Latin American Faculty Summit 2011

Born in Bogotá on August 10, 1951, Juan Manuel Santos was a cadet at the Navy Academy in Cartagena; he studied Economics and Business Administration and carried out graduate studies at the London School of Economics, Harvard University, and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

Santos was chief of the Colombian delegation before the International Coffee Organization (ICO) in London; he was the most recent Designate to the Presidency and Colombia’s first Foreign Trade Minister. He has also been Finance Minister and National Defense Minister. During this last position, he was in charge of leading the implementation of the government’s Democratic Security Policy. He created the Good Government Foundation (Fundación Buen Gobierno) and founded the political party, Partido de la U (currently Colombia’s largest political party) in 2005.

As a journalist, he was a columnist and deputy director of the newspaper, El Tiempo; he was awarded the King of Spain Prize; and was president of the Freedom of Expression Commission for the Inter American Press Association (IAPA). He has published several books, among which the most significant are The Third Way, co-written with the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and Check on Terror (Jaque al Terror), where he describes the most important actions against the Farc terrorist group during his tenure as head of the Ministry of Defense.

On June 20, 2010, (after obtaining the largest vote during the first round of the presidential elections which took place on May 30, 2010) at the second round of the presidential elections, he was elected President of the Republic of Colombia for the four-year period between August 7, 2010, and August 7, 2014. He obtained more than 9 million votes, the highest amount obtained by any candidate in the history of Colombian democracy. During his campaign, he promised to lead a government of national unity that would carry out the transition from Democratic Security to Democratic Prosperity.

President Santos is married to María Clemencia Rodríguez, with whom he has three children: Martín (21), María Antonia (19), and Esteban (16).

Jorge Silva has a significant trajectory in the technology industry. His career begun more than 20 years ago in different companies related to technology. During this time, he has provided his services in companies such as Andersen Consulting where he performed as consultant, he was the systems information manager in Pizano S. A., and he occupied several positions of responsibility in Compaq Computer, Novell, and HP.

He arrived at Microsoft eight years ago. In this company, he developed one of the best practices for small and medium businesses. Subsequently, he held important leading positions and and was responsible for the marketing and business area of Colombia. Years later, he was in charge of the business at a regional level as Andean region director with responsibilities in Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, and Ecuador. Jorge has also had other responsibilities at a regional level as executive of other companies in the sector. He lived in Buenos Aires, Argentina, for three years, working for Compaq.

Jorge Silva was born in Bogotá, is an industrial engineer graduated from Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, specialized in Information Systems from the Arthur Andersen Center for Professional Education, with an MBA from California State University and Negotiation studies in UCA – Universidad Católica Argentina. He has complemented his studies with certified courses in marketing and strategy in universities such as MIT, Wharton, and Babson College.

Certified as a personal coach, Jorge Silva is currently Microsoft Colombia’s general manager. Technology is one of Jorge’s passions. And since he entered Microsoft, he has been the main promoter of the Children Online Safety strategy with excellent results and impact in the school community. In addition, he has been the director of the Technology Committee of Colegio Los Nogales for more than 10 years, advisor of Colegio Jorge Washington in Cartagena, and has specialized as speaker on this matter in Colombia and other countries of the Andean region.

Jorge is married and father of two girls.

As senior vice president, Richard (Rick) F. Rashid (opens in new tab) oversees worldwide operations for Microsoft Research, an organization encompassing more than 850 researchers across six labs worldwide. Under Rashid’s leadership, Microsoft Research conducts both basic and applied research across disciplines that include algorithms and theory; human-computer interaction; machine learning; multimedia and graphics; search; security; social computing; and systems, architecture, mobility and networking. His team collaborates with the world’s foremost researchers in academia, industry, and government on initiatives to advance the state-of-the-art of computing and to help ensure the future of Microsoft’s products.

After joining Microsoft in 1991, Rashid served as director and vice president of the Microsoft Research division and was promoted to his current role in 2000. In his earlier roles, Rashid led research efforts on operating systems, networking, and multiprocessors, and authored patents in such areas as data compression, networking, and operating systems. He managed projects that catalyzed the development of Microsoft’s interactive TV system and also directed Microsoft’s first e-commerce group. Rashid was the driving force behind the creation of the team that later developed into Microsoft’s Digital Media Division.

