rights. Her work has been funded by major international foundations including MacArthur, Ford, Rockefeller; governments such as the Netherlands, United States, and Canada; the UN, ILO, and World Bank, and US corporations including Ford Motor. Aaronson is the author of six books and numerous articles on trade, human rights, digital trade, and globalization. She is a member of Working Group 2 of the Freedom Online Coalition (24 governments working on digital rights). Aaronson is also the director of the eBay Policy Scholars and is developing a new international affairs curriculum on the Internet.

Gul Agha is professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Agha is a Fellow of the IEEE. He served as editor-in-chief of IEEE Concurrency: Parallel, Distributed and Mobile Computing (1994-98), and of ACM Computing Surveys (1999-2007). He has published over 200 research articles and supervised 30 PhD dissertations. His book, Actors, is among the most widely cited in concurrent and distributed computing. Besides work on semantics and implementation of actor languages, Agha’s research group has developed novel coordination languages, methods for software testing (including concolic testing), computational learning for verification, statistical model checking, and Euclidean model checking. In collaboration with civil engineers, he has developed methods for autonomic structural health monitoring (SHM) of civil infrastructure using wireless smart sensor networks. Agha is a co-founder of Embedor Technologies, a company providing solutions for infrastructure monitoring in smart cities.

P. Anandan is the managing director of Microsoft Research Outreach. Previously, he was the managing director of Microsoft Research India. He was awarded the title of Distinguished Scientist in 2010 in recognition of his contributions to Microsoft and the research community. Since June 1997, before being named managing director of Microsoft Research India, Anandan was a senior researcher at Microsoft Research headquarters in Redmond, where he built one of the world’s strongest research teams in computer vision and video processing.During that time, he also served as an ambassador for the Microsoft Research University Relations program in India. Anandan helped develop strong relationships between Indian universities and Microsoft Research. He has also represented Microsoft in meetings with the government of India to emphasize the company’s commitment to research and development. He was part of the working group constituted by the 12th Planning Commission (opens in new tab) to make recommendations on India’s Higher Education Policy. Anandan continues Microsoft Research’s ongoing relationships with the government and academic communities in his new role.

Before joining Microsoft, Anandan was an assistant professor of computer science for four years at Yale University, where he founded the computer vision group. Following this, he was a research manager at Sarnoff Corp. His group developed state-of-the-art video stabilization technology and systems for ground and airborne video surveillance. During a research career that has spanned two decades, Anandan has done pioneering research in video motion analysis and is recognized for his fundamental contributions in the area of optical flow, motion estimation, video mosaicking and 3-D scene analysis.

Anandan holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, which presented him with a Distinguished Alumni award in 2006. He earned his master of science in computer science from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. He received the Distinguished Alumni award from IIT Madras in 2010, and was also inducted into the “Hall of Computing” by the University of Nebraska in 2010. Anandan is currently on the Board of Governors of IIIT Delhi and IIT Madras.

Anandan is a native of Chennai, India. His interests outside work include the study of philosophy, especially philosophy of the mind.

Elizabeth M. Belding is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Elizabeth’s research focuses on mobile networking, specifically monitoring, advanced service support, and solutions for developing and underdeveloped regions. She is the founder and director of the Mobility Management and Networking (MOMENT) Laboratory. Elizabeth is the author of over 100 technical papers and has served on more than 60 program committees for networking conferences. She is currently on the editorial board of the IEEE Pervasive Magazine. She is an ACM Distinguished Scientist and an IEEE Fellow, and she received the 2015 NCWIT Harrold and Notkin Research and Graduate Mentoring Award and the 2012 UCSB Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award.

Philip A. Bernstein (opens in new tab) is a Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft Research. Over the past 35 years, he has also been a product architect at Microsoft and Digital Equipment Corp., a professor at Harvard University and Wang Institute of Graduate Studies, and a VP Software at Sequoia Systems. During that time, he has published many papers (opens in new tab) and two books on the theory and implementation of database systems, especially on transaction processing and data integration, which are still the main focus of his research. He is an ACM Fellow, a winner of the ACM SIGMOD Innovations Award, a member of the Washington State Academy of Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He received a B.S. degree from Cornell and M.Sc. and Ph.D. from University of Toronto.

Chris Bishop is a Distinguished Scientist and Deputy Managing Director at Microsoft Research Cambridge, where he is head of the Machine Learning and Perception group. His research interests include probabilistic approaches to machine learning, as well as their application to fields such as biomedical sciences and healthcare. He is also Professor of Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh where he is a member of the Institute for Adaptive and Neural Computation in the School of Informatics. He is a Fellow of Darwin College Cambridge, a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Chris is the author of the influential textbooks Neural Networks for Pattern Recognition (Oxford University Press, 1995) which has over 23,000 citations, and Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning (Springer, 2006), which has over 16,000 citations. He has an MA in Physics from Oxford, and a PhD in quantum field theory from the University of Edinburgh.

Judith Bishop is director of Computer Science at Microsoft Research. Her role is to create strong links between Microsoft’s research groups and universities globally, through encouraging projects, supporting conferences, and engaging directly in research. Her expertise spans programming languages, software engineering, and distributed systems with a strong practical bias. Her current projects are Orleans and Code Hunt, and she worked previously on TouchDevelop and Try F#. She received her PhD from the University of Southampton and was a professor in South Africa for many years, with visiting positions in the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, Italy, and the United States. She was general co-chair of ICSE 2010 and co-chair of several Microsoft Research summits. She serves frequently on editorial, program, and award committees. She has written 16 books on programming, which have been translated into six languages. Judith received the ACM Distinguished Educator Award in 2014, the IFIP Silver Core and Outstanding Service Award in 2006, and South Africa’s Distinguished Woman Scientist of the Year in 2005.

Nikolaj Bjorner (opens in new tab) is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, Redmond, working in the area of Automated Theorem Proving and Software Engineering. His current main line of work is around the state-of-the art theorem prover Z3, which is used as a foundation of several software engineering tools. Previously, he designed the DFSR, Distributed File System – Replication, co-designed RDC, remote differential compression, protocol both shipped with Windows Server since 2005 and before that worked on distributed file sharing systems at a startup XDegrees, and program synthesis and transformation systems at the Kestrel Institute. He received his master’s and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from Stanford University, and spent the first three years of university at DTU and DIKU.

Dan Bohus is a Researcher in the Adaptive Systems and Interaction Group at Microsoft Research. The central question that drives his long term research agenda is: how can we develop systems that naturally embed interaction and computation deeply into the flow of everyday tasks, activities, and collaborations? In the last few years Dan’s work has focused on developing computational models for multiparty engagement, turn taking, interaction planning, and on addressing the challenges in inference and decision making that such models bring to the fore. Prior to joining Microsoft, Dan obtained his Ph.D. degree from Carnegie Mellon University, where he investigated problems of dialog management and error handling in speech interfaces.

Mark Bolas, who is the Director of the Mixed Reality Lab at the Institute for Creative Technologies and an Associate Professor at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, has been exploring presence and immersive experiences for over three decades, putting forward his thoughts on the medium of virtual reality as early as 1989. Bolas’ decision to open-source his seminal work and research has helped to usher in the current VR revolution. The influence of his lab’s DIY VR projects (FOV2GO, VR2GO, MxR Unity Package) can be seen in current commercial products like the Samsung GearVR, the Oculus Rift and Google Cardboard. Emerging VR companies founded by students who have prototyped work at the MxR Lab under the supervision of Bolas, include: Survios, Otherworld Interactive, Oculus VR, and the Emblematic Group.

Bolas has recently launched a new effort, The Rosetta Project, to bridge the gap between the language of cinema and the emerging medium of VR, including a fun project that brings stop motion maquettes into head mounted displays via light field rendering. Bolas co-founded Fakespace Labs, Inc. in 1988 and developed and sold VR hardware and systems for dozens of major research labs over the decades. He holds more than twenty patents and has been recognized with awards from the Consumer Electronics Association, Popular Science, SIGGRAPH Best Emerging Technology, IEEE’s Industry Excellence, and IEEE’s Virtual Reality Technical Achievement Award.

