Faculty Summit 2016

Mohammad Alizadeh is an Assistant Professor in the EECS Department at MIT, and a member of CSAIL. Before joining MIT, I completed my Ph.D. at Stanford University, and spent a couple of years at a datacenter networking startup, Insieme Networks, and Cisco.

Ganesh Ananthanarayanan is a researcher at Microsoft Research. His research interests are broadly in systems and networking, with recent focus on cloud computing and large scale data analytics systems. He has published over 25 papers in top conferences such as USENIX OSDI, ACM SIGCOMM and USENIX NSDI. Prior to joining Microsoft Research, he completed his Ph.D. in Berkeley, working with Prof. Ion Stoica in the AMP Lab. More details about Ganesh’s work can be found on his profile (opens in new tab).

Victor Bahl is a Distinguished Scientist and the Director of the Mobility & Networking Research (MNR) Group. He believes that he has one of the best jobs in the industry – pursuing untethered research, shepherding brilliant researchers and helping shape Microsoft’s long-term vision related to networking technologies through research, industry partnerships, and associated policy engagement with governments and research institutions around the world. His personal research spans a variety of topics in mobile computing, wireless systems, cloud services and data center networking & management. Over his career he has built many seminal and highly-cited systems, published prolifically in top conferences and journals, authored over 100 patents, given over 30 keynotes, won many awards and honors, and engaged in significant professional and company-wide leadership activities.

Magdalena Balazinska is an Associate Professor in the department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington and the Jean Loup Baer Professor of Computer Science and Engineering. She’s the director of the IGERT PhD Program in Big Data and Data Science. She’s also a Senior Data Science Fellow of the University of Washington eScience Institute. Magdalena’s research interests are in the field of database management systems. Her current research focuses on big data management, scientific data management, and cloud computing. Magdalena holds a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2006). She is a Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellow (2007), received an NSF CAREER Award (2009), a 10-year most influential paper award (2010), an HP Labs Research Innovation Award (2009 and 2010), a Rogel Faculty Support Award (2006), a Microsoft Research Graduate Fellowship (2003-2005), and multiple best-paper awards.

Thomas Ball (Tom) is a Principal Researcher and Research Manager at Microsoft Research. Tom graduated with a B.A. in Computer Science from Cornell University in 1987 and a M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1993. From 1993-1999, he was a member of the technical staff at Bell Laboratories, where he made contributions in program visualization and program profiling. In 1999, Tom moved to Microsoft Research, where he started the SLAM software model checking project with Sriram Rajamani, which led to the creation of the Static Driver Verifier (SDV) tool for finding defects in device driver code. Tom is a 2011 ACM Fellow for “contributions to software analysis and defect detection”. Since becoming a manager at Microsoft, he has nurtured research areas such as automated theorem proving, program testing/verification, and empirical software engineering. His current focus is CS and programming education via the Touch Develop and BBC micro:bit projects.

Josh Benaloh is Senior Cryptographer at Microsoft Research and an Affiliate Faculty member of the University of Washington Computer Science and Engineering department. He earned an S.B. from M.I.T. and M.S., M.Phil., and Ph.D. degrees from Yale University where his 1987 dissertation “Verifiable Secret-Ballot Elections” introduced the use of homomorphic encryption within the context of conducting elections whose correctness could be verified by voters and observers without having to trust election officials, equipment vendors, or anyone else. Dr. Benaloh is an author of the influential 2015 report “Keys Under Doormats: Mandating insecurity by requiring government access to all data and communications” which made the front page of the New York Times and was frequently cited in congressional hearings and other discussions of the subject.

Chris Benner is the Dorothy E. Everett Chair in Global Information and Social Entrepreneurship, Director of the Everett Program for Digital Tools for Social Innovation, and a Professor of Environmental Studies and Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.  His research examines the relationships between technological change, regional development, and the structure of economic opportunity, focusing on regional labor markets and the transformation of work and employment. Significant authored or co-authored books include: Equity, Growth and Community (2015), which examines diversity and dynamics of regional knowledge communities, and their relationship to social equity and economic growth;  Just Growth (2012) which helps uncover the subtle and detailed processes, policies and institutional arrangement that help explain how certain regions around the country have been able to consistently link prosperity and inclusion; This Could Be The Start of Something Big (2009) which examines new regional movements around community development, policy initiatives, and social movement organizing; and Work in the New Economy (2002), an examination of the transformation of work and employment in the information economy.  He received his Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from the University of California, Berkeley.

Keren Bergman is the Charles Batchelor Professor and Chair of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University. She was a founding member and currently serves as the inaugural Scientific Director of the Columbia Nano Initiative launched in 2014. Prof. Bergman received the B.S. from Bucknell University in 1988, and the M.S. in 1991 and Ph.D. in 1994 from M.I.T. all in Electrical Engineering. At Columbia, Prof. Bergman leads multiple cross-disciplinary programs at the intersection of computing and photonics. Her research focuses on the architectural design exploration and implementation of photonic systems that incorporate the advantages of manipulating information in the optical domain for advanced computing. Prof. Bergman is a Fellow of the OSA and IEEE.

Michael Bernstein is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, where he is a member of the Human-Computer Interaction group. His research focuses on the design of crowdsourcing and social computing systems. This work has received Best Paper awards and nominations at premier venues in human-computer interaction and social computing (ACM UIST, ACM CHI, ACM CSCW, AAAI ISWSM). Michael has been recognized as a Robert N. Noyce Family Faculty Scholar, and awarded the Sloan Fellowship, NSF CAREER award and the George M. Sprowls Award for best doctoral thesis in Computer Science at MIT. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University, and a masters and Ph.D. in computer science from MIT.

Jeffrey Bigham is an Associate Professor in the Human-Computer Interaction and Language Technologies Institutes in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. His research combines computation and crowds to make intelligent interactive systems and solve hard problems in computer science. Many of these systems are designed with a deep understanding of the needs of people with disabilities. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Washington in 2009. He has been a Visiting Researcher at MIT CSAIL and Microsoft Research, and is a co-founder of Legion Labs, a company founded to commercialize crowd-powered technologies for people with disabilities. He has received a number of awards for his work, including the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, the Microsoft Imagine Cup Accessible Technology Award, and the National Science Foundation CAREER Award.

Mark Billinghurst is Professor of Human Computer Interaction at the University of South Australia in Adelaide, Australia. In 2002 he earned a PhD from the University of Washington and researches innovative computer interfaces, publishing papers in topics such as wearable computing, Augmented Reality and mobile interfaces. Previously he was Director of the HIT Lab NZ at the University of Canterbury and has worked at Nokia, Google and the MIT Media Laboratory. In 2013 he received the IEEE VR Technical Achievement Award for contributions in Augmented Reality, and was recently elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand.