Before joining Microsoft, Rashid was professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). As a faculty member, he directed the design and implementation of several influential network operating systems and published extensively about computer vision, operating systems, network protocols, and communications security. During his tenure, Rashid developed the Mach multiprocessor operating system, which has been influential in the design of modern operating systems and remains at the core of several commercial systems.

Rashid’s research interests have focused on artificial intelligence, operating systems, networking, and multiprocessors. He has participated in the design and implementation of the University of Rochester’s Rochester Intelligent Gateway operating system, the Rochester Virtual Terminal Management System, the CMU Distributed Sensor Network Testbed, and CMU’s SPICE distributed personal computing environment. He also co-developed of one of the earliest networked computer games, “Alto Trek,” during the mid-1970s.

Rashid was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering in 2003 and presented with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Emanuel R. Piore Award and the SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award in 2008. He was also inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2008. In addition, Rashid is a member of the National Science Foundation Computer Directorate Advisory Committee and a past member of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency UNIX Steering Committee and the Computer Science Network Executive Committee. He is also a former chairman of the Association for Computing Machinery Software System Awards Committee.

Rashid received master of science (1977) and doctoral (1980) degrees in computer science from the University of Rochester. He graduated with honors in mathematics and comparative literature from Stanford University in 1974.

As corporate vice president of the Microsoft Research Connections division of Microsoft Research, Tony Hey is responsible for research collaborations worldwide and technical computing strategy across Microsoft Corporation. He leads the company’s efforts to build long-term public-private partnerships with global scientific and engineering communities, spanning broad reach and in-depth engagements with academic and research institutions, related government agencies, and industry partners. His responsibilities also include working with internal Microsoft groups to build future technologies and products that will transform computing for scientific and engineering research. Hey also oversees Microsoft Research’s efforts to enhance the quality of higher education around the world.

Before joining Microsoft, Hey served as director of the United Kingdom’s e-Science Initiative, managing the government’s efforts to provide scientists and researchers with access to key computing technologies. Before leading this initiative, Hey worked as head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science and dean of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Southampton, where he helped build the department into one of the most respected computer science research institutions in England.

His research interests focus on parallel programming for parallel systems built from mainstream commodity components. With Jack Dongarra, Rolf Hempel, and David Walker, he wrote the first draft of a specification for a new message-passing standard called MPI. This initiated the process that led to the successful MPI standard of today.

Hey is a fellow of the U.K.’s Royal Academy of Engineering. He also has served on several national committees in the United Kingdom, including committees of the U.K. Department of Trade and Industry and the Office of Science and Technology. He was a member of the British Computer Society, the Institute of Engineering and Technology, and the Institute of Physics.

Hey also has a passionate interest in communicating the excitement of science to young people. He has written popular books on quantum mechanics and on relativity.

Hey is a graduate of Oxford University, with an undergraduate degree in physics and a doctorate in theoretical physics.

Orlando Ayala is a corporate vice president, chairman of emerging markets, and chief advisor to Microsoft’s chief operating officer. As chairman of emerging markets, Ayala is dedicated to helping federal, provincial, and local governments develop the digital infrastructure, educational programs, and human resource potential to turn their particular capabilities into a competitive advantage on an international scale.

By partnering with leading technology partners, multilateral organizations, and non-governmental organizations, Ayala’s highly-focused group aims to use technology as a transforming force in initiatives designed to advance the national agendas around the world, whether in education, health, citizen services, citizen safety, or academic and industry research. His goal is to improve access to technology and education that will offer new ways for individuals, communities, and entire countries to realize their potential in the coming years.

In his 20-year history with Microsoft, Ayala has served in a number of roles, joining the company as the senior director of the Latin America region. Ayala opened 33 worldwide subsidiaries as senior vice president of the Intercontinental region, before taking on the role of group vice president of the worldwide Sales Marketing and Services Group. Ayala went on to run the Small and Midmarket Solutions and Partner group, during which time he also took on the role of chief operating officer of the then-nascent Microsoft Dynamics business.

