Latin American Faculty Summit 2012

Alex Acero is a research area manager at Microsoft Research, where he directs more than 50 researchers and engineers working on audio, speech, multimedia, communication, and natural language. Prior to joining Microsoft, he was the manager of the speech group at Telefonica Investigacion y Desarrollo and a senior engineer at Apple Computer. He has been granted 93 US patents. Since 2000, Alex has also been an affiliate professor of electrical engineering at the University of Washington and has taught spoken language processing. He has participated in the PhD thesis committee of seven students. Alex received his PhD in electrical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.

Camilo Acosta, an engineer with a passion for research, presently is a private consultant and the CTO of All Robotics, a Colombian engineering firm specializing in the development of robots and software solutions for academia. After earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, he moved to Scotland, where he eventually headed a PhD project in rehabilitation robotics. A spin-off of this was the NeXOS project, a four-year undertaking that involved a consortium of universities, where Camilo served as the lead research fellow. Upon completion of the project, he returned to Colombia and served as the director of the Centre for Robotics and Informatics (CERI) at the Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano. While at CERI, he led a network of universities, work that accelerated into a joint investigation with Microsoft Research into the possibilities of using Zentity as a platform for understanding the vital signs of universities and networks of universities.

Victor Bahl is director of the Mobile Computing Research Center (MCRC) in Microsoft Research, where he leads basic and applied research in mobile computing. Prior to leading MCRC, Victor founded and led the Networking Research Group, and he continues to help shape Microsoft’s long-term vision related to networking technologies through research and associated policy engagement with governments and institutions worldwide. Victor’s personal research interests span mobile computing, wireless systems, cloud computing, and datacenter/enterprise networking and management. He has built and deployed several seminal and highly cited systems, many of which have been broadly adopted by the computing industry and shipped in Microsoft products. He has authored more than 115 peer-reviewed papers and holds 90 patents, and has received many accolades, including Microsoft’s Individual Performance Award (three times), SIGMOBILE’s Distinguished Service Award, IEEE’s Northwest Outstanding Engineer Award, SIGCOMM’s and CoNext’s Best Paper Award, FCC’s Open Internet App Award, and FCC’s People’s Choice App Award. Victor received his PhD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is a fellow of the ACM, IEEE, and AAAS.

Judith Bishop is director of computer science at Microsoft Research, where she works to create strong links between Microsoft’s research groups and universities worldwide. Her expertise is in programming languages and distributed systems, with a strong practical bias and an interest in compilers and design patterns. She initiated the Software Engineering Innovation Foundation (SEIF) and is currently working on a new way of running programs in browsers (especially F#) and on promoting programming on mobile phones with TouchDevelop. Judith has authored more than 95 publications, including 15 books on programming languages that are available in six languages. She serves frequently on international editorial, program, and award committees, and has received numerous awards and distinctions, including the IFIP Outstanding Service Award in 2009 and the IFIP Silver Core Award 2006 for service to the worldwide computer science community. She is a fellow of the British Computer Society, the Royal Society of South Africa, and many other prestigious bodies. Judith received her PhD from the University of Southampton.

José Blakeley is partner architect in Microsoft’s Data Warehousing Product Unit in the Database Systems Group, where he contributed to the development of the Microsoft SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) Edition DBMS. A Microsoft employee since 1994, José’s other contributions include the development of the OLE DB data access interfaces, the integration of the .NET runtime with SQL Server 2005, the extensibility features in SQL Server, and the creation of the ADO.NET Entity Framework in Microsoft Visual Studio 2008. José has authored numerous conference papers, book chapters, and journal articles on design aspects of relational and object database management systems, as well as on data access. He has 20 patents awarded and 22 patents pending. José became an ACM Fellow in 2009. Before joining Microsoft, he was a member of the technical staff at Texas Instruments, where he was co-principal investigator of the DARPA Open-OODB system. He received a B.Eng. from the Monterrey Institute of Technology (ITESM) in Mexico and a PhD in computer science from the University of Waterloo in Canada.

Cristián Bonacic is an associate professor in the School of Agriculture and Forestry, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, and has led a wildlife conservation research group for more than 10 years in Chile. His research interests include automatic and remote systems for wildlife surveillance, citizen science, IT applied to wildlife conservation, and networking of biodiversity conservation scientists. He earned a D.Phil. in zoology at Britain’s Oxford University.

Ernesto Bribiesca is a professor at the Instituto de Investigaciones en Matematicas Aplicadas y en Sistemas (IIMAS) at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), where he teaches graduate courses in pattern recognition. He also serves as associate editor of the journal, Pattern Recognition, and he has twice been an Honorable Mention winner of the Annual Pattern Recognition Society Award. Ernesto previously worked as a researcher at the IBM Latin American Scientific Center and at the Direcciòn General de Estudios del Territorio Nacional (DETENAL). He received his PhD in mathematics from the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM).

Derick Campbell is a software engineering veteran with 25 years of experience in product development, product incubation, and software consulting. In his latest role of a 15-year Microsoft career, Derick manages the Microsoft Research Connections engineering team.