Bill Buxton is a relentless advocate for innovation, design, and especially the appropriate consideration of human values, capacity, and culture in the conception, implementation, and use of new products and technologies. This is reflected in his research (opens in new tab), teaching, talks (opens in new tab), and writing — including his column on design and innovation for BusinessWeek.com (opens in new tab), and his 2007 book, Sketching User Experiences (opens in new tab).

Sergey Bykov joined Microsoft in 2001 and worked in several product groups, such as e-Business Servers, Embedded Devices, and Online Services, before moving to Research in 2008. He has been working on Project “Orleans” since its inception, and is leading the team that keeps innovating to bring more exciting features to the platform.

Michael Carbin is researcher at Microsoft Research, a visiting scientist at MIT, and will be joining MIT as an assistant professor in January of 2016. His research interests include the theory, design, and implementation of programming systems, including languages, program logics, static and dynamic program analyses, runtime systems, and mechanized verifiers. Carbin’s recent research has focused on the design and implementation of programming systems that deliver improved performance and resilience by incorporating approximate computing and self-healing. His research on verifying the reliability of programs that execute on unreliable hardware has received best paper awards at leading programming languages conferences (OOPSLA 2013 and OOPSLA 2014). His undergraduate research at Stanford University received the Wegbreit Prize for Best Computer Science Undergraduate Honors Thesis. As a graduate student at MIT, Carbin received the MIT Lemelson Presidential and Microsoft Research Graduate Fellowships.

Lili Cheng is a Distinguished Engineer and General Manager in Microsoft Research. She manages FUSE (Future Social Experiences) Labs (opens in new tab), which is a multidisciplinary team which applies expertise to areas such as: interest-based networks, nearby sharing, creative expression, crowd work, and collective action. We collaborate with colleagues in startups, academia, the art & design community, as other teams across Microsoft and industry.

Prior to Microsoft, Lili worked in Apple Computer’s Advanced Technology Group, on the User Interface research team, where she focused on Quicktime Conferencing and Quicktime VR. Lili is also a registered architect; she worked in Tokyo and Los Angeles for Nihon Sekkei and Skidmore Owings and Merrill on commercial urban design and large-scale building projects. She has taught at NYU-Interactive Telecommunications as well as Harvard University.

Lili was born in Tokyo, is married with three boys, and lives in Bellevue Washington.

Dr. Aakanksha Chowdhery is a postdoctoral researcher in the Mobility and Networking Group at Microsoft Research. She completed her MS and PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. In 2012, she became the first woman to win the Paul Baran Marconi Young Scholar Award, given for the scientific contributions in the field of communications and the Internet. She also received the Youngmi Joo Stanford School of Engineering Fellowship and the Stanford’s Diversifying Academia Recruiting Excellence (DARE) fellowship. Prior to joining Stanford, she completed her Bachelor’s degree at IIT Delhi where she received the President’s Silver Medal Award. Her research focuses the design of algorithms and protocols for next-generation mobile systems, wireless and wire-line networks.

Andrew Cross is a Research Program Manager in the Technology for Emerging Markets group at the Microsoft Research lab in Bangalore. His research and project focus, spanning work in Latin America, Africa, and for the past 3.5 years India, is on developing low-cost technology-based solutions that enhance and empower human efforts to deliver quality healthcare and education. His role at Microsoft Research is piloting novel research ideas in the field, and scaling up successful trials as broader deployments often in collaboration with universities, hospitals, NGOs, and government organizations. His current work overlaps several fields including human-computer interaction (HCI), education, health, and development. His education includes a BS in Computer Engineering and Plan II Honors at the University of Texas at Austin, and MPhil in Engineering for Sustainable Development at the University of Cambridge.

Ed Cutrell (opens in new tab) manages the Technology for Emerging Markets (TEM (opens in new tab)) group at Microsoft Research India. TEM is a multidisciplinary group working to study, design, build, and evaluate technologies and systems useful for people living in underserved rural and urban communities. The goal of this work is to understand how people in the world’s poor and developing communities interact with information technologies, and to invent new ways for technology to meet their needs and aspirations. Ed has worked in the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) since 2000; he is trained in cognitive neuropsychology, with a PhD from the University of Oregon.

Dr. Laura DeNardis is a scholar of Internet architecture and governance and a professor in the School of Communication at American University in Washington, DC. The author of The Global War for Internet Governance (Yale University Press 2014) and other books, her expertise has been featured in Science Magazine, The Economist, National Public Radio, New York Times, Time Magazine, Christian Science Monitor, Slate, Reuters, Forbes, The Atlantic, and The Wall Street Journal. Dr. DeNardis is an affiliated fellow of the Yale Law School Information Society Project and previously served as its executive director. She is a Senior Fellow of the Centre for International Governance Innovation and holds an international appointment as research director for the Global Commission on Internet Governance. She holds an AB in Engineering Science from Dartmouth College, a Master of Engineering from Cornell University, a PhD in Science and Technology Studies from Virginia Tech, and was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from Yale Law School.

Niklas Elmqvist is an associate professor in the College of Information Studies at University of Maryland, College Park. His research areas include information visualization, human-computer interaction (HCI), and visual analytics. He received his PhD in December 2006 from the Department of Computer Science & Engineering (opens in new tab) at Chalmers University of Technology (opens in new tab). Before joining University of Maryland, he was at Purdue where he was a postdoctoral researcher in the Aviz (opens in new tab) group at INRIA Saclay (opens in new tab) in Paris, France.

Dr. Oren Etzioni is Chief Executive Officer of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. He was a Professor at the University of Washington’s Computer Science department starting in 1991, receiving several awards including GeekWire’s Hire of the Year (2014), Seattle’s Geek of the Year (2013), the Robert Engelmore Memorial Award (2007), the IJCAI Distinguished Paper Award (2005), AAAI Fellow (2003), and a National Young Investigator Award (1993). He was also the founder or co-founder of several companies, including Farecast (sold to Microsoft in 2008) and Decide (sold to eBay in 2013), and the author of over 100 technical papers that have garnered roughly 20,000 citations. The goal of Oren’s research is to solve fundamental problems in AI, particularly the automatic learning of knowledge from text. Oren received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 1991, and his B.A. from Harvard in 1986.

Eddie Farhi Edward (Eddie) Farhi was educated at the Bronx High School of Science and had stops at Brandeis, Harvard, SLAC and CERN before coming to MIT where since 2004 he has served as the Director of the Center for Theoretical Physics. He was trained as a particle physicist and started his career working on jets which are collimated beams of particles now of great interest at the LHC. He also worked on models of elementary particles in which quarks and leptons are themselves composites. He studied the properties of a superdense form of matter called Strange Matter. He worked with Alan Guth on two fundamental questions in general relativity: Is it possible to create a new inflationary universe in the lab? Is it possible to construct a time machine in a universe which does not have one?

After learning that a quantum computer could be used for factoring, Eddie devoted himself to the development of quantum algorithms, advocating a physics-based approach. Working with Goldstone, Gutmann and Sipser, he introduced the Quantum Adiabatic Algorithm which is the basis of the design of the D-Wave machine and other superconducting device architectures. He showed that ideas from quantum scattering theory could be used to develop quantum algorithms and he (along with Goldstone and Gutmann) then showed that a quantum computer can determine who wins a game faster than any classical algorithm. Eddie along with Shor and others collaborators introduced a quantum cryptographic protocol, quantum money. Recently Eddie (again with Goldstone and Gutmann) introduced a quantum algorithm for approximate optimization. Here they were able to prove that the quantum algorithm could achieve non-trivial approximation ratios. This result is the first of its kind in showing the power of quantum computers for combinatorial search and is opening a whole line of investigation related to current ideas in classical computer science.