Medical doctor; surgeon; pioneer in transplants in Colombia; three times rector of Universidad de Antioquia; author of the Law 1286, which elevated Colciencias to the cabinet-level agency—Department of Science, Technology, and Innovation; and novelist, Dr. Jaime Restrepo Cuartas is the director general of Colciencias. Dr. Restrepo is also a proponent of new regulatory policy that aims to bring Colombia to the highest level within the global knowledge society. A physician, scholar, researcher, literate and union leader, Dr. Restrepo is known for his leadership in every position he has held, as exemplified by his accomplishments at Universidad de Antioquia, where he went from alumnus to rector, bringing his Alma Mater to the top rankings in higher education and research in Colombia.

A specialist in general surgery since 1971, he was among the group of scientists who founded the Transplant Team at Hospital Universitario San Vicente de Paul and at Universidad de Antioquia, participating in the first transplants of kidney, liver, pancreas, and heart performed in Colombia and Latin America.

During his political career, he was a member of the City Council of Puerto Berrio (Antioquia), between 1981 and 1982; and was later elected to Colombia’s House of Representatives, between 2006 and 2010, where he was recognized as one of the most disciplined and active members of Congress. He championed the enactment of three laws: Law 1122 of January 2007, which reformed Law 100 of 1993 and created the Health Regulatory Commission; Law 1295 of April 2009, which promotes integral care from early-childhood; and Law 1286 of January 2009, Colombia’s Law of Science, Technology, and Innovation.

John Hopcroft (opens in new tab) is the IBM Professor of Engineering and Applied Mathematics at Cornell University. He started his career on the faculty at Princeton in 1964 and moved to Cornell in 1967. In 1987, he became the chair of the Department of Computer Science. In 1993, he became associate dean for College Affairs, and in 1994 he became dean of the College of Engineering, in which job he served until 2001 when he returned to the Department of Computer Science.

Hopcroft earned his B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Seattle University in 1961 and his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1964. He has honorary degrees from Seattle University, the National College of Ireland, the University of Sydney, St. Petersburg State University, and a Doctor of Engineering from HKUST in 2010. He is an honorary professor of the Beijing Institute of Technology, Yunnan University, and an Einstein Professor of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. His current research interests are in the area of information capture and access.

Hopcroft has served on numerous advisory boards, including the Air Force Science Advisory Board, the NASA Space Sciences Board, and the National Research Council’s Board on Computer Science and Telecommunications. In 1986, he was awarded the Turing Award by the Association for Computing Machinery, and in 1992, President H. W. Bush appointed him to the National Science Board, which oversees the National Science Foundation. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Hopcroft serves on the Packard Foundation’s Science Advisory Board, the Microsoft Technical Advisory Board for Research Asia, and the advisory boards of IIIT Delhi and the College of Engineering at Seattle University. He has received numerous awards: the IEEE Harry Goode Memorial Award in 2005, the CRA Distinguished Service Award in 2007, the ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award in 2009, and the IEEE von Neumann Medal in 2010.

Philip E. Bourne (opens in new tab) PhD is a professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of California San Diego, associate director of the RCSB Protein Data Bank and an adjunct professor at the Burnham Institute. He is a past president of the International Society for Computational Biology. He is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA). He is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the open-access journal, PLoS Computational Biology, and a long-standing member of the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and Genome Canada panels responsible for reviewing proposals relating to computational biology.

Awards include: the Jim Gray eScience Award (opens in new tab) (2010), the Benjamin Franklin Award (2009), the Flinders University Convocation Medal for Outstanding Achievement (2004), and the Sun Microsystems Convergence Award (2002).

Bourne’s professional interests focus on relevant biological and educational outcomes derived from computation and scholarly communication. This implies algorithms, text mining, machine learning, metalanguages, biological databases, visualization applied to problems in drug discovery, evolution, cell signaling, apoptosis, systems biology, and scientific dissemination. He has published more than 200 papers and five books, one of which sold more than 150,000 copies. He has co-founded four companies: ViSoft Inc., Protein Vision Inc.—a company distributing independent films for free—and most recently, SciVee.

Bourne is committed to furthering the free dissemination of science through new models of publishing and better integration and subsequent dissemination of data and results which as far as possible should be freely available to all.

