Faculty Summit 2015 Welcome and Opening Keynote

July 17, 2015
Ethan Jackson, Jeannette Wing, Jennifer Listgarten, Larry Zitnick, Meg Mitchell, and P. Anandan | Microsoft Research

P. Anandan, managing director at Microsoft Research, opens the Faculty Summit, followed by Jeanette Wing, corporate vice president, Microsoft Research, talking about Microsoft’s unique role in the computing research ecosystem.

Speaker Details

“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 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. ”

“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, 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. ”

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.

- Ethan Jackson
  
  Senior Director
- Jeff Running
- Jennifer Listgarten
  
  Senior Researcher
- Larry Zitnick
  
  Principal Researcher
- Margaret Mitchell
  
  Researcher
- Jeannette Wing
  
  Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Research