Steven Feiner Steve Feiner is professor of Computer Science at Columbia University, where he directs the Computer Graphics and User Interfaces Lab, and co-directs the Columbia Vision and Graphics Center. His lab has been doing Augmented Reality (AR) research for over 20 years, designing and evaluating interaction and visualization techniques, creating the first outdoor mobile AR system using a see-through head-worn display, and pioneering experimental applications of AR to fields such as tourism, journalism, maintenance, and construction. Steve received an A.B. in Music and a Ph.D. in Computer Science, both from Brown University. He is coauthor of Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice, received the IEEE VGTC 2014 Virtual Reality Career Award, and was elected to the CHI Academy. Together with his students, he has won the ACM UIST Lasting Impact Award and best paper awards at ACM UIST, ACM CHI, ACM VRST, and IEEE ISMAR.

Stephanie Forrest is Regents Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of New Mexico (UNM) in Albuquerque, and a member of the Santa Fe Institute External Faculty. She was educated at St. John’s College (B.A.) and The University of Michigan (M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science). She served as department chair 2006-2011 and recently spent one year at the U.S. Department of State working on cyber-policy. Forrest has over 20 years’ experience leading interdisciplinary research and education programs at UNM, primarily in the intersection of biology and computation, including work on evolutionary diseases such as influenza and cancer, immunological algorithms for computer security, automatically repairing bugs in software, and studying complex systems.

Some of Forrest’s awards include the Stanislaw Ulam Memorial Lectures (2013), the UNM Annual Research Lecture (2012), the ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award (2011), and the Presidential Young Investigator Award (1991). She is a Fellow of the IEEE.

Nate Foster is an assistant professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. His research focuses on developing language abstractions and tools for building reliable systems. He received a PhD in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2009, an MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine from Cambridge University in 2008, and a BA in Computer Science from Williams College in 2001. His awards include a Sloan Research Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, a Most Influential POPL Paper Award, a Tien ’72 Teaching Award, an NSDI ’13 Community Award, a Yahoo! Academic Career Enhancement Award, and the Penn CIS Morris and Dorothy Rubinoff Award.

Henry Fuchs (PhD, University of Utah, 1975) is the Federico Gil Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and adjunct professor of Biomedical Engineering at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is one of three co-directors (together with Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann and Markus Gross) of the BeingThere International Research Center in Telepresence, collaboration between ETH Zurich, NTU Singapore, and UNC Chapel Hill. Active in computer graphics since the 1970s, Fuchs has coauthored over 200 papers on a variety of topics, including rendering algorithms (BSP Trees), graphics hardware (Pixel-Planes), virtual environments, telepresence, medical and training applications. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, recipient of the 1992 ACM SIGGRAPH Achievement Award, and the 2013 IEEE VGTC Virtual Reality Career Award.

Ross Gardler is a long-time open source guy. In the past he ran the publicly funded OSS Watch open source advisory service to the UK Higher and Further Education Sector and currently works for Microsoft Open Technologies with a focus on Linux. He is currently the President of the Apache Software Foundation.

Ann Gates Dr. Ann Quiroz Gates is a Professor and Chair of the Computer Science Department at the University of Texas at El Paso and directs the NSF-funded Cyber-ShARE Center of Excellence. Her research areas are in formal software specification and scientific workflows. Gates leads the Computing Alliance for Hispanic-Serving Institutions, an NSF-funded consortium that is focused on the recruitment, retention, and advancement of Hispanics in computing, and is a founding member of the National Center for Women in Information Technology. She received CRA’s 2015 A. Nico Habermann Award, the 2010 Anita Borg Institute Social Impact Award, and the 2009 Richard A. Tapia Achievement Award for Scientific Scholarship, Civic Science, and Diversifying Computing. In addition, Gates was recognized for her service to the IEEE-Computer Society with the IEEE-CS Golden Core Award and was named to Hispanic Business magazine’s 100 Influential Hispanics in 2006.

Dr. C. Lee Giles is the David Reese Professor of Information Sciences and Technology at the Pennsylvania State University with appointments in the departments of Computer Science and Engineering, and Supply Chain and Information Systems. His research interests are intelligent cyberinfrastructure and big data, specialty search engines, information retrieval, knowledge and information extraction, data mining, entity disambiguation, and social networks with over 400 papers published in these areas. He was a co-creator of the popular academic search engine CiteSeer (now CiteSeerX) and related scholarly and scientific search engines. He is a fellow of the ACM, IEEE, and INNS. He recently gave a keynote at the ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2013) on “Scholarly Big Data: Information Extraction and Data Mining.” His research has been funded by NSF, DARPA, Microsoft, Dow Chemical, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Smithsonian, IBM, NEC, NASA, Ford, and others.

Ms. Sharon Gillett has been principal technology policy strategist at Microsoft Corporation since June 2013. Ms. Sharon Gillett is head of the Massachusetts Department of Telecommunications and Cable. Ms. Gillett is a member of Advisory Board at Meadow Networks, Inc. Her experience includes 10 years in the high-tech industry developing software and managing projects in computer networking (at BBN) and supercomputing (at Thinking Machines Corporation). She served as the executive director and research associate for the Internet and Telecoms Convergence Consortium, an industry-sponsored consortium at MIT. Her research lies at the intersection of Internet infrastructure technology and policy. She has published numerous peer-reviewed and trade-press articles focusing on broadband policy issues and has been a lecturer for communications policy at both MIT and Cambridge University in the UK.

Noah Goodman Noah D. Goodman is assistant professor of Psychology, Linguistics (by courtesy), and Computer Science (by courtesy) at Stanford University. He studies the computational basis of human thought, merging behavioral experiments with formal methods from statistics and programming languages. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Texas at Austin in 2003. In 2005, he entered cognitive science, working as postdoc and research scientist at MIT. In 2010 he moved to Stanford where he runs the Computation and Cognition Lab. CoCoLab studies higher-level human cognition including language understanding, social reasoning, and concept learning; the lab also works on applications of these ideas and enabling technologies such as probabilistic programming languages.

Dan Grossman has been a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington since 2003. He holds the J. Ray Bowen Professorship for Innovation in Engineering Education. His research interests are in several areas of programming languages, and he has collaborated for several years with colleagues in computer architecture on better approaches to concurrent programming and approximate programming. Dan completed his Ph.D. at Cornell University and his undergraduate studies at Rice University.

Phil Haack (yes, it’s pronounced “hack”) works at GitHub as an engineering manager for the Desktop team. This team is responsible for GitHub for Mac, GitHub for Window, and the GitHub Extension for Visual Studio. He also led the team that created https://choosealicense.com/ (opens in new tab), an effort to demystify and simplify the choosing of an open source license. Prior to GitHub, he was a senior program manager at Microsoft responsible for shipping ASP.NET (opens in new tab) MVC and NuGet. These projects were released under open source licenses and helped served as examples to other teams for how to ship open source software. He regularly writes for his blog http://haacked.com/ (opens in new tab) and tweets random observations on Twitter as @haacked (opens in new tab). He also speaks at conferences here and there, and has quit writing technical books forever several times now.

Tracy Hammond is the Director of the Sketch Recognition Lab and Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University, Dr. Hammond is an international leader in activity recognition (focusing on eye, body, and sketch motions), haptics, intelligent fabrics, smartphone development, and computer human interaction research.

As General Manager for Microsoft Surface Hub, Jeff Han leads a world-class interdisciplinary team of hardware, manufacturing, and software engineers, along with interaction designers and researchers dedicated to building large-format interactive displays and experiences.

Martial Hebert is a Professor of Robotics at Carnegie-Mellon University and director of the Robotics Institute. His interest includes computer vision, especially recognition and scene understanding in images and video data, model building and object recognition from 3D data, and perception for mobile robots and for intelligent vehicles. His group has developed approaches for object recognition and scene analysis in images, 3D point clouds, and video sequences. In the area of machine perception for robotics, his group has developed techniques for people detection, tracking, and prediction, and for understanding the environment of ground vehicles from sensor data.