Personal interests are squash, hiking, skiing, flying, and motor bikes.

Wolfram Schulte is a principal researcher and the founding manager of Microsoft’s Research in Software Engineering (opens in new tab) (RiSE) team in Redmond, Washington. His research interest is in providing better software development languages, and verification and validation tools. At Microsoft, he co-designed Microsoft’s LINQ and Task Parallel Library; he co-built the model-based testing tool Spec Explorer and the unit testing tool Pex; he co-developed the program verifiers Spec# and VCC. His latest interest is a new constraint logic programming language called Formula. He has a PhD from TU Berlin, a state doctorate from the University of Ulm, and he has worked as a software developer at sd&m.

Alex Acero is research area manager in Microsoft Research, directing an organization with more than 50 engineers working on audio, multimedia, communication, speech, and natural language. He is also an affiliate professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Washington.

He received an M.S. degree from the Polytechnic University of Madrid in 1985, an M.S. degree from Rice University in 1987, and a Ph.D. degree from Carnegie Mellon University in 1990, all in Electrical Engineering. Dr. Acero worked in Apple Computer’s Advanced Technology Group from 1990 to 1991. In 1992, he joined Telefonica I+D, Madrid, Spain, as manager of the speech technology group. Since 1994, he has been with Microsoft Research.

Dr. Acero is a Fellow of IEEE and ISCA. Dr. Acero is author of the books Acoustical and Environmental Robustness in Automatic Speech Recognition (Kluwer, 1993) and Spoken Language Processing (Prentice Hall, 2001), has written invited chapters in four edited books and more than 200 technical papers. He holds 97 U.S. patents. He has served the IEEE Signal Processing Society as vice president technical directions (2007–2009), director industrial relations (2009–2011), 2006 distinguished lecturer, member of the Board of Governors (2004–2005 and 2010–2012), associate editor for IEEE Signal Processing Letters (2003–2005) and IEEE Transactions of Audio, Speech and Language Processing (2005–2007), and member of the editorial board of IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing (2006–2008) and IEEE Signal Processing Magazine (2008–2010). He also served as member (1996–2000) and chair (2000-2002) of the Speech Technical Committee of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. He was publications chair of ICASSP98, sponsorship chair of the 1999 IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding, and general co-chair of the 2001 IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding. Dr. Acero served as member of the editorial board of Computer Speech and Language and member of Carnegie Mellon University Dean’s Leadership Council for College of Engineering.

Derick Campbell is a 20-year software engineering veteran with a rich history of product development, product incubation, and enterprise IT management. Derick currently leads the Research Accelerators Engineering team in Microsoft Research Connections.

P. Anandan is the co-founder and managing director of Microsoft Research India. Before moving to Bangalore to start Microsoft Research India, Anandan was a senior researcher at Microsoft Research headquarters in Redmond, Washington, where he built one of the world’s strongest research teams in computer vision and video processing.

Before joining Microsoft, Anandan was an assistant professor of computer science 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, his work has resulted in numerous patents, academic papers, and recognition in the form of several awards in computer vision. 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, and a Master of Science in Computer Science from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. He earned his undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras. He is a Distinguished Alumnus of both IIT Madras and University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and has been inducted into the Nebraska Hall of Computing.

Jeff Dozier is a professor in the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he has taught since 1974 after earning his PhD from the University of Michigan. He founded the Bren School and served as its first dean for six years.

His research interests are in the fields of snow hydrology, Earth system science, remote sensing, and information systems. He has led interdisciplinary studies in two areas: one addresses hydrologic science, environmental engineering, and social science in the water environment; the other is in the integration of environmental science and remote sensing with computer science and technology.

From 1990 to 1992, he was the senior project scientist for NASA’s Earth Observing System when the configuration for the system was established. He is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, an Honorary Professor of the Academia Sinica, and a recipient of the NASA/Department of Interior William T. Pecora Award. Among Jeff’s recent honors are the 2009 Jim Gray Award (opens in new tab) from Microsoft for his achievements in data-intensive science and his selection as the 2010 Nye Lecturer (opens in new tab) for the American Geophysical Union.