Judith Bishop (opens in new tab) is Director of Computer Science in Microsoft Research, USA. Her role is to create strong links between Microsoft’s research groups and universities globally, through encouraging projects and contests, supporting events, summits and summer schools, and engaging directly in research. She leads the Open Source Initiative and Quantum Computing outreach. Previous projects include the BBC micro:bit, Code Hunt, TouchDevelop and TryF#. Judith’s research expertise is in programming languages and distributed systems, with a strong practical bias. After studying in South Africa, Judith received her PhD from the University of Southampton, UK. She then served as a professor, most recently at the University of Pretoria. Judith is an ACM Distinguished Member, and has received the IFIP Silver Core Award, among other awards. She is a Fellow of the British Computer Society and the Royal Society of South Africa.

Joshua Bloom is co-founder and CTO of Wise.io, a startup based in Berkeley building machine learning applications for customer success. He is also an astronomy professor at the University of California, Berkeley where has taught high-energy astrophysics and Python for data scientists. He has published over 300 refereed articles largely on time-domain transients events and telescope/insight automation. His book on gamma-ray bursts, a technical introduction for physical scientists, was published recently by Princeton University Press. Josh has been awarded the Data-Driven Discovery prize from the Moore Foundation and the Pierce Prize from the American Astronomical Society; he is also a former Sloan Fellow, Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society, and Hertz Foundation Fellow. He holds a PhD from Caltech and degrees from Harvard and Cambridge University.

Peter Bodik is a researcher in the Mobility and Networking group in MSR Redmond. Peter received his PhD. at UC Berkeley where he has been working on applying Machine Learning to problems in operations of large-scale distributed systems, such as failure diagnosis or automatic resource allocation. At Microsoft, he’s been working on improving fault tolerance of distributed systems, scheduling in big-data systems and low-latency services, and recently on streaming and batch video analytics.

Dan Bohus is a Senior Researcher in the Adaptive Systems and Interaction Group at Microsoft Research. His research agenda is focused on physically situated, open-world spoken language interaction. Before joining Microsoft Research, Dan has received his Ph.D. degree (2007) in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.

Ernie Brickell is Fellow of the International Association of Cryptologic Research. He was the founding editor in chief of the Journal of Cryptology. He has been an invited speaker 7 times at IACR conferences and workshops and has 38 publications in Cryptology. Ernie began his career at Sandia National Laboratories, and has also worked at Bellcore and CertCo. He recently retired from Intel Corporation, where he was a Senior Principal Security Architect. Ernie has conducted research in privacy and drove incorporation of privacy features into Intel products. He and coauthors, Jan Camenish and Liqun Chen received the test of time award for their paper on Digital Anonymous Attestation at CCS. His design of Enhanced Privacy ID has been incorporated into Intel products to allow Intel devices to attest that they are Intel devices, to prove that the keys are not revoked, and without revealing the identity of the device. Ernie holds an M.S. in computer science and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the Ohio State University.

Ryan Calo is an assistant professor at the University of Washington School of Law and an assistant professor (by courtesy) at the Information School. Professor Calo is a CoMotion Presidential Innovation Fellow for the class of 2015. Professor Calo’s research on law and emerging technology appears or is forthcoming in leading law reviews (California Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, Stanford Law Review Online, University of Pennsylvania Law Review Online) and technical publications (MIT Press, IEEE, Science, Artificial Intelligence), and is frequently referenced by the mainstream media (NPR, New York Times, Wall Street Journal). Professor Calo has also testified before the full Judiciary Committee of the United States Senate and spoken at the Aspen Ideas Festival and NPR’s Weekend in Washington. In 2014, he was named one of the most important people in robotics by Business Insider. He serves on numerous advisory boards, including the University of California’s People and Robots Initiative, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), Without My Consent, and the Future of Privacy Forum. Prior to law school at the University of Michigan, Professor Calo investigated allegations of police misconduct in New York City.

Scott Charney is Corporate Vice President for Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Group.  This group is responsible for the security and global readiness of Microsoft’s products and services, as well as addressing global public policy issues relating to computer security.  Prior to joining Microsoft, Mr. Charney served as Chief of the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section in the U.S. Department of Justice.  In that capacity, he investigated and prosecuted national and international hacker cases, proposed and commented on cybercrime legislation; and chaired the G8 Subgroup on High-Tech Crime.

Melissa Chase is a researcher in the Cryptography group at MSR Redmond, focusing on provably secure privacy. Before joining Microsoft, she received a B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics from Harvey Mudd College, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Brown University. She has worked in a number of different areas within cryptography, including minimal disclosure credentials, electronic cash, attribute based encryption, and re-encryption.

Surajit Chaudhuri is a Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft Research and leads the Data Management, Exploration and Mining group. As a Deputy Managing Director of MSR Redmond Lab, he also has oversight of Distributed Systems, Networking, Security, Programming languages and Software Engineering groups. He works closely with Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprises division. His current areas of interest are enterprise data analytics, data discovery, self-manageability and cloud database services. Working with his colleagues in Microsoft Research, he helped incorporate the Index Tuning Wizard (and subsequently Database Engine Tuning Advisor) and data cleaning technology into Microsoft SQL Server. Surajit is an ACM Fellow, a recipient of the ACM SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award, ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award, a VLDB 10-year Best Paper Award, and an IEEE Data Engineering Influential Paper Award. Surajit received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1992.

Paolo Costa is a researcher in the Systems & Networking group in MSR Cambridge. His research interests lie at the intersection of distributed systems and networking with particular emphasis on large-scale networked systems. His current research investigates how to improve data center networks through a deep rethinking of the way these networks are built and operated, leveraging the availability of new hardware technologies such as systems-on-chip (SoCs), distributed switching fabrics, and optical networks. In the past, he had been a research faculty at Imperial College London and received a PhD degree in Computer Engineering from the Politecnico di Milano.

Jeffrey L. Cox leads the Optical Engineering and Network Testing teams in Azure Networking and is focused on developing future end-to-end network infrastructure architectures supporting all of Microsoft’s online and cloud services. For almost 30 years, Jeff has been involved in architecting, designing, and operating some of the largest scale network infrastructures ever built. Jeff has also led the development of hardware systems in the packet switching/optical transmission space, built datacenters, developed protocols, and has taught numerous networking courses. Prior to joining Microsoft, Jeff was Director of Engineering in the Core Business Unit of Juniper Networks focusing on developing next-generation integrated packet-optical technologies at 100Gb/s and beyond. Prior to Juniper, Jeff was the Director of Research & Technology at BT (British Telecom) leading a group of over 100 researches investigating various networking technologies from physical infrastructure up through end-to-end network architectures. Prior to BT, Jeff was involved in network architecture at JP Morgan Chase focused on MPLS and optical network deployment. For five years beginning in 2000, Jeff started Celion Networks, an optical DWDM transmission system company. Jeff was the Chief Systems Architect for the Celion systems and was responsible for overall product design of the systems. Prior to Celion, Jeff was Sr. Director of Global Data Architecture for Level(3) Communications and was responsible for overall end-to-end architecture for the various packet network infrastructures with a focus on Ethernet and MPLS technologies. For most of the 1990s, Jeff built large-scale enterprise networks for various large corporations. Jeff began his networking career in the 1980s at Texas A&M University where he was responsible for the campus academic computing centers and networking infrastructure.