Julia Hockenmaier is associate professor in Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She works on natural language processing. Her current research focuses on automatic image description, statistical parsing, and unsupervised grammar induction. Julia received her PhD from the University of Edinburgh and did postdoctoral work at the University of Pennsylvania. She has received an NSF CAREER award was shortlisted for the British Computer Society’s Distinguished Dissertation award.

Eric Horvitz is serving as the managing director of the Microsoft Research lab at Redmond, balancing lab-wide responsibilities with ongoing research on machine intelligence and on opportunities to leverage the complementarities of human and machine intelligence. Visit his home page (opens in new tab).

His ongoing research builds on representations of probability and utility, and centers on identifying ideal actions under uncertainty and bounded informational, computational, and cognitive resources. Beyond curiosity-driven research on foundations of machine perception, learning, and reasoning, he has been excited about building real-world systems that provide value to people, organizations, and society, working in multiple areas, including human-computer interaction, information retrieval, healthcare, transportation, operating systems, and aerospace.

See the Microsoft Research home page (opens in new tab) as a starting point for browsing through projects, events, and people and contact information for the Microsoft Research lab at Redmond—and other Microsoft labs in the United States and throughout the world.

Dr. Charles Isbell received his B.S. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT. After four years at AT&T Labs/Research, he returned to Georgia Tech to join the faculty of the College of Computing. Charles’ research interests are varied, but he focuses on building autonomous agents that engage in life-long learning in the presence of thousands of other intelligent agents, including humans. His work has been featured in the popular media, as well as in technical collections. Charles also pursues reform in computing education. He was a developer of Threads, Georgia Tech’s structuring principle for computing curricula and one of the developers of Georgia Tech’s MOOC-supported Masters of Science in Computer Science, the first of its kind in the world. Recently, he has assumed the role of the Senior Associate Dean for the College.

Harold Javid’s career spans industry and academia. After completing a PhD in EE from UIUC, Harold worked for small companies as electronics division manager and general manager developing real time embedded controls and industrial optimizers. In between, he worked in large companies including GE and Boeing as application engineer, researcher, and research manager. In 1998, after turning around a small company and then supporting its sale, he followed his heart back to his technical love—by joining Microsoft. In Microsoft Research, as director of academic outreach, he leads collaborations between Microsoft Research and universities in North America. One of Harold’s most fun responsibilities is as chief organizer of the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit. Harold is actively involved in service to the IEEE as a founding chair of the IEEE-CS Research Advisory Board and Division V director elect of the IEEE Board of Directors.

Carlos Jensen is an associate professor in the School of EECS at Oregon State University (opens in new tab). He is the Director of the Center for Applies Systems and Software (opens in new tab) (CASS), which includes the OSU Open Source Lab (opens in new tab), home to over 160 medium and large open source projects like the Linux Foundation (opens in new tab), Apache Foundation (opens in new tab), and Drupal (opens in new tab). His research is in the intersection of usability and software engineering; he and his students study how open source developers to produce great software, where they fail to, and what tools and techniques we can develop to help more projects be successful.

He is deeply engaged in developing experiential learning opportunities. Through partnerships with industry, government and open source foundations, CASS provides on-campus development, testing and devops jobs for 70+ students, mentored by 14 full-time staff. Our students help run critical open source infrastructure, develop emergency response systems for the Oregon DOT, and test next generation switches, all while gaining valuable hands-on experience.

Carlos Jensen received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology (2005).

Jaeyeon Jung is a researcher at Microsoft Research. Prior to joining Microsoft, she was a research scientist at Intel Labs Seattle (2007–2011) after a brief stint as a software architect at Mazu networks (2006–2007). She obtained her PhD from MIT in 2006. Her current research focuses on developing new technologies for protecting consumer privacy, particularly in the areas of mobile systems and emerging consumer devices for the home.

Yan Ke Yan Ke is a principal software engineering manager in the Bing Experiences group, working on entity understanding and question answering. His team developed many of the ranking algorithms for the entity pane, carousel, and fact answer triggering. Previously, he developed the Web Index Discovery and Selection algorithms for Bing. Yan joined Microsoft in 2008 after graduating with his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, specializing in computer vision.

Brenden Kuerbis is a postdoctoral researcher at Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies, where his work focuses on the governance of Internet identifiers. He is currently researching governance structures in securing Internet routing as part of a NSF Secure and Trustworthy Computing (SaTC) project. Kuerbis is a regular contributor to the Internet Governance Project (IGP), a leading source for coverage and analysis of the political economy of global Internet policy, which puts research expertise into practical action by participating directly in Internet governance debates and institutions. Kuerbis participates in ICANN’s Cross Community Working Group to develop an IANA transition proposal. His work has appeared in academic and popular press including International Studies Review, Telecommunications Policy, Info, Communications & Strategies, Washington Internet Daily, and Forbes. Kuerbis holds a Ph.D. in information studies from Syracuse University, an MBA, MSIT from University of Denver, and a B.A. in international affairs from the University of Colorado Boulder.

Dr. Monica Lam has been a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University since 1988. She received a BSc from University of British Columbia in 1980 and a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1987. She is the Faculty Director of the Stanford MobiSocial Computing Laboratory. Her current research interests are in building an open and federated social computing infrastructure. She has worked in the areas of architecture, compiler optimization, software analysis to improve security, mobile and social computing. Lam is an ACM Fellow, received an NSF Young Investigator award in 1992, and has won a range of best paper awards from the ACM. She is a co-author of the “dragon book”, the most popular textbook in compilers. She is also the founding CEO of Omlet, a Stanford spinoff to create an open social platform.

Jaron Lanier either coined or popularized the term “VR.” His primal startup VPL created the first commercial VR products, first avatars, first multi-person virtual world experiences, and initial prototypes of surgical simulation and other major applications. Lanier has helped spawn startups that were acquired by Oracle, Adobe, Google, and Pfizer. He is currently interdisciplinary scientist at Microsoft Research.

Both of his books (Who Owns the Future? and You Are Not a Gadget) have been international bestsellers and prominently hailed as among the most influential books of recent years. Lanier was awarded the 2014 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, one of the highest and most visible cultural honors in Europe. He’s also received honorary PhDs and a lifetime career award from the IEEE.

Lanier is also a musician. He maintains one of the largest and most varied collections of actively played rare instruments in the world. He has performed with Philip Glass, Ornette Coleman, and many others.

Ed Lazowska holds the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, where his research and teaching concern the design, implementation, and analysis of high performance computing and communication systems, and, more recently, the techniques and technologies of data-intensive discovery. A long-time advocate for increasing participation in the field, he serves on the Executive Advisory Council of the National Center for Women & Information Technology, and on the National Research Council’s Committee on Women in Science, Engineering, and Medicine. He is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Dr. Peter Lee, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Research, is responsible for Microsoft Research New Experiences and Technologies, or MSR NExT, an organization of world-class researchers, engineers, and designers devoted to creating potentially disruptive technologies for Microsoft and the world. While NExT will continue to advance the field of computing research and produce work with significant scholarly impact, its priority is developing technologies that benefit Microsoft and the world more broadly.

In this role, Lee oversees Microsoft Research Asia, Microsoft Research Technologies, FUSE Labs, and Microsoft Research Special Projects, along with several incubation project teams.

Prior to joining Microsoft, Lee has held key positions in both government and academia. His most recent position was at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), where he founded and directed a major technology office that supported research in computing and related areas in the social and physical sciences. One of the highlights of his work at DARPA was the DARPA Network Challenge, which mobilized millions of people worldwide in a hunt for red weather balloons — a unique experiment in social media and open innovation that fundamentally altered the thinking throughout the Department of Defense on the power of social networks.

Before DARPA, Lee served as head of Carnegie Mellon University’s nationally top-ranked computer science department. He also served as the university’s vice provost for research. At CMU, he carried out research in software reliability, program analysis, security, and language design. He is well-known for his co-development of proof-carrying code techniques for enhanced software security, and has tackled problems as diverse as programming for large-scale modular robotics systems and shape analysis for C programs.