A long-time backcountry skier, mountaineer, and rock climber, he helped lead six expeditions to the Hindu Kush range in Afghanistan and has a dozen first ascents there. The story behind the naming of Dozier Dome in the Sierra Nevada can be found in the Tuolumne Meadows Rock Climbing Forum.

Hrvoje Benko (opens in new tab) is a researcher at Microsoft Research. In his research, he explores novel interactive computing technologies and their impact on human-computer interaction. In particular, he is interested in surface computing, multi-touch and freehand gestural input, 2-D and 3-D interactions, and augmented reality.

Dr. Benko is the author of more than 25 scientific conference papers and journal articles. His work has been featured in the mainstream media (including New York Times, Seattle Times, and Popular Science) and on popular technology blogs (such as Gizmodo, Engadget, CNET, and Ars Technica). He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Columbia University in 2007 working with Professor Steven Feiner.

Evelyne Viegas (opens in new tab) is the director of Semantic Computing at Microsoft Research, based in Redmond, Washington, United States. Semantic Computing is about interacting with data in rich, safe, and semantically meaningful ways to create the path from data to information, knowledge, and intelligence.

In her current role, Evelyne is building initiatives that 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 knowledge representation and reasoning under uncertainty at web scale. Prior to her present role, Evelyne worked as a technical lead at Microsoft delivering Natural Language Processing components to projects for MSN, Office, and Windows.

Before Microsoft, and after completing her Ph.D. in France, she worked as a principal investigator at the Computing Research Laboratory in New Mexico on an ontology-based Machine Translation project. Evelyne serves on international editorial, program, and award committees.

Catharine van Ingen is a partner architect in the Microsoft Research eScience group. Her research centers on applying cutting-edge commercial computing technologies such as geospatial databases and cloud computing to modern research challenges in environmental science. Catharine mined her first TB of data in the early 1980s. She holds a PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the California Institute of Technology.

Kristin M. Tolle, Ph.D. is the Director for Microsoft Research Connections Natural User Interface (NUI) team and a Clinical Associate Professor at the University of Washington. Since joining Microsoft, Dr. Tolle has acquired several patents and worked for several product teams including the Natural Language Group, Visual Studio, and Excel. Prior to joining Microsoft, Tolle was a Research Associate at the University of Arizona Artificial Intelligence Lab managing the group on medical information retrieval and natural language processing. Her research interests include: contextual computing, natural language processing and machine translation, mobile computing, user intent modeling and information extraction.

Dr. Cristian Bonacic, DVM, M.Sc., DPhil., associate professor, wildlife scientist, and lecturer in wildlife conservation at the Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry Science of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Director of Fauna Australis. Head of the Environmental Science Diploma and of the MSc in Conservation and Wildlife Management. Member of the Wildlife Trust Alliance and associate researcher of the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU, Oxford). Adjunct researcher of CERC, Columbia University. In 2007, he received a Whitley commendation for his work in innovation for conservation science from HRH Princess Royal at the Royal Geographical Society of London.

Eduardo Nakamura is a Research Fellow of the CNPq (The Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development). He is has a B.E. degree in Electrical Engineering (Universidade Federal do Amazonas, 1998, Brazil), M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Computer Science (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, 2007, Brazil).

He is a researcher of the FUCAPI research institute (Brazil) and a professor of the Universidade Federal do Amazonas. Since then, he has advised three M.Sc. students and co-advised one Ph.D. student. He co-authored more than 60 publications in international journals, magazines, conferences, and book chapters. He has served as a technical committee member in major international conferences, such as IEEE ICC, IEEE Globecom, IEEE ISCC, ACM SAC, ICCCN, EWSN, ISSNIP; and as an associate editor for the IEEE Sensors and the International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks.

In 2008, he received the Great CAPES Ph.D. Thesis Award, granted by the Brazilian Ministry of education, for the best thesis in the great field of Exact Sciences and Engineering. In 2009, he received the IEEE Latin America Young Professional Award, granted by the IEEE Communications Society. In 2010, he was a finalist of the prestigious Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship. In 2011, he was elected as an affiliate member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, a special membership granted to outstanding young researchers working in Brazil.