David Culler is the Freisen Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, Faculty Director of its Sustainable Infrastructures initiative, and co-director of its DataScience Planning Initiative. Professor Culler received his B.A. from U.C. Berkeley in 1980, and M.S. and Ph.D. from MIT in 1985 and 1989. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, an ACM Fellow, an IEEE Fellow and was selected for the 2013 Okawa Prize and ACMs Sigmod Outstanding Achievement Award. He has received Test-of-Time awards from SigMobile, Sensys, Usenix, NSDI, SIGCOMM, PLDI, HPDC, and ISCA. He received the NSF Presidential Young Investigators award in 1990 and the NSF Presidential Faculty Fellowship in 1992. He was the Principal Investigator of the DARPA Network Embedded Systems Technology project that created the open platform for wireless sensor networks based on TinyOS, and was co-founder and CTO of Arch Rock Corporation and the founding Director of Intel Research, Berkeley.

Susan B. Davidson received the B.A. degree in Mathematics from Cornell University in 1978, and the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Princeton University in 1980 and 1982. Dr. Davidson is the Weiss Professor of Computer and Information Science (CIS) at the University of Pennsylvania, where she has been since 1982, and currently serves as Chair of the board of the Computing Research Association. Dr. Davidson’s research interests include database and web-based systems, scientific data management, provenance, crowdsourcing, and data citation. Dr. Davidson was the founding co-director of the Penn Center for Bioinformatics from 1997-2003, and the founding co-director of the Greater Philadelphia Bioinformatics Alliance. She served as Deputy Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science from 2005-2007 and Chair of CIS from 2008-2013. She is an ACM Fellow, a Corresponding Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2015), received the Lenore Rowe Williams Award (2002), was a Fulbright Scholar and recipient of a Hitachi Chair (2004), and received the Trustees’ Council of Penn Women/Provost Award (April 2015) for her work on advancing women in engineering.

Emiliano De Cristofaro is a Senior Lecturer (British English for Associate Professor) at University College London (UCL). Prior to joining UCL in 2013, he was a research scientist at PARC (a Xerox company). In 2011, he received a PhD in Networked Systems from the University of California, Irvine, advised (mostly while running on the beach) by Gene Tsudik. His research interests include privacy technologies, applied cryptography, and systems security. He has served as program co-chair of the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS) in 2013 and 2014, and of the Workshop on Genome Privacy and Security (GenoPri 2015). For more information on Emiliano, check out his homepage (opens in new tab).

Ramani Duraiswami is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and at the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. He has broad research interests in a number of areas including spatial audio, computer vision, machine learning and scientific computing. He has a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins and a B.Tech. from IIT Bombay. See his professor profile (opens in new tab) for more information on his research. Two companies have been spun out of UMD based around Prof. Duraiswami’s research, including VisiSonics (opens in new tab), which is developing several innovative products for virtual and augmented reality, addressing 3D audio capture, analysis and reproduction.

Dr. Oren Etzioni is Chief Executive Officer of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. He has been a Professor at the University of Washington’s Computer Science department since 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 over 25,000 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.

Joe Finney is a senior lecturer in the School of Computing and Communications at Lancaster University. His research interests include networked mobile systems, support for lightweight embedded systems, and novel mobile applications. Early in his career, he worked with Microsoft to develop next generation mobile internet protocols for the windows operating system. More recently, he designed, developed and patented a technology known as Firefly, that enables the real-time modelling and control of 3D artistic LED displays. Currently, he spends most of his time working collaboratively with colleagues at the BBC, Microsoft, ARM, Samsung (and many others) to develop the underlying software of the BBC micro:bit – an inexpensive, lightweight computer designed to inspire the next generation of technologists. Joe holds a PhD in computer science from Lancaster University, and is a member of the IEEE, ACM, and British Computing Society. Contact him (opens in new tab) at the School of Computing and Communications.

Nicolo Fusi is a researcher working at the intersection of machine learning, computational biology and medicine. His focus is on the development of new statistical and computational methods to better understand the genetic and environmental causes of complex diseases. In machine learning, his main interest is in the development of scalable inference methods for Bayesian nonparametric models. Recently, he has also been working on sensing using wearable devices and the computational aspects of gene therapy. Nicolo received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Sheffield working with Neil Lawrence. He received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. in theoretical computer science from the University of Milan.

Hannes Gamper received his Diploma Engineer degree in Electrical Engineering/Sound Engineering from University of Technology and University of Music and Performing Arts, both in Graz, Austria, and his PhD from Aalto University, Finland. He joined MSR Labs in 2014 as a post-doctoral researcher in the Audio and Acoustics Research Group, where he is now researcher. His research interests are in the area of spatial audio perception and rendering for augmented and virtual reality. He worked on spatial sound rendering for Hololens and Windows 10, in particular the personalization of audio filters that enable placing sounds arbitrarily around a listener.

Monia Ghobadi is a postdoc researcher at Microsoft Research. Her research interests are in the general area of computer networking and systems, including data center networking, optical networks, congestion control and software-defined networks. She received her PhD from University of Toronto and spent a couple of years at Google’s data center team.

Joseph Gonzalez an assistant professor at UC Berkeley and co-founder of Dato Inc. Joseph holds a PhD in Machine Learning from CMU where he created the PowerGraph open-source graph processing system and a collection of tools for Graphical Model inference. Joseph is part of the UC Berkeley AMPLab where he created, GraphX, the graph analytics framework in Apache Spark.

Jan Gray is founder of Gray Research LLC. He worked at Microsoft 1987-2009 as Partner Software Architect on developer tools and platforms products including the Visual C++ compiler, COM+, Common Language Runtime, and the Parallel Computing Platform. Jan also has two decades of experience crafting FPGA-efficient soft processors. Consulting for MSR, he built the parallel machine learned model evaluation pipeline stage of the Catapult Bing ranking accelerator. His current work is GRVI Phalanx, a “software-first, software-mostly” FPGA accelerator framework that composes hundreds of RISC-V soft processors, accelerators, and extreme bandwidth I/O interfaces using a Hoplite network-on-chip. Jan has a B.Math. (CS/EE) from the University of Waterloo, and has over 40 patents.