Lee is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and serves the research community at the national level, including policy contributions to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and membership on both the National Research Council’s Computer Science and Telecommunications Board and the Advisory Council of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate of the National Science Foundation. He was the former chair of the Computing Research Association and has testified before both the US House Science and Technology Committee and the US Senate Commerce Committee.

Lee holds a Ph.D. in computer and communication sciences from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and computer sciences, also from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

Rustan Leino (opens in new tab) is Principal Researcher in the Research in Software Engineering (RiSE) (opens in new tab) group at Microsoft Research, Redmond, and Visiting Professor in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London (opens in new tab). He is known for his work on programming methods and program verification tools, and is a world leader in building automated program verification tools. These include the languages and tools Dafny (opens in new tab), Chalice, Jennisys, Spec# (opens in new tab), Boogie (opens in new tab), Houdini, ESC/Java, and ESC/Modula-3.

Prior to Microsoft Research, Leino worked at DEC/Compaq SRC. He received his PhD from Caltech (1995), before which he designed and wrote object-oriented software as a technical lead in the Windows NT group at Microsoft. Leino collects thinking puzzles on a popular web page and hosts the Verification Corner (opens in new tab) channel on YouTube. In his spare time, he plays music and, recently having ended his tenure as cardio exercise class instructor, is trying to learn to dance.

Fei-Fei Li is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford, and the Director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab and the Stanford Vision Lab. Her research areas are in machine learning, computer vision and cognitive and computational neuroscience, with an emphasis on Big Data analysis. Dr. Fei-Fei Li has published more than 100 scientific articles in top-tier journals and conferences, including Nature, PNAS, Journal of Neuroscience, CVPR, ICCV, NIPS, ECCV, IJCV, IEEE-PAMI, etc. Research from Fei-Fei’s lab have been featured in New York Times, New Scientists and a number of popular press magazines and newspapers. Dr. Fei-Fei Li obtained her B.A. degree in physics from Princeton in 1999 with High Honors, and her PhD degree in electrical engineering from California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 2005. Dr. Fei-Fei Li is a recipient of the 2014 IBM Faculty Fellow Award, 2011 Alfred Sloan Faculty Award, 2012 Yahoo Labs FREP award, 2009 NSF CAREER award, the 2006 Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellowship, and a number of Google Research awards.

Michael Littmann Michael Littman works mainly in reinforcement learning (opens in new tab), but has done work in machine learning (opens in new tab), game theory (opens in new tab), computer networking (opens in new tab), partially observable Markov decision process (opens in new tab) solving, computer solving of analogy problems and other areas. He is currently a professor of computer science (opens in new tab) at Brown University (opens in new tab). Before graduate school, Littman worked with Thomas Landauer at Bellcore and was granted a patent for one of the earliest systems for cross-language information retrieval. Littman received his Ph.D. in computer science from Brown University in 1996. From 1996 to 1999, he was a professor at Duke University. During his time at Duke, he worked on an automated crossword solver PROVERB, which won an Outstanding Paper Award in 1999 from AAAI and competed in the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. From 2000 to 2002, he worked at AT&T. From 2002 to 2012, he was a professor at Rutgers University (opens in new tab); he chaired the department from 2009 to 2012. In summer 2012 he returned to Brown University as a full professor.

Ben Livshits is a research scientist at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington, and an affiliate professor at the University of Washington. Originally from St. Petersburg, Russia, he received a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Math from Cornell University in 1999, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2002 and 2006, respectively. Dr. Livshits’ research interests include application of sophisticated static and dynamic analysis Techniques to finding errors in programs.

Ben has published papers at PLDI, POPL, Oakland Security, Usenix Security, CCS, SOSP, ICSE, FSE, and many other venues. He is known for his work in software reliability and especially tools to improve software security, with a primary focus on approaches to finding buffer overruns in C programs and a variety of security vulnerabilities (cross-site scripting, SQL injections, etc.) in web-based applications. He is the author of several dozen academic papers and patents. Lately, he has been focusing on topics ranging from security and privacy to crowdsourcing an augmented reality. Ben generally does not speak of himself in the third person.

Ratul Mahajan is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and an Affiliate Professor at the University of Washington. His research interests include all aspects of networked systems. His current work focuses on network verification and optical networks, and his past work spans software-defined networking, Internet routing and measurements, incentive-compatible protocol design, vehicular and wireless networks, and connected homes. He has published over 50 papers in top-tier venues such as SIGCOMM, SOSP, MobiCom, and CHI. He is a winner of the ACM SIGCOMM Test of Time award, ACM SIGCOMM Rising Star award, the William R. Bennett prize, the SIGCOMM best paper award, and Microsoft Research Graduate Fellowship.

Sharad Malik received the B. Tech. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi in 1985 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1987 and 1990 respectively. Currently he is the George Van Ness Lothrop Professor of Engineering at Princeton University and the chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering. Previously he served as the director of the Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education at Princeton University (2006-2011) and the director of the multi-university Gigascale Systems Research Center (2009-2012).

Malik’s research focuses on design methodology and design automation for computing systems. His research in functional timing analysis and propositional satisfiability has been widely used in industrial electronic design automation tools.

He has received the DAC Award for the most cited paper in the 50-year history of the conference (2013), the CAV Award for fundamental contributions to the development of high-performance Boolean satisfiability solvers (2009), the ICCAD Ten Year Retrospective Most Influential Paper Award (2011), the Princeton University President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching (2009), as well as several other research and teaching awards. In 2009 he received the IIT Delhi Distinguished Alumni Award. He is a fellow of the IEEE and ACM.

Kathryn Mckinley Kathryn S. McKinley is a principal researcher at Microsoft. She was previously an Endowed Professor of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin and received her PhD, MS, and BA from Rice University. Her research interests span programming language implementation, architecture, security, performance, and energy. She and her collaborators have produced widely used tools: the DaCapo Java Benchmarks, TRIPS Compiler, Hoard memory manager, MMTk garbage collector toolkit, and the Immix garbage collector. Her awards include the 2012 ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Software Award, the 2011 ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Service Award, Best & Most Influential awards (ASPLOS, OOPSLA, ICS, SIGMETRICS), IEEE Top Picks, and CACM Research Highlights. Her service includes program chair for ASPLOS ’04, PACT ’05, PLDI ’07, ISMM’12, and CGO’13; editor-in-chief of ACM TOPLAS (2007-2010); DARPA ISAT member (2012–present), CRA Board member (2012-present), and CRA-W co-chair (2011–2014). Dr. McKinley was honored to testify to the House Science Committee (Feb. 14, 2013). She has graduated 18 PhD students. She is an IEEE Fellow and an ACM Fellow.

Tao Mei Tao (opens in new tab) is a Lead Researcher with Microsoft Research, Beijing, China. His current research interests include multimedia information retrieval and computer vision. He has authored or co-authored over 100 papers in journals and conferences, 10 book chapters, and edited three books. He holds 13 granted U.S. patents and more than 20 in pending. Tao was the recipient of several paper awards from prestigious multimedia journals and conferences, including the IEEE T-CSVT (2013) and T-MM (2014) Best Paper Awards, and the ACM Multimedia Best Paper Awards (2007 and 2009). He is an Associate Editor of IEEE Trans. on Multimedia and ACM/Springer Multimedia Systems, and a Senior Member of IEEE and ACM. He received the B.E. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China, in 2001 and 2006, respectively.

Margaret Mitchell is a researcher in Microsoft’s NLP Research Group (opens in new tab), working on grounded language generation. Before joining Microsoft, she was a postdoctoral researcher at The Johns Hopkins University Center of Excellence (opens in new tab), where she worked on semantic role labeling and sentiment analysis using graphical models.

Margaret received her PhD in Computer Science from the natural language generation (NLG) group (opens in new tab) at the University of Aberdeen. As a student, she focused on how to naturally refer to visible, everyday objects, blending research in vision, language, statistics, and cognitive science.