Tiago Duque Estrada received the BSc in Biological Sciences and MSc in Ecology from State University of Campinas (UNICAMP – Brazil). He has always been very concerned with the amount of data produced in research that has the only output in scientific papers or thesis.

After a diploma in Geographic Information Systems, he has been applying the influence of space on ecological processes. His Chevening Scholarship in United Nations Environment Program – World Conservation Monitoring Centre was crucial for the development of his concerns on how to use data for the decision-making process in environmental governance. For years he has been developing projects on conservation with NGOs in the areas of data collection, analysis, and management and in the past year is working with the BIOTA/FAPESP program supporting the re-development of the SinBIOTA among other activities as assistant editor of the Biota Neotropica Journal.

Dr. Steven Johnston is a senior research fellow at the University of Southampton Faculty of Engineering and the Environment. He has worked on large-scale distributed systems such as BioSimGrid and has experience with high-performance computing, SOA, and data repositories. He was the lead architect in CFMS, demonstrating—in partnership with Microsoft, Airbus, Rolls-Royce, BAE Systems and MBDA—how novel software-plus-services approaches can significantly improve productivity for scientists and engineers. He has extensive experience with cloud-computing architectures and is currently working to demonstrate cloud-compute capabilities for Space Situational Awareness.

Prof. Simon Cox is Director of the Microsoft Institute of High Performance Computing at the University of Southampton. His research focuses on how tools, technologies, and platforms can make engineering and scientific processes faster, cheaper, and better.

Nelson Baloian received the title of “Engineer in Computer Sciences” from the Universidad de Chile, Chile, in 1988 and the Doktor rer. nat. degree from the University of Duisburg, Germany, in 1997. Since then, he has been researching in the areas of computer supported collaborative learning/work, distributed systems, and recently on mobile computing. Currently, he is faculty member of the Department of Computer Sciences at the Universidad de Chile. He is also associate visiting professor from the Waseda University, Japan, and a regular guest professor at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany.

Alvaro Soto received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 2002; and an M.Sc. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Louisiana State University in 1997. He joined the Computer Science Department at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, where he became associate professor in 2007. His main research interests are in statistical machine learning, cognitive robotics, and computer vision.

Lee Dirks is the Director of Education and Scholarly Communication in the Microsoft Research Connections team, where he manages a variety of research programs related to open access to research data, interoperability of archives and repositories, preservation of digital information, and the application of new technologies to facilitate teaching and learning in higher education.

A veteran of more than 20 years in a variety of information management fields, Lee holds an M.S.L.S. degree from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill as well as a post-master’s degree in Preservation Administration from Columbia University.

In addition to past positions at Columbia and with OCLC, Lee has held a variety of roles at Microsoft since joining the company in 1996—namely as the corporate archivist, corporate librarian, and as a senior manager in the corporate market research organization.

In addition to participation on several (U.S.) National Science Foundation (opens in new tab) task forces, Lee also teaches as adjunct faculty at the iSchool at the University of Washington (opens in new tab), and serves on the advisory boards for the University of Washington Libraries (opens in new tab), the UW iSchool’s Master of Science in Information Science program (opens in new tab) and the Metadata Research Center (opens in new tab)at the School of Information and Library Science (opens in new tab) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as well as on the advisory board for the Purdue University Press (opens in new tab).

Dr. Camilo A. Acosta-Márquez is the director of the Center for Robotics and Informatics (CERI) at the Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano in Bogotá, Colombia. The Center focuses on technological developments that support applications based on robotics, advanced automation, and interactive design.

Sean Mortazavi is an architect in Microsoft in the Technical Computing group, concentrating on integrated development environments for programmers and domain experts. Prior to that, he worked on debugger, profiler, and correctness tools for High Performance Computing (HPC) developers. Before HPC, he was in the Visual Studio and Microsoft Research groups where he worked on Microsoft’s next-generation of compilers, JITs, and static analysis tools. Before Microsoft, he was at Sun Microsystems where he ran the code generation/optimization group for SPARC. He is a big proponent of open-source tools and technologies.