Mary L. Gray is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research and Fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. She maintains an appointment as Associate Professor of the Media School, with affiliations in American Studies, Anthropology, and Gender Studies at Indiana University. Mary’s research looks at how media access, material conditions, and everyday uses of technologies transform people’s lives. Her most recent book, Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America (NYU Press), looked at how young people in the rural United States use media to negotiate their sexual and gender identities, local belonging, and connections to broader, imagined queer communities. Mary’s current book project, co-authored with computer scientist Siddharth Suri, combines ethnography, interviews, survey data and large scale data analysis to understand workers’ experiences of on-demand economies and their implications for the future of work. A third thread of Mary’s work examines how ethics and research compliance processes produce norms of vulnerability and risk in human subjects research, particularly work at the intersections of computer and social science. Her research has also been published by Critical Studies in Media Communication, Cultural Anthropology, International Journal of Communication, and Social Media + Society.

Daron Green is responsible for Microsoft Research’s university research investments and collaborations. MSR maintains a global portfolio of research activities with leading universities and research institutes including joint research centers, Phd sponsorships, awards and major initiatives in computer science.  Previously, Dr. Green was General Manager of Microsoft’s Technology Policy Group; responsible for identifying business opportunities and innovations from potential disruptive technologies. Dr. Green’s research background was in molecular modeling – BSc in Chemical Physics (Sheffield) and PhD in molecular simulation of fluid mixtures (Sheffield). His post-doctoral research was in simulation of polymer and protein folding (UCD). After working at Southampton University’s Parallel Applications Center, Dr. Green moved into high performance computing and was responsible for some of Europe’s largest HPC Framework V programs for the European Commission and major HPC procurements in the UK. He also worked at IBM and British telecom in both areas helping develop and incubate new business opportunities.

Chris Hawblitzel is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research. His research focuses on using programming language techniques and formal verification to enforce the safety and security of systems software. He has worked on projects like the Singularity OS (Eurosys “Test of Time” award), the Verve verified OS (PLDI best paper award), and the Ironclad/IronFleet verified software stack. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell in 2000, and taught at Dartmouth College until 2004.

Roozbeh Jafari is an associate professor in Biomedical Engineering, Computer Science and Engineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University. He received his PhD in Computer Science from UCLA and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at UC-Berkeley. His research interest lies in the area of wearable computer design and signal processing. His research has been funded by the NSF, NIH, DoD (TATRC), AFRL, AFOSR, DARPA, SRC and industry (Texas Instruments, Tektronix, Samsung & Telecom Italia). He has published over 140 papers in refereed journals and conferences. He has served as the general chair and technical program committee chair for several flagship conferences in the area of Wearable Computers including. He is the recipient of the NSF CAREER award in 2012, IEEE Real-Time & Embedded Technology & Applications Symposium (RTAS) best paper award in 2011 and Andrew P. Sage best transactions paper award from IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society in 2014. He is an associate editor for the IEEE Sensors Journal, IEEE Internet of Things Journal and IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics.

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 of the IEEE Board of Directors.

Xiaoqian Jiang is an assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the University of California San Diego. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. He is an associate editor of BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making and serves as an editorial board member of Journal of American Medical Informatics Association. He works primarily in health data privacy and privacy-preserving federated biomedical data analysis. He received the distinguished paper award from American Medical Informatics Association Clinical Research Informatics (CRI) Summit in 2012 and 2013.

Kim Laine is a Post-Doc at Microsoft Research in the Cryptography Research group. He joined Microsoft in 2015 after graduating from University of California, Berkeley with a PhD in Mathematics. Kim’s current research interests revolve around the theme of “computing on encrypted data”, which involves studying and developing cryptographic techniques such as Homomorphic Encryption, and Secure Multi-Party Computation. In particular, his work shows that these techniques can be used to efficiently solve privacy-related problems in many contexts ranging from healthcare to finance. Kim is also the main developer of Microsoft’s newly released Homomorphic Encryption library SEAL.

Susan Landau works at the intersection of cybersecurity, national security, law, and policy. She is the author of “Surveillance or Security? The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies,” (MIT Press), and co-author, with Whitfield Diffie, of “Privacy on the Line: the Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption.” Landau has testified to Congress and frequently briefed US and European policymakers on encryption, surveillance, and cybersecurity issues. She is Professor of Cybersecurity Policy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and has previously been a Senior Staff Privacy Analyst at Google, a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, and a faculty member at the University of Massachusetts and Wesleyan University. A 2015 inductee in the Cybersecurity Hall of Fame and a 2012 Guggenheim fellow, Landau is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the Association for Computing Machinery.

John Langford is a machine learning research scientist, a field which he says “is shifting from an academic discipline to an industrial tool”.^[1] (opens in new tab) He is the author of the weblog hunch.net and the principal developer of Vowpal Wabbit. John works at Microsoft Research New York, of which he was one of the founding members, and was previously affiliated with Yahoo! Research,[1] (opens in new tab) Toyota Technological Institute, and IBM’s Watson Research Center. He studied Physics and Computer Science at the California Institute of Technology, earning a double bachelor’s degree in 1997, and received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University (opens in new tab) in 2002. He was the program co-chair for the 2012 International Conference on Machine Learning.[1] (opens in new tab)

John Launchbury is the Director of the Information Innovation Office (I2O) at DARPA. In this role he develops strategy and works with I2O program managers to develop new programs and transition program products. Before joining DARPA, Launchbury was chief scientist of Galois, Inc., which he founded in 1999 to address challenges in information assurance through the application of functional programming and formal methods. Under his leadership, the company experienced strong growth and was recognized for thought leadership in high-assurance technology development. Prior to founding Galois, Launchbury was a full professor at the OGI School of Science and Engineering at OHSU (Oregon). He earned awards for outstanding teaching and gained international recognition for his work on the analysis and semantics of programming languages, the Haskell programming language in particular. Professor Launchbury received first-class honors in mathematics from Oxford University, holds a Ph.D. in computing science from the University of Glasgow and won the British Computer Society’s distinguished dissertation prize. In 2010, Launchbury was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

Jennifer Listgarten is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, MA. Prior to joining Microsoft, Jennifer completed a Ph.D. in Computer Science in the machine learning group at the University of Toronto. Her work focuses on the development and application of novel statistical and machine learning methods for the analysis of high-throughput biological data. Her recent work has focused on problems in statistical genetics, epigenetics and CRISPR. Other areas she is or has worked in include cancer genetics, immunoinformatics, microarray expression and mass spectrometry-based proteomics.

Jessica Lundin is a senior data scientist in Microsoft Health, working on personalized health from wearables. Her work at the intersection of machine learning and health is motivated by enhancing the data-driven health experience, in addition to demonstrating successful health-related outcomes at the individual and community scales. Her background includes a Masters in Applied Mathematics and Ph.D. in Geophysics from the University of Washington and her previous research includes neutrino detection, climate science, and glacier dynamics. Dr. Lundin has worked for two acquired start-ups and drives intelligent software products using machine learning and distributed computing.

Rangan Majumder is the Group Program Manager for Relevance and Artificial Intelligence in ASG. His team uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to solve customer and business problems across various products including: finding what you are looking for on the web through Bing; making you more productive through Cortana; finding that Office document you’re looking for through enterprise and OneDrive search; and using big data to make predictions for the topics you care about through Bing Predicts. His team is also trying to make major progress towards general intelligence by building a system with the cognitive capabilities of the human mind. His team works regularly with Microsoft Research whether its transferring their breakthroughs into the product group or contributing directly to their technology like CNTK.