Margaret also spent several years as a visiting scholar at the Center for Spoken Language Understanding (opens in new tab), part of OHSU, in Portland, Oregon, where she worked on understanding the syntactic and phonetic characteristics in the language of people with neurological disorders.

Ray Mooney Raymond J. Mooney is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his Ph.D. in 1988 from the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign. He is an author of over 150 published research papers, primarily in the areas of machine learning and natural language processing. He was the President of the International Machine Learning Society from 2008–2011, program co-chair for AAAI 2006, general chair for HLT-EMNLP 2005, and co-chair for ICML 1990. He is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the Association for Computational Linguistics, and the recipient of best paper awards from AAAI-96, KDD-04, ICML-05 and ACL-07.

Todd Mytkowicz is a researcher at Microsoft Research. His research focuses on creating abstractions that help programmers easily express complex problems and yet are sufficiently constrained to deliver efficient and powerful implementations. Mytkowicz has a PhD in computer science from the University of Colorado at Boulder and enjoys mountain biking, skiing, and spending time with his family. Contact him at toddm@microsoft.com (opens in new tab).

Arvind Narayanan (Ph.D. 2009) is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Princeton. He studies information privacy and security and has a side-interest in technology policy. His research has shown that data anonymization is broken in fundamental ways, for which he jointly received the 2008 Privacy Enhancing Technologies Award. Narayanan leads the Princeton Web Transparency and Accountability project that aims to uncover how companies are collecting and using our personal information. He also studies the security and stability of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.

Narayanan is an affiliated faculty member at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton and an affiliate scholar at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society.

M-H. Carolyn Nguyen is a Director in Microsoft’s Telecommunications and Internet Governance Group, focused on policy issues related to Internet governance through engagements with relevant stakeholders globally. Her past activities have included policy initiatives on privacy, security, open/big data, the internet of things, intelligent systems, and their effects on existing social, economic, and policy frameworks. She has worked at the intersection of these disciplines, developing an evidence base to encourage more holistic approaches to policy through collaboration with multidisciplinary researchers and other experts, including the Digital Enlightenment Forum, the World Economic Forum, and Microsoft Research.

Prior to joining Microsoft in 2011, Carolyn held positions with Research in Motion, Avaya Communications, Lucent Technologies, and Bell Laboratories. Carolyn received her BSEE from Princeton University, MEng from Cornell University, and PhD from Columbia University, all in electrical engineering. She also completed Executive Programs at Harvard Business School and London Business School.

Cathy Palmer is principal research program manager for Microsoft Research. She provides leadership and support for strategic research initiatives across Microsoft Research and Microsoft product teams. Her expertise spans operating systems, networking, and distributed systems, focusing currently on cloud computing. She received her PhD from the University of Washington and joined Tera Computer Company (now Cray, Inc.) where she was a kernel OS developer for the MTA, a multithreaded high performance parallel computer. She also served as software project leader for a large-scale multiprocessor system for the US Department of Energy, ranked Top 10 on the Top500. She joined the Microsoft High Performance Team in 2006, where she served as lead program manager responsible for system administration for multiple product releases of the Microsoft HPC Server and owned the job scheduling for Azure HPC Scheduler. She joined Microsoft Research in 2012, focusing on initiating and enabling strong research collaborations between Microsoft Research and Microsoft engineering.

Ken Perlin (opens in new tab), a professor in the Department of Computer Science (opens in new tab) at New York University (opens in new tab), directs the NYU Games For Learning Institute (opens in new tab), and a participating faculty member in the NYU Media and Games Network (MAGNET) (opens in new tab). He was also founding director of the Media Research Laboratory (opens in new tab) and director of the NYU Center for Advanced Technology. His research interests include graphics, animation, augmented and mixed reality, user interfaces, science education and multimedia. He received an Academy Award for Technical Achievement from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his noise and turbulence procedural texturing techniques, which are widely used in feature films and television, as well as the 2008 ACM/SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award (opens in new tab), the TrapCode award for achievement in computer graphics research, the NYC Mayor’s award for excellence in Science and Technology and the Sokol award for outstanding Science faculty at NYU, and a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation. Dr. Perlin currently serves on the program committee of the AAAS (opens in new tab). He was general chair of the UIST2010 (opens in new tab) conference, and has been a featured artist at the Whitney Museum of American Art (opens in new tab).

Dr. Sundeep Rangan received the B.A.Sc. at the University of Waterloo, Canada and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, all in Electrical Engineering. He has held postdoctoral appointments at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and Bell Labs. In 2000, he co-founded (with four others) Flarion Technologies, a spin-off of Bell Labs that developed Flash OFDM, the first cellular OFDM data system. Flarion grew to over 150 employees with trials worldwide. In 2006, Flarion was acquired by Qualcomm Technologies. Dr. Rangan was a director of Engineering at Qualcomm involved in OFDM infrastructure products. He joined the ECE department at Poly in 2010. His research interests are in wireless communications, signal processing, information theory, and control theory.

Charles Rich is a Professor of Computer Science and a member of the associated faculty of the Interactive Media and Game Development and the Robotics Engineering programs at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He was previously Distinguished Research Scientist and a founding member of Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories. Rich earned his PhD at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where he was a founder and director of the Programmer’s Apprentice project. He is a Fellow and past Councilor of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, a Senior Member of the IEEE, as well as having served as chair of the 1992 International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, co-chair of the 1998 National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, program co-chair of the 2004 and general co-chair of the 2010 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, and program co-chair of the 2011 International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games.

Matthew Richardson is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research. His research includes work on natural language processing, machine learning, data mining, and extracting knowledge from large scale datasets such as query logs. His current work is focused on question answering and machine comprehension. He received his B.S. from Caltech, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington in 2004. While at Microsoft, he has published papers at a wide variety of conferences, including EMNLP, AAAI, KDD, SIGIR, and WWW, won a best paper award at CHI2011, co-organized the SIGIR 2009 workshop on IR for advertising, and has served on 50 program committees.

Dan Roth is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a University of Illinois Scholar. He is the director of the DHS funded Center for Multimodal Information Access & Synthesis (MIAS) and has faculty positions also at the Statistics, Linguistics and ECE Departments and at the graduate School of Library and Information Science.

Roth is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and the Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL), for his contributions to Machine Learning and to Natural Language Processing.

He has published broadly in machine learning, natural language processing, knowledge representation and reasoning and learning theory, and has developed advanced machine learning based tools for natural language applications that are being used widely by the research community. Prof. Roth has given keynote talks in major conferences, including AAAI, The Conference of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence; EMNLP, The Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, ECML & PKDD, the European Conference on Machine Learning and the Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases, and EACL, the European Conference of Computational Linguistics. He has also presented several tutorials in universities and conferences including at ACL and the European ACL and has won several teaching and best paper awards.

Roth is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) and has served on the editorial board of several of the major journals in his research areas. He was the program chair of AAAI’11, ACL’03 and CoNLL’02 and serves regularly as an area chair and senior program committee member in the major conferences in his research areas.

Prof. Roth got his B.A. Summa cum laude in Mathematics from the Technion, Israel and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Harvard University in 1995.

Aaditeshwar Seth is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at IIT Delhi, where he runs the ACT4D (Appropriate Computing Technologies for Development) research group. He graduated with a PhD degree from the University of Waterloo in Canada in 2008, and completed his B.Tech from IIT Kanpur in 2002. Aaditeshwar is passionate about building technologies for social development. He won the Knight News Challenge award in 2008 to start an organization, Gram Vaani, which builds low-cost voice-based systems for community media in rural areas. Gram Vaani’s technologies and work done by Aadi’s students are now in use by over 100 developmental organizations in India, Africa, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, where collectively more than 2 million people have directly touched their platforms. Several elements of their work have also been adopted by government departments in India for scaleup, and have influenced the use of ICTs for development within many international aid and development organizations.

Former managing director of Microsoft Research Asia, Dr. Harry Shum, after leading Bing product development for several years as a Corporate Vice President, has taken the new role of Microsoft Executive Vice President, Technology and Research.