Felipe Ayora is a program manager at Microsoft, in the High Performance Computing group. His group is responsible for Windows HPC Server (opens in new tab), Microsoft’s third-generation high performance computing solution. Felipe focuses on the system management, infrastructure, and diagnostics aspects of Windows HPC Server. Prior to joining Microsoft, Felipe worked as an IT consultant in Latin America and Europe, started a VoIP company in Ecuador, and worked as a software engineer in Mexico. He graduated from Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM), in Monterrey, as an electronic systems engineer.

Nicolas Villar is a researcher in the Computer Mediated Living Group, based at the Microsoft Research lab in Cambridge, U.K. He is particularly interested in the use of embedded systems—programmable microcontrollers, wireless communication devices, sensors, and actuators—as building blocks in the design of physical interactive objects and user interface devices that are engaging, useful, and usable. His current work focuses on understanding and developing technologies that enable interactive devices to be rapidly prototyped, manufactured, and deployed into use.

Chris Wendt graduated as Diplom-Informatiker from the University of Hamburg, Germany, and subsequently spent a decade on software internationalization for a multitude of Microsoft products, including Windows, Internet Explorer, MSN, and Windows Live, bringing these products to market with equal functionality worldwide. Since 2005, he is leading the program management and planning for Microsoft’s machine translation development, responsible for Bing Translator and Microsoft Translator services. He is based at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington.

Dr. Mercer has a background in zoology and has worked in various aspects of bioinformatics over the years. Most recently, he was director of Bioinformatics and Strategic IT at the National Research Council of Canada’s Institute for Marine Biosciences, with responsibility for the Canadian Bioinformatics Resource, a national network dedicated to bioinformatics research support. He then worked as director of Software Engineering at Gene Codes Corporation before moving to Microsoft Research in 2005.

Michael Zyskowski is a senior program manager in the Microsoft Research Connections group, productizing state-of-the-art research technologies for broad consumption by both academic and commercial R&D. He currently is responsible for building an open-source bioinformatics software library for genomics research, and a cloud-plus-mobile software development kit (SDK) for students and citizen scientists.

Prior projects include real-time simulation of high performance vehicles in both consumer and enterprise markets, 3-D visualization, and analytics and architecture/design of software and hardware systems. Prior to Microsoft, he spent time at Boeing performing work in stability and control, aerodynamics, and accident investigation. He holds BS and MS degrees in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Kansas.

When not making the world a better place, Mike enjoys building and flying airplanes, and spending time with his family. His specialties are technical design, architecture, program management, developer evangelism, and creativity.

Fabrizio Gagliardi, born in Pisa, Italy, is Europe, Middle East, and Africa Director for Microsoft Research Connections. He joined Microsoft in November 2005 after a long career at CERN, the world-leading laboratory for particle physics in Geneva, Switzerland. There he held several technical and managerial positions since 1975: director of the EU Grid project EGEE (2004–2005); director of the EU Data-Grid project (2001–2004); head of mass storage services (1997–2000); leader of the EU project GPMIMD2 (1993–1996).

Fabrizio Gagliardi has worked with four different Nobel Prize winners while at CERN. He has a Doctor degree in Computer Science, granted by the University of Pisa in 1974. Dr. Gagliardi has been consulting on computing and computing policy matters with the Commission of the European Union, several government and international bodies (among them NSF, DoE in the United States, CNRS and other research bodies in France, EPSRC in the United Kingdom, CNR and INFN in Italy, OECD, UN agencies).

Dr. Gagliardi is author and co-author of several publications and articles on real-time and distributed computing systems. Since 2009, he has been chair of the ACM Europe Council. Also in 2009, he was given the additional responsibility to drive the Cloud Computing Initiative of the Microsoft Extreme Computing Group in Europe. As part of that job, he played a major role in the incubation and successful negotiation of a new FP7 EU computing infrastructure project, named VENUS-C, which officially started in June 2010.

Mateo Valero (opens in new tab) is a professor in the Computer Architecture Department at Technical University of Catalonia, in Barcelona. His research interests focus on high-performance architectures. He has published approximately 500 papers, has served in the organization of more than 300 International Conferences and he has given more than 300 invited talks. He is the director of the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre, the National Centre of Supercomputing in Spain.