Vani Mandava is a Senior Program Manager with Microsoft Research at Redmond with over a decade of experience designing and shipping software projects and features that are in use by millions of users across the world. Her efforts in the Microsoft Research Outreach team is to enable academic researchers and institutions develop technologies that fuel data-intensive scientific research using advanced techniques in data management, data mining, especially leveraging Microsoft cloud platform through the Azure for Research program. She leads Microsoft Research Academic Outreach North America efforts at University of California, Berkeley and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Vani holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science with a focus on machine learning from State University of New York at Buffalo. She has enabled the adoption of data mining best practices in various v1 products across Microsoft client, server and services in MS-Office, SharePoint and Online Services (Bing Ads) organizations. She co-authored a book ‘Developing Solutions with Infopath’.

Rob Mauceri is Director of Core Data Science in the Windows and Devices Group, where he leads a team of over 130 data scientists and engineers responsible for creating a center of excellence in the application of data science to improve Microsoft devices, operating systems, and services for phones, tablets, PCs, Xbox console, wearables, and IOT. Core Data Science drives data analytics and engineering for top level WDG Power Metrics and Mission Control for OS flighting and experimentation. The data science practice includes analyses and applied machine learning for a broad set of use cases including OS and device health (performance, reliability, battery life, etc.), understanding usage, customer segmentation, real-time anomaly detection, business modeling for device price prediction, adoption of updates and engineering system improvements. Data scientists work directly with engineering teams building product experiences including the Windows shell, Edge browser, Cortana, in-box apps for photos, maps, as well as partner teams in the MS Games Studio, Surface, Xbox, the Business Group and more. Rob’s prior role was Director of Program Management for Windows Internet Explorer, leading the team responsible for the design and development of the popular web browser for Windows, including IE9, IE10, IE11, and touch-first IE in Windows 8. For the last 20 years Rob led teams of program managers and software engineers working on Microsoft’s web services, platform, and tools across Office and Windows including FrontPage, SharePoint Designer, and Office Live Workspace. Before coming to Microsoft, Rob was one of the first developers at Vermeer Technologies, creator of Vermeer FrontPage (acquired by Microsoft in 1996), and at The MathWorks where he helped create the first Windows version of MATLAB and SIMULINK, and invented MATLAB Notebook, an interactive, live computational document format with Microsoft Word and MATLAB. Rob holds a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts where he graduated with distinction. He currently resides in Seattle, Washington with his wife and three daughters.

Vishal Misra is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University, with a joint appointment in the Electrical Engineering Department and an IEEE Fellow. His research emphasis is on mathematical modeling of networking systems, bridging the gap between practice and analysis. He received his undergraduate degree from IIT Bombay and MS and PhD degrees from the school of engineering at University of Massachusetts at Amherst, which gave him a distinguished alumnus award in 2014. He is also the recipient of the NSF Career, DoE Career, IBM and Google Faculty awards. He co-founded two startups, cricinfo (acquired by ESPN) and Infinio.

Shoaib Mohammed (S’08, M’13) received his B.Tech. and M.Tech. degrees in Electrical Engineering from IIT Madras and the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University in 2007, 08, 10 and 13, respectively. Since 2013, he has been working as a Researcher at Microsoft Research, Redmond. His work is focused on building low-energy sensing and computing systems, which include components of machine learning, signal processing and computer vision. He has co-authored 2 book chapters, 14 patents, and 30 technical papers in this area. He has served as a fellow of the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning NJ in 2012. He is a recipient of the 2012 Harold W. Dodds Honorific fellowship and the Gordon Wu Prize for Excellence from Princeton University, and the 2011 Qualcomm Ph.D. fellowship and the Roberto Padovani Scholarship.

Andrés Monroy-Hernández is a researcher at Microsoft Research, and an affiliate professor at the University of Washington. His work focuses on the design and study of social computing systems for large scale collaboration.

His research has received best paper awards at CHI, CSCW, ICWSM, and HCOMP, recognized at Ars Electronica, and featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, NPR, and Wired. Andrés was named one of the TR35 Innovators by the MIT Technology Review (Spanish), and one of CNET’s influential Latinos in Tech.

He holds a Ph.D. from the MIT Media Lab, where he led the creation of the Scratch Online Community website.

Mayur Naik is an Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science at Georgia Tech since 2011. His research interests lie in areas related to programming systems, with a current emphasis on program analysis techniques for improving software quality and programmer productivity on modern computing platforms. He is a recipient of the Lockheed-Martin Dean’s award for excellence in teaching at Georgia Tech (2015), an NSF CAREER award (2013), and Distinguished Paper awards at FSE 2015, PLDI 2014, and ICSE 2009. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2008 and was a Research Scientist at Intel Labs, Berkeley from 2008 to 2011.

Suman Nath is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research. His current research focuses on data management, cloud, and mobile systems. His research has own several best paper awards at top conferences including ACM MobiSys 2012, IEEE ICDE 2008, and Usenix NSDI 2006. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from CMU (2005).

Juan Carlos Niebles received a B.S. degree in Electronics Engineering from Universidad del Norte (Colombia) in 2002, a M.Sc. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2007, and a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University in 2011. He is a Senior Research Scientist at the Stanford AI Lab and Associate Director of Research at the Stanford-Toyota Center for AI Research since 2015. He is also an Assistant Professor in Electrical and Electronic Engineering in Universidad del Norte (Colombia) since 2011. His research interests are in computer vision and machine learning, with a focus on visual recognition and understanding of human actions and activities, objects, scenes and events. His computer vision research has been sponsored by a Google Faculty Research award (2015), the Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship (2012), a Google Research award (2011) and the Colombian science agency – COLCIENCIAS.

Jitendra Padhye is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. He is interested in all aspects of computer networking and networked systems. His recent work has focused on data center networks and mobile computing. He is the recipient of the ACM SIGCOMM’s Test of Time award. He received his PhD in Computer Science from University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2000.

Joe Paradiso is the Alexander W. Dreyfoos (1954) Professor in Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Laboratory, where he has directed the Responsive Environments group for nearly 20 years. His current research explores how sensor networks augment and mediate human experience, interaction and perception. He received his PhD in Physics from MIT in 1981 and a BSEE from Tufts University in 1977. After two years developing precision drift chambers at the Lab for High Energy Physics at ETH in Zurich, he joined the Draper Laboratory in 1984, where his research encompassed spacecraft control systems, image processing algorithms, underwater sonar, and precision alignment sensors for large high-energy physics detectors. He joined the Media Lab in 1994, where his research interests have included embedded sensing systems and sensor networks, wearable and body sensor networks, energy harvesting and power management for embedded sensors, ubiquitous and pervasive computing, localization systems, passive sensor architectures, human-computer interfaces, & interactive media. He has over 250 publications and 17 issued patents in fields ranging from high-energy physics to computer music, is a member of the APS and ACM and a senior member of the IEEE and AIAA.