Dr. Shum is an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Fellow and an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Fellow. He served on the editorial board of the International Journal of Computer Vision, and was a Program Chair of the International Conference of Computer Vision (ICCV) 2007. Dr. Shum has published more than 100 papers in computer vision, computer graphics, pattern recognition, statistical learning, and robotics. He holds more than 50 U.S. patents.

Dr. Shum joined Microsoft Research in 1996 where he worked in Redmond, WA as a researcher on computer vision and computer graphics. In 1999, Shum moved to Beijing to help start Microsoft Research China (later renamed Microsoft Research Asia). His tenure there began as a research manager and subsequently moved up to Assistant Managing Director, Managing Director of Microsoft Research Asia, Distinguished Engineer, and Corporate Vice President. In 2007, Shum became Microsoft Corporate Vice President responsible for Bing product development. In 2013, he took on the responsibilities of Microsoft Executive Vice President including oversight of Microsoft Research.

Dr. Shum received a doctorate in robotics from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. In his spare time, he enjoys playing basketball, rooting for the Pittsburgh Steelers, and spending quality time with his family.

Dr. Yang Song is a Researcher at the Internet Services and Research Center (ISRC), Microsoft Research Redmond. He has been with Microsoft Research since 2009. His research interests include information retrieval, machine learning, data mining and user modeling. He has published over 40 scientific research works on international conferences, journals and books. He also holds five US patents. Dr. Song received his Ph.D. degree from Department of Computer Science and Engineering, the Pennsylvania State University, and B.S. degree from Department of Computer Science, Zhejiang University, China.

Dr. Krysta Svore is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington, where she manages the Quantum Architectures and Computation group. Svore’s research includes the development and implementation of quantum algorithms, including the design of a scalable, fault-tolerant software architecture for translating a high-level quantum program into a low-level, device-specific quantum implementation, and the study of quantum error correction codes and noise thresholds. She has also developed machine-learning methods for web applications, including ranking, classification, and summarization algorithms. Dr. Svore received an ACM Best of 2013 Notable Article award. In 2010, she was a member of the winning team of the Yahoo! Learning to Rank Challenge. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science with highest distinction from Columbia University in 2006 and her B.A. from Princeton University in Mathematics and French in 2001. She is a Senior Member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), serves as a representative for the Academic Alliance of the National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT), and is an active member of the American Physical Society (APS).

Jie Tang is an associate professor with Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University. His interests include social network analysis, data mining, and machine learning. He published more than 100 journal/conference papers and holds 10 patents. He served as PC Co-Chair of WSDM’15, ASONAM’15, ADMA’11, SocInfo’12, KDD-CUP Co-Chair of KDD’15, Poster Co-Chair of KDD’14, Workshop Co-Chair of KDD’13, Local Chair of KDD’12, Publication Co-Chair of KDD’11, and as the PC member of more than 50 international conferences. He is the principal investigator of National High-tech R&D Program (863), NSFC project, Chinese Young Faculty Research Funding, National 985 funding, and international collaborative projects with Minnesota University, IBM, Google, Nokia, Sogou, etc. He leads the project Arnetminer.org (opens in new tab) for academic social network analysis and mining, which has attracted millions of independent IP accesses from 220 countries/regions in the world. He was honored with the Newton Advanced Scholarship Award, CCF Young Scientist Award, NSFC Excellent Young Scholar, and IBM Innovation Faculty Award.

Kristin Tolle Dr. Tolle is the Director of the Data Science Initiative in Microsoft Research Outreach, Redmond, WA. Since joining Microsoft in 2000, Dr. Tolle has acquired numerous patents and worked for several product teams including the Natural Language Group, Visual Studio, and the Microsoft Office Excel Team. Since joining Microsoft Research’s outreach program in 2006, she has run several major initiatives from biomedical computing and environmental science to more traditional computer and information science programs around natural user interactions and data curation. She was also directed the development of the Microsoft Translator Hub and the Environmental Science Services Toolkit. Dr. Tolle is one of the editors and authors of one of the earliest books on data science, The Fourth Paradigm: Data Intensive Scientific Discovery. Her current focus is develop an outreach program to engage with academics on data science in general and more specifically around using data to create meaningful and useful user experiences across devices platforms.

Matthias Troyer is professor of computational physics at ETH Zurich and consultant for the quantum computing activities at Microsoft Research. He is a recipient of an ERC Advanced Grant of the European Research Council, a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a Trustee of the Aspen Center for Physics. His research activities center on large scale simulations of quantum systems, development of new simulation algorithms and high performance computing. His love for new tech gadgets has led him from supercomputing to quantum devices. He has tested quantum random number generators, validated analog quantum simulators for materials (one of the scientific breakthroughs of the year 2010 according to Science magazine), explored the computational capabilities of the controversial devices built by D-Wave Systems, and is now working on quantum algorithms for real-world applications. Besides his research on quantum physics he is collaborating with an interdisciplinary team of colleagues towards the modeling and simulations of island ecosystems.

Andy van Dam Andries van Dam (Andy) has been on Brown’s faculty since 1965, and was one of the Computer Science Department’s co-founders and its first Chairman, from 1979 to 1985. He was a Principal Investigator and was the Director from 1996 to 1998 in the NSF Science and Technology Center for Graphics and Visualization (opens in new tab), a research consortium including Brown, Caltech, Cornell, North Carolina (Chapel Hill), and the University of Utah. He served as Brown’s first Vice President for Research from 2002 to 2006.

Lucy Vanderwende’s research focuses on text understanding. She is deeply involved with developing MindNet, a method for automatically acquiring semantic information; when extracting from dictionaries, much of this information might be considered common sense. Lucy has been involved in projects to extract information from electronic health records, for phenotype determination and prediction, where identifying the truth value of the sentence contributes to greater accuracy. Further, Lucy has worked with Sumit Basu on various projects of Question Generation, primarily for the purpose of generating quizzes from arbitrary text to support self-motivated learning. Lucy has been at Microsoft Research since 1992 and Affiliate Faculty at University of Washington Department of Biomedical Health Informatics since 2011.

Benjamin Van Durme is the lead of Natural Language Understanding research at the Johns Hopkins University Human Language Technology Center of Excellence (HLTCOE), as well as an assistant research professor in both Computer Science and Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins University. Between the HLTCOE, his small army of PhD students, and affiliated post-doctoral researchers, research areas covered include: information extraction and knowledge base population, streaming and randomized algorithms in HLT, topic modeling, author attribute prediction in social media, educational NLP, and various aspects of computational semantics.

George Varghese obtained his Ph.D. in 1992 from MIT. He worked from 1993-1999 at Washington University, and from 1999 to 2012 at UCSD, both as professor of computer science. He won the ONR Young Investigator Award in 1996, and was elected to be a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 2002. His book, Network Algorithmics, was published in December 2004 by Morgan-Kaufman. In May 2004, he co-founded NetSift Inc., which was acquired by Cisco Systems in 2005. He joined Microsoft Research in 2012. He has received the 2014 ACM SIGCOMM Award (opens in new tab), the 2014 IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award (opens in new tab), and the 2015 Distinguished Alumni Award from IIT Bombay.

Manuela Veloso Manuela M. Veloso is the Herbert A. Simon University Professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. She researches in artificial intelligence and robotics. She founded and directs the coral research laboratory (opens in new tab), for the study of autonomous agents that collaborate, observe, reason, act, and learn.

Professor Veloso is IEEE Fellow, AAAS Fellow, AAAI Fellow, and the past President of AAAI and RoboCup. Professor Veloso and her students have worked with a variety of autonomous robots, including mobile service robots and soccer robots. The CoBot service robots have autonomously navigated for more than 1,000km in our multi-floor office buildings. See www.cs.cmu.edu/~mmv (opens in new tab) for further information, including publications.