Dr. Valero has been honoured with several awards. Among them, the Eckert-Mauchly Award, by the IEEE and the ACM, the IEEE Harry Goode, two Spanish National awards, the “Julio Rey Pastor” to recognize research on IT technologies and the “Leonardo Torres Quevedo” to recognize research in Engineering, by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology, presented by the King of Spain and the “King Jaime I” in research by the Generalitat Valenciana presented by the Queen of Spain. He has been named Honorary Doctor by the University of Chalmers, by the University of Belgrade, by the Universities of Las Palmas de Gran Canarias and Zaragoza in Spain, and by the University of Veracruz in Mexico. “Hall of the Fame”, selected as one of the 25 most influents European researchers in IT during the period 1983–2008.

In December 1994, Professor Valero became a founding member of the Royal Spanish Academy of Engineering. In 2005, he was elected Correspondant Academic of the Spanish Royal Academy of Science and in 2006, member of the Royal Spanish Academy of Doctors and member of the Academia Europaea (the Academy of Europe). He is a Fellow of the IEEE, Fellow of the ACM, and an Intel Distinguished Research Fellow. In 1998 he won a “Favourite Son” Award of his home town, Alfamén (Zaragoza) and in 2006, his native town of Alfamén named their public college after him.

Dean Guo is a principal program manager in the Microsoft Research Connections division of Microsoft Research. He joined Microsoft in 1999. His interests include the development and the application of smart and powerful software to make it easy for researchers to analyze diverse and large datasets and visualize data in a meaningful way.

He holds a Ph.D. in Bioinformatics from the University of Utah (opens in new tab). He has been the lead program manager for shipping several Microsoft Research projects, such as Project Trident: A Scientific Workflow Workbench, Terapixel: The largest and clearest image of the night sky available in the WorldWide Telescope and Bing Map, Try F#: running F# programs in a browser, and Earth Data Excel Add-in for WorldWide Telescope.

Christophe Poulain is a senior research software design engineer in the Microsoft Research Connections team. He is interested in the development and application of software to solve problems that involve massive amounts of data and computation, particularly in the field of scientific or engineering problems like those described in the book, The Fourth Paradigm.

In his short time at Microsoft Research, he has had great fun working on a series of interesting and seemingly unrelated projects. These include the academic release of DryadLINQ for Dryad on Windows HPC (opens in new tab) clusters, building visualizations for WorldWide Telescope (opens in new tab)—including Terapixel (the largest and clearest seamless image of the night sky), and most recently, Try F# (opens in new tab).

Oscar Naim is a senior research program manager at Microsoft Research Connections. Oscar joined Microsoft in January of 2006, and he has more than 15 years of experience as a software engineer, including positions at Oracle Corporation and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has a PhD in Computer Sciences from the University of Southampton, UK (with Tony Hey as his supervisor), as well as a Master and Bachelor’s degree in Computer Sciences from Universidad Simon Bolivar, Venezuela.

As a member of Advanced Research Tools and Services group, Oscar has been the lead program manager for all Microsoft Research Education and Scholarly Communications projects since he joined the team in July of 2009, including projects such as: Chemistry Add-in for Word, Article Authoring Add-in, Ontology Add-in, Zentity, and Active Text.

In his free time, Oscar loves to play classical guitar and help his sons’ little league baseball teams.

Vidya joined Microsoft Research India in 2006, and is responsible for Microsoft Research India’s external partnership and collaborations. She heads Microsoft Research Connections, which aims to strengthen the computer science research ecosystem in India. Vidya works extensively with industry, government, and universities both within and outside India. The Microsoft Research Connections team at Microsoft Research India focuses on capacity building, research collaborations, and programs to address societal challenges and empower communities with tools and technologies. In addition, the team works with industry to encourage innovation.

Prior to joining Microsoft, Vidya worked with a number of leading IT companies as a communications consultant where she has been instrumental in defining communications and business strategies.

Sridhar is responsible for the communications function in Microsoft Research India, which involves external and internal communications, public relations, and marketing. In addition, he works with external partners from industry and academia in India and abroad to build collaborations for specific projects. Sridhar joined Microsoft Research in 2006.

Prior to joining Microsoft, Sridhar worked in multiple fields including sales, marketing, and public relations, and has worked and consulted with a number of leading companies across these areas.