Bryan Parno is a Researcher at Microsoft Research. After receiving a Bachelor’s degree from Harvard College, he completed his PhD at Carnegie Mellon University, where his dissertation won the 2010 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award. In 2011, he was selected for Forbes’ 30-Under-30 Science List. He formalized and worked to optimize verifiable computation, receiving a Best Paper Award at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy his advances. He coauthored a book on Bootstrapping Trust in Modern Computers, and his work in that area has been incorporated into the latest security enhancements in Intel CPUs. His research into security for new application models was incorporated into Windows and received a Best Paper Awards at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy and the USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation. He has recently extended his interest in bootstrapping trust to the problem of building practical, formally verified secure systems.

Jignesh Patel is a Professor in Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His papers have been selected as the “best papers in the conference” at VLDB (2012), SIGMOD (2011) and ICDE (2010, 2011). He has a strong interest in seeing research ideas transition to actual products. His Ph.D. thesis work was acquired by NCR/Teradata in 1997. In 2007 he founded Locomatix, which became part of Twitter in 2013, and seeded the technology that became Heron. Heron now powers all real-time services at Twitter. His last company, Quickstep Tech. was acquired by Pivotal in 2015. He founded the NEST entrepreneurship contest at the U. Wisconsin in 2009. This contest has contributed to the creation of a number of startups that collectively have created over a 100 jobs in the city of Madison. Jignesh was named as one of the top technology entrepreneurs in Madison in 2013. He also enjoys teaching and is the recipient of the Wisconsin “COW” Teaching Award, and the U. Michigan College of Engineering Education Excellence Award. He is an ACM Fellow, and serves on the board of Lands’ End and a number of technology startups. You can also follow his ‘Big and Fast Data Blog’.

Dana Pe’er develops computational methods that integrate diverse high-throughput data to provide a holistic, systems-level view of molecular networks. Currently she has two key focuses: developing computational methods to interpret single cell data and understand cellular heterogeneity; modeling how genetic and epigenetic variation alters regulatory network function and subsequently phenotype in health and disease. This path has led her to explore how systems biology approaches can be used to personalize cancer care. Dana is recipient of the Burroughs Welcome Fund Career Award, NIH Directors New Innovator Award, NSF CAREER award, Stand Up to Cancer Innovative Research Grant and a Packard Fellow in Science and Engineering.

Hoifung Poon is a researcher at Microsoft Research. His research interests lie in advancing machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) to help automate discovery in genomics and precision medicine. His most recent work focuses on scaling semantic parsing to PubMed for extracting biological pathways, and on developing probabilistic methods to incorporate pathways with high-throughput omics data in cancer systems biology. Hoifung received his PhD from the University of Washington under the supervision of Pedro Domingos. He has received Best Paper Awards in premier NLP and machine learning venues such as the Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, the Conference of Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, and the Conference of Uncertainty in AI.

Winifred Poster is a sociologist with degrees from UC Berkeley (BA) and Stanford University (PhD). She currently teaches at Washington University, St. Louis, with recent visiting positions at the University of Hyderabad in India, Linköping and Örebro Universities in Sweden, the University of Paderborn in Germany, the University of Toronto, and the Intel Science & Technology Center for Social Computing at UC Irvine. Her interests are in digital globalization, feminist labor theory, and Indian outsourcing. Under several grants from the National Science Foundation, she has been following high-tech labor processes from the US to India, both in earlier waves of computer manufacturing and software, and later waves of back-office data processing and call center work. Her research explores the labors of surveillance, crowdsourcing, the gendering of cybersecurity, and the automation of service work. Her book with Marion Crain and Miriam Cherry Invisible Labor (University of California Press, 2016) uncovers hidden forms of work in the emerging consumptive, technology, and global economies. Borders in Service with Kiran Mirchandani (University of Toronto Press, forthcoming) underscores the connections between labor and nation in transnational service work.

After studying Computer Science and Mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University, Chris joined Microsoft in 2000 to work on the Intentional Programming (opens in new tab) project, an extensible compiler and development framework. He moved to the Natural Language Processing group a year later in 2001. Quirk’s research has primarily focused on building the statistical machine translation systems powering Microsoft Translator (opens in new tab). Particularly on syntax-informed translation systems powering many of the high-traffic translation systems. More recently he’s been investigating applications of NLP techniques to biological data, and building systems that bridge natural language and programming code.

Christopher (Chris) Re is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University and a Robert N. Noyce Family Faculty Scholar. His work’s goal is to enable users and developers to build applications that more deeply understand and exploit data. Chris received his PhD from the University of Washington in Seattle under the supervision of Dan Suciu. For his PhD work in probabilistic data management, Chris received the SIGMOD 2010 Jim Gray Dissertation Award. He then spent four wonderful years on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, before moving to Stanford in 2013. He helped discover the first join algorithm with worst-case optimal running time, which won the best paper at PODS 2012. He also helped develop a framework for feature engineering that won the best paper at SIGMOD 2014. In addition, work from his group has been incorporated into scientific efforts including the IceCube neutrino detector and PaleoDeepDive, and into Cloudera’s Impala and products from Oracle, Pivotal, and Microsoft’s Adam. He received an NSF CAREER Award in 2011, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship in 2013, a Moore Data Driven Investigator Award in 2014, the VLDB early Career Award in 2015, and the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2015.

Meredith Ringel Morris is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research in Redmond, where she conducts research at the intersection of HCI, social computing, and accessible computing. A more detailed biography, project descriptions, and publications are available on her website (opens in new tab).

Mark Russinovich is Chief Technology Officer for Microsoft Azure, Microsoft’s global enterprise-grade cloud platform. A widely recognized expert in distributed systems and operating systems, Mark earned a Ph.D. in computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. He later co-founded Winternals Software, joining Microsoft in 1996 when the company was acquired. Today he remains the primary author of the Sysinternals tools and website, which include dozens of popular Windows administration and diagnostic utilities. Mark is a popular speaker at industry conferences such as IPExpo, Microsoft Ignite and Build, and RSA Conference. He has also authored several nonfiction and fiction books, including the Microsoft Press Windows Internals book series, as well as fictional cyber security thrillers Zero Day, Trojan Horse and Rogue Code.

Eran Segal is a Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at the Weizmann Institute of Science, heading a multi-disciplinary team of computational biologists and experimental scientists in the area of Computational and Systems biology. His group has extensive experience in machine learning, computational biology, probabilistic models, and analysis of heterogeneous high throughput genomic and clinical data. His research focuses on understanding the effect of genetic variation among human individuals, and on the relationship between nutrition, health, and gut microbes in human individuals, with the aim of developing personalized nutrition and personalized medicine. You can learn more about his research on the lab website (opens in new tab).