Alex Wade is Director of Scholarly Communication at Microsoft Research. He currently focused on Microsoft Academic, spanning areas of knowledge acquisition, knowledge representation, intentionality, dialog systems, semantic search and intelligent agents. During his career at Microsoft, Alex has managed the enterprise search and taxonomy management systems, delivered Windows Search for multiple OS releases, and has implemented an Open Access policy governing Microsoft Research’s scholarly output. Prior to joining Microsoft, he worked in the library systems of the University of Washington, the University of Michigan and the University of California at Berkeley. Alex holds a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from U.C. Berkeley, and a Masters of Librarianship degree from the University of Washington.

Kuansan Wang is a Principal Researcher and Director of Internet Service Research Center and Conversational System Research Center at Microsoft Research in Redmond where he is currently conducting research in web search, large scale data mining, dialog systems and web-scale natural language processing. He joined the Speech Technology Group in Microsoft Research in 1998, and has been the software architect for Speech Server 2004, Microsoft Response Point 2007 and co-authored six ISO/ECMA/W3C standards. Kuansan has a BS, MS from National Taiwan University and PhD from U of Maryland, College Park, all in Electrical Engineering.

Nathan Wiebe received his PhD in 2011 from the University of Calgary studying quantum simulation and adiabatic quantum computing. He then accepted a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Waterloo before accepting a post-doctoral researcher position at Microsoft Research in 2013. His current work focuses on quantum machine learning, quantum simulation, quantum circuit design, and quantum device characterization.

Jeannette Wing joined Microsoft Research in January 2013 after holding positions in academia and government, most recently at Carnegie Mellon University and the National Science Foundation (NSF). From 2007 to 2010, she served as assistant director of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate at the NSF (opens in new tab), where she led the directorate that funds academic computer science research in the United States. Her areas of expertise are in trustworthy computing, formal methods, concurrent and distributed systems, programming languages, and software engineering.

Wing was on the faculty at the University of Southern California for two years before joining the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University. As a student, she worked at Bell Laboratories and Xerox PARC. She spent sabbaticals at MIT and Microsoft Research Redmond. She received the CRA Distinguished Service Award in 2011 and the SIGSOFT Retrospective Paper Award in 2012. Wing is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers.

Wing received her bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Geoffrey Xie Geoffrey G. Xie is a professor and associated chair of the computer science department, Naval Postgraduate School. He received the BS degree in computer science from Fudan University, China, and the PhD degree in computer sciences from the University of Texas at Austin. He was a visiting scholar in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University from 2003 to 2004, and the Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, from 2010 to 2011. He has published more than 70 articles in various areas of networking. He co-chaired the ACM SIGCOMM Internet Network Management Workshop in 2007. He won the best paper award at the 2007 IEEE ICNP conference and the 2011 IEEE Fred W. Ellersick Award. His current research interests include formal network analysis, routing design and theories, and abstraction driven design of enterprise networks.

Scott Wen-tau Yih is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research Redmond. His research interests include natural language processing, machine learning and information retrieval. Yih’s current work focuses on continuous semantic representations using neural networks and matrix/tensor decomposition methods, with applications in lexical semantics, knowledge base embedding and question answering. Yih received the best paper award from CoNLL-2011 and has served as area chairs (HLT-NAACL-12, ACL-14) and program co-chairs (CEAS-09, CoNLL-14) in recent years. Yih received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, before joining Microsoft Research.

Richard Zemel is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, where he has been a faculty member since 2000. Prior to that, he was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Psychology at the University of Arizona, and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Salk Institute and at Carnegie Mellon University. He received the B.Sc. degree in History & Science from Harvard University in 1984, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto in 1993. He has received several awards and honors, including a Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research, and six Dean’s Excellence Awards at the University of Toronto. He is a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and a member of the NIPS Advisory Board. His research interests include topics in machine learning, vision, and neural coding. His recent research focuses on structured output models, image-text analysis, and fairness.

Luke Zettlemoyer is an assistant professor in computer science and engineering at the University of Washington. He does research in natural language processing, with a focus on empirical computational semantics. Honors include paper awards at UAI and ACL, selection to the DARPA CSSG, an NSF CAREER Award, and an Allen Distinguished Investigator Award. Luke received his PhD from MIT and was a postdoc at the University of Edinburgh.

Xinyu Zhang is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received the B.E. degree in 2005 from Harbin Institute of Technology, China; the M.S. degree in 2007 from the University of Toronto, Canada; and the Ph.D. degree in 2012 from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His research interest lies in designing and implementing protocols that improve the capacity, interoperability, and energy-efficiency of wireless networks. He is a recipient of ACM MobiCom Best Paper Award in 2011 and NSF CAREER Award in 2014.

Zhengyou Zhang is a principal researcher with Microsoft Research, Redmond, Washington, and the research manager of the Multimedia, Interaction, and Experiences group. Before joining Microsoft Research in March 1998, he was with INRIA (French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control), France, for 11 years and was a senior research scientist from 1991. From 1996-1997, he spent a one-year sabbatical as an Invited Researcher with the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR), Kyoto, Japan.

He is an IEEE Fellow, and an ACM Fellow. He is the Founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Autonomous Mental Development, and serves as an Associate Editor of several journals. He has been on the program committees for numerous international conferences in the areas of computer vision, audio and speech signal processing, multimedia, human-computer interaction, and autonomous mental development. He received the IEEE Helmholtz Test of Time Award at ICCV 2013 for his paper published in 1999 on camera calibration, now known as Zhang’s method.

Heather Zheng received Ph.D. (1999) and M.S.E. (1998) degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park and a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Xi’an Jiaotong University, China (1995). Zheng is currently an associate professor of Computer Science at UC Santa Barbara where she leads the LINK Lab, part of the Next Generation Networking Group. Before coming to UCSB in 2005, she spent six years in industry research positions at Bell-Labs, Murray Hill, and Microsoft Research Asia. In 2006, her work on Cognitive Radios was featured in MIT Technology Review as a Top-10 Emerging Technology, and she recently became a fellow of the World Technology Network. In 2005, she was one of MIT Technology Review’s Top 35 Innovators under the age of 35 for her work on cognitive radios. Zheng received Bell Laboratories President’s Gold Award from Lucent Bell-Labs (2002), and the George Harhalakis Outstanding Graduate Student Award from Institute of System Research, University of Maryland, College Park (1998–1999). She was admitted to the highly gifted class of Xi’an Jiaotong University, China at age of 15, and graduated with the highest honors.

Lidong Zhou is a Principal Researcher and Research Manager of the Systems Research Group in Microsoft Research Redmond. Previously, he managed the System Research Group of Microsoft Research Asia from 2008 to 2012 and was a researcher at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley from 2002 to 2008. His main research interest is in the area of distributed systems. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University.

Larry Zitnick C. Lawrence Zitnick is a principal researcher in the Interactive Visual Media group at Microsoft Research, and is an affiliate associate professor at the University of Washington. He is interested in a broad range of topics related to visual object recognition, language and artificial intelligence. He developed the PhotoDNA technology used by Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and various law enforcement agencies to combat illegal imagery on the web. Before joining Microsoft Research, he received the PhD degree in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in 2003.

Ben Zorn is a Research Manager and Principal Researcher, co-managing the Research in Software Engineering (RiSE) group, a group of over 30 researchers and developers working on programming languages and software engineering in Microsoft Research, Redmond. After receiving a PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 1989, he served eight years on the Computer Science faculty at the University of Colorado in Boulder, receiving tenure and being promoted to Associate Professor in 1996. Dr. Zorn left the University of Colorado in 1998 to join Microsoft Research, where he currently works. His research interests include programming language design and implementation for reliability, security, and performance. Dr. Zorn has served as both Program Chair (1999) and General Chair (2010) of the PLDI conference, as an Associate Editor of the ACM journals Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems and Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization. He has also served seven years as a Member-at-Large of the SIGPLAN Executive Committee and four years as a member of the ACM Software Systems Award Committee. He is currently a member of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council, a committee of the Computing Research Association.