Prof. Segal published over 100 publications, and received several awards and honors for his work, including the Overton prize, awarded annually by the International Society for Bioinformatics (ICSB) to one scientist for outstanding accomplishments in the field of computational biology, and the Michael Bruno award. He was recently elected as an EMBO member and as a member of the young Israeli academy of science.

Education: Prof. Segal was awarded a B.Sc. in Computer Science summa cum laude in 1998, from Tel-Aviv University, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Genetics in 2004, from Stanford University. Before joining the Weizmann Institute, Prof. Segal held an independent research position at Rockefeller University, New York.

Ben Shapiro (opens in new tab) is an Assistant Professor in the ATLAS Institute, the Department of Computer Science, and, by courtesy, in the School of Education at the University of Colorado Boulder. His research group, the Laboratory for Playful Computation (opens in new tab), investigates how to enable kids from diverse backgrounds to learn computer science through collaborative, creative expression and through the design of networked technologies to solve problems in their homes and communities. He received his PhD in Learning Sciences from Northwestern University and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Wisconsin—Madison.

Patrice Simard is a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft Research, Redmond. He is passionate about finding new ways to combine engineering and science in the field of machine learning. Simard’s research is currently focused on making machine learning widely accessible for replicating tasks easily done by humans. He received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Rochester in 1991. Simard then worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories before joining Microsoft Research in 1998. He was Chief Scientist and General Manager of Live Labs Research in 2006 and Chief Scientist of Microsoft’s AdCenter in 2009. In 2012, he returned to Microsoft Research to create the Computer-Human Interactive Learning group. In 2015, he became Deputy Managing Director at Microsoft Research.

Lenin Ravindranath Sivalingam is a Researcher at Microsoft Research. He obtained his Ph.D. from MIT in 2014. His research interests include mobile computing and distributed systems with an emphasis on improving performance and reliability of mobile and cloud applications. Lenin has published many papers at top-tier venues including OSDI, SOSP, NSDI, MobiSys, and SenSys and has filed over a dozen patents. His work on low-energy trajectory mapping won the best paper award at SenSys 2009. He received Cisco Graduate Fellowship in 2008 and Microsoft Research Graduate Fellowship in 2011.

Joshua R. Smith is currently an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the University of Washington, where he leads Sensor Systems Laboratory (opens in new tab) and research group. His research there focusses on inventing new sensor systems, devising new ways to power them, and developing algorithms for using them. This research has applications in the domains of ubiquitous computing, robotics, medical devices and HCI. His group works develops novel sensors for robotic manipulation, resonant (non-radiative) wireless power transfer, and (radiative) wirelessly powered sensing platforms. Formerly, he was a principal investigator at Intel Research Seattle, where he led projects in robotics, wireless power and wireless sensing. At Intel, he founded the Wireless Resonant Energy Link (WERL) project, which aims to transfer tens of watts of power, wirelessly. Smith completed his PhD at the MIT Media Lab in 1999, under Neil Gershenfeld.

David Soloveichik is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. Previously, David was a Fellow at the Center for Systems and Synthetic Biology at the University of California, San Francisco. He received his undergraduate and Master’s degree from Harvard University in Computer Science. He completed his PhD degree in Computation and Neural Systems at the California Institute of Technology, where his dissertation was awarded the Milton and Francis Clauser Doctoral Prize for the best doctoral thesis. David’s scientific area of interest is Molecular Programming: the engineering of complex molecular systems for synthetic biology, nanotechnology, and bioengineering. He is also studying underlying theoretical connections between distributed computing and molecular information processing. David was the recipient of the Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology (Theory) from the Foresight Institute in 2012, and the Tulip Award from the International Society for Nanoscale Science, Computation and Engineering in 2014.

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).

Dr. Ivan Tashev toke his Master’s degree in Electronic Engineering (1984) and PhD in Computer Science (1990) from the Technical University of Sofia, Bulgaria. He was Assistant Professor in the same university when in 1998 joined Microsoft. Currently Dr. Tashev is a Partner Architect and leads the Audio and Acoustics Research Group in Microsoft Research Labs in Redmond, USA. He has published four books, more than 70 papers, 30 US patents. Dr. Tashev created audio processing technologies incorporated in Windows, Microsoft Auto Platform, and Round Table device. He served as the audio architect for Kinect for Xbox and Microsoft HoloLens.

Zach Tatlock is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington where he is a member of the Programming Languages and Software Engineering (PLSE) group. His research improves software reliability by developing tools that help programmers ensure their code is safe and accurate. Along with his students, he focuses on software infrastructure that many other programs rely on (compilers, distributed systems, networks, web browsers); control programs in safety-critical applications (radiotherapy devices, robotics); and approximations used in engineering and manufacturing (floating point, 3D printing).

Jaime Teevan is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and affiliate faculty at the University of Washington. Working at the intersection of human computer interaction, information retrieval, and social media, she studies people’s information seeking activities. Much of her research focuses on the social and temporal context of information use, and she developed the first personalized search algorithm used by Bing. Her accomplishments have been honored with Technology Review (TR35) Young Innovator and Borg Early Career awards. She has published over one hundred technical articles, books, award papers, and patents, and has given keynotes at CIKM, UMAP, TEDx, and Web Science. Jaime received a Ph.D. from MIT and a B.S. in Computer Science from Yale University.

Kristin M. Tolle, Ph.D. is the Director of the Data Science Training Program Management team in the Advanced Analytics Ecosystem Development Team at Microsoft—part of the Data Science Platform team. She is also an Adjunct Faculty and Senior Data Scientist at the University of Washington’s eScience Research Institute. Since joining Microsoft in 2000, Dr. Tolle has acquired numerous patents and spent a significant portion of her career working in Microsoft Research. New to her present role, she is always on the lookout for data science talent partnered with excellent communications skills and curiosity. During her time in Research she successfully managed several critical research development projects such as the Microsoft Translator Hub and the Environmental Science Services Toolkit. Dr. Tolle is also co-editor and author, with Tony Hey and Stewart Tansley, of one of the earliest books on data science, The Fourth Paradigm: Data Intensive Scientific Discovery. Her current focus is on educating partners on how to use advanced cloud-based analytics to better meet their business objectives and educating next generation data scientists.

Evelyne Viegas is the Director of Artificial Intelligence Outreach at Microsoft Research, based in Redmond, U.S.A. In her current role, Evelyne is building initiatives which focus on information seen as an enabler of innovation, working in partnership with universities and government agencies worldwide. In particular she is creating programs around computational intelligence research to drive open innovation and agile experimentation via cloud-based services; and projects to advance the state-of-the-art in artificial intelligence and data-driven research including knowledge representation, machine learning and reasoning under uncertainty at scale.

Xi Wang is an assistant professor in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. His research interests are in building secure and reliable systems. His recent work focuses on improving systems software through bug finding and formal verification techniques. Xi received his PhD from MIT.

Dave Wecker came to Microsoft in 1995 and helped create the “Blender” (digital video post-production facility). He designed and worked on a Broadband MSN offering when he became architect for the Handheld PC v1 & v2 as well as AutoPC v1 and Pocket PC v1. He moved to Intelligent Interface Technology and resurrected SHRDLU for Natural Language research as well as building a state of the art Neural Network based Speech Recognition system. For the Mobile Devices Division, he implemented secure DRM on e-books and Pocket PCs. He created and was director of ePeriodicals before taking on the role of Architect for Emerging Technologies. This lead to starting the Machine Learning Incubation Team and then architect for Parallel Computing Technology Strategy working on Big Data and now Quantum Computing. He has over 20 patents for Microsoft and 9 Ship-It awards. He started coding professionally in 1973, worked in the AI labs at CMU while obtaining a BSEE and MSIA and was at DEC for 13 years (ask him about DIDDLY sometime ;).

Norman A. Whitaker is a Microsoft distinguished scientist and managing director of Microsoft Research Special Projects. As head of that group, he provides a structure for projects with focused objectives aimed at altering and expanding what people imagine is possible with technology.

Previously, Whitaker served as deputy director of the Information Innovation Office at DARPA, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Whitaker also served as deputy director of the Transformational Convergence Technology Office, as special assistant to the DARPA director, and as program manager for the DARPA Urban Challenge autonomous-vehicle program. He also was centrally involved in planning the 2005 Grand Challenge. Before his work at DARPA, Whitaker was CEO of the Escher Research Institute, which he co-founded in 2003, chief technology officer of Puritan Research, and a program manager at DARPA. From 1986 to 1997, he was on the research staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories.

Whitaker received his Bachelor of Science (1979), his Master of Science (1983), and his Ph.D. (1986) in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a member of the IEEE.

Prof Ian White is currently Master of Jesus College, van Eck Professor of Engineering, Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Head of Photonics Research at the Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge. Ian is originally from Northern Ireland, coming up to Jesus College in 1977 to read Engineering. He gained his BA and PhD degrees from the University of Cambridge in 1980 and 1984. He was then appointed a Research Fellow and Assistant Lecturer at the University of Cambridge before becoming Professor of Physics at the University of Bath in 1990. He moved in 1996 to the University of Bristol, before returning to the University of Cambridge in October 2001. At Cambridge he has also previously held the roles of Head of the School of Technology and Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Institutional Affairs. Ian has contributed to a variety of research activities in photonics, ranging from short pulse laser diodes, optoelectronic components for signal processing and routing, high speed components for data communications, to techniques for transmitting digital and radio frequency signals over long distances of multimode optical fibre. He has published in excess of 900 journal and conference papers, and is co-founder of Zinwave Ltd and Pervasid Ltd. Ian is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Institution of Electrical Engineers and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He is heavily involved in policy development and administration of research and sits on a number of International Conference Committees. He is an Editor-in-Chief of Electronics Letters and of Nature Microsystems and Nanoengineering.

Keith Winstein is an assistant professor of computer science and, by courtesy, of law at Stanford University. His work applies statistical and predictive approaches to teach computers to design better network protocols and applications. Winstein and colleagues created the Mosh (mobile shell) tool for remote access over challenged networks, the Sprout algorithm for transporting video over cellular networks, and the Remy system, in which computers design network protocols from first principles. He has received the Applied Networking Research Prize (2013), a Sprowls Award for the best doctoral dissertation in computer science at MIT (2014), and the ACM SIGCOMM Doctoral Dissertation Award (2015). From 2007 to 2010, Winstein worked as a staff reporter at The Wall Street Journal.

Lin Xiao is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research Redmond, WA. His current research interests include theory and algorithms for large-scale optimization, randomized and online algorithms for machine learning, and parallel and distributed computing. He received Ph.D. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Stanford University in 2004. Before joining Microsoft in 2006, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for the Mathematics of Information at California Institute of Technology.

Dr. Eric Xing is a professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, as well as the Director of the newly established Center for Machine Learning and Health. His principal research interests lie in the development of machine learning and statistical methodology, and large-scale computational system and architecture, for solving problems involving automated learning, reasoning, and decision-making in high-dimensional, multimodal, and dynamic possible worlds in complex systems. Professor Xing received a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from Rutgers University, and another Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley. His current work involves, 1) foundations of statistical learning, including theory and algorithms for estimating time/space varying-coefficient models, sparse structured input/output models, and nonparametric Bayesian models; 2) framework for parallel machine learning on big data with big model in distributed systems or in the cloud; 3) computational and statistical analysis of gene regulation, genetic variation, and disease associations; and 4) application of statistical learning in social networks, data mining, and vision.

Junfeng Yang is a Computer Science professor at Columbia University; Co-director of Columbia’s Software Systems Lab; and Co-founder and CEO of NimbleDroid, a Columbia spin-off in NYC that invents cutting-edge tools to redefine how developers craft awesome apps. Previously he was a consultant and researcher at Microsoft and earned his PhD in Computer Science at Stanford. Junfeng’s primary research interests center on making high-performance, reliable, and secure systems. The systems and tools he created have been applied to analyze, test, and run real-world software such as Linux, benefiting hundreds of millions of users. His research has been covered by Communications of ACM, The Register, and numerous sites. His awards include Google Faculty Research Award, Sloan Research Fellowship, Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Award, National Science Foundation Career Award, and OSDI Best Paper Award.

Matei Zaharia is an assistant professor of computer science at MIT as well as CTO of Databricks, the company commercializing Apache Spark. He is broadly interested in computer systems, data centers and data management. He started the Spark project while he was a PhD student at UC Berkeley, and he has also contributed to other open source cluster computing projects such as Apache Mesos and Apache Hadoop. Matei received the 2014 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for his graduate work.

Nickolai Zeldovich is an Associate Professor at MIT’s department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). His research interests are in building practical secure systems, from operating systems and hardware to programming languages and security analysis tools. He received his PhD from Stanford University in 2008, where he developed HiStar, an operating system designed to minimize the amount of trusted code by controlling information flow. Two of his current research projects are building formally verified systems software and developing an encrypted messaging system that hides metadata.

Lidong Zhou is a Principal Researcher and Research Manager of the Systems Research Group at Microsoft Research Redmond. He started his career at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley in 2002 and moved to Microsoft Research Asia in 2008 to lead systems research at Microsoft Research Asia for another 6 years. His research spans both the theory and practice of distributed systems. He served on the program committees of top systems conferences such as SOSP, OSDI, PODC, DISC, NSDI, and Eurosys, and is an associated editor of ACM Transactions on Storage. He is the general co-Chair of SOSP 2017 in China after years of effort to bring SOSP to the Asia-Pacific region. He has been playing a key technical role in the design and development of several key Microsoft distributed system infrastructure and platforms. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University.