Ignacio Casas is professor of information technologies in the Department of Computer Science (DCS), School of Engineering, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (PUC Chile). His main research interests are business-driven technologies and technology-enhanced learning (TEL) environments and tools. Ignacio has been a leading figure in Chile’s information and communication technology (ICT) development, co-founding DCS-PUC Chile (1981) and serving as its head (1988–1992); co-founding and serving as president (1989–1990) of the Chilean Computer Science Society; and serving as chief technology officer at PUC Chile (1995–2005). He is responsible for introducing TEL systems, Wi-Fi, and e-learning services in his university. Ignacio is the co-founder and co-director of the 15-year-old RELATED network, which advocates the development and use of TEL in Latin America, and the executive director of the LACCIR, which works to advance ICT applied research in the region. He is a member of IEEE and Colegio de Ingenieros de Chile and serves on the board of directors of several technology development enterprises. He earned a PhD in computer science from the University of Toronto.

Pedro Celis, a distinguished engineer at Microsoft, currently works in the Bing organization and previously served as CTO of the Microsoft SQL Server group. Pedro was born and raised in Monterrey, Mexico, where he developed a lifelong passion for education and technology that has led to positions as a professor of computer science and as a software engineer for several companies. Pedro was appointed to the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) by President George W. Bush. He served as a member of from 2003 to 2005, advising the president on federal policies and investments that would maintain and enhance US pre-eminence in information technology. Pedro holds more than 15 US patents, and in 2009 he was named one of the 100 most influential Hispanics in the United States by Hispanic Business magazine. He holds an engineering degree from the Monterrey Institute of Technology (ITESM) and master’s and doctoral degrees in computer science from the University of Waterloo in Canada.

Jonathan «Peli» de Halleux is currently working on TouchDevelop (opens in new tab), Moles (opens in new tab), and Pex (opens in new tab). Peli joined the Foundations for Software Engineering in October 2006. He worked in the CLR as a SDET in charge of the Just In Time compiler (2004–2006). Before joining Microsoft, Peli earned a PhD in Applied Mathematics from the Catholic University of Louvain (2000–2004).

Lee Dirks is director for portfolio strategy in Microsoft Research Connections, where he works to foster collaborative research projects with academia and research organizations. A veteran of more than 20 years in various information management fields, Lee holds an MSLS from the University of North Carolina (UNC)–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, then corporate librarian, and as a senior manager in the corporate market research organization. In addition to participation on several (US) National Science Foundation task forces, Lee also teaches as adjunct faculty at the iSchool at the University of Washington, and serves on the advisory boards for the University of Washington (UW) Libraries, the UW iSchool’s Master of Science in Information Science (MSIM) program, and the Metadata Research Center at the School of Information and Library Science at UNC–Chapel Hill.

Josafath Israel Espinosa Ramos is a student from Universidad La Salle. His research interest focuses on applications of evolutionary computation, using bio-inspired models to build highly optimized networks. He has developed a computer program that uses genetic algorithms and differential evolution in the design of seismic networks, thereby maximizing the warning time of a seismic alert system. In 2011, Israel had a full paper accepted at the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO–2011) in Dublin, Ireland. He also was finalist in the eighth annual “Humies” award at the same event.

Dan Fay is director of the Earth, Energy, and Environment effort at Microsoft Research Connections and works with academic scientists on related topics. Previously, he handled North America as part of the Technical Computing Initiative. Dan serves as a member of the Purdue University Computer and Information Technology Industrial advisory board. He is a graduate of Northeastern University.

Ernesto Galindo Rojo is a student at Universidad Panamericana, studying engineering in digital animation. A native of Mexico City, he is passionate about music, photography, and technology and is always looking for new ways to improve or understand how things work and trying to help other people. He is currently participating in the 2012 Imagine Cup for the Mexican team, which has created software platforms to help children with ADD. He also serves as an animation coordinator for a social service project called Enlaza México.

Hector Garcia-Molina is the Leonard Bosack and Sandra Lerner Professor in the departments of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. From 1997 to 2001, Hector was a member the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC), and he served on the faculty of the Computer Science Department at Princeton University from 1979 to 1991. Hector is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a recipient of the 1999 ACM SIGMOD Innovations Award. He also serves as an advisor for Onset Ventures, sits on the board of directors of Oracle, and is a member of the State Farm Technical Advisory Council. He received a BS in electrical engineering from the Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico, in 1974, and earned an MS in electrical engineering in 1975 and a PhD in computer science in 1979, both from Stanford University. Hector also holds an honorary PhD from ETH Zurich (2007).

Lorena Gómez is director of the master’s program in software engineering and information technology at Tecnológico de Monterrey (ITESM), Monterrey campus. Her research interests include databases, software development, and mobile computing. She is collaborating with the University of the West Indies on the development of an application framework for mobile payments in support of micro-economies in Latin America and the Caribbean, a project sponsored by LACCIR. Lorena teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on databases, business intelligence, and the Software Capstone Project, and she received a Teaching and Research Award from Monterrey Tech in 2011. She is a Fulbright Fellow and a member of the UPE Computer Science Honor Society and the Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society. Lorena also serves on the board of directors of both the Microsoft Dynamics Academic Alliance and the Microsoft Enterprise Consortium. She earned her PhD in computer science from Arizona State University.

Juan Alberto González Esparza is the general manager of Microsoft Mexico, responsible for the operations of the company in Mexico. He heads an organization with more than 500 employees active in commercial areas, professional services and consulting, marketing, consumer channels, and online businesses. In line with his personal goals and corporate vision, Juan Alberto strategically leads the corporate citizenship initiative, wherein Microsoft Mexico has become one of the best practices around the world. Among his main objectives are the definition of a national digital agenda, the formation of human capital in information technologies, and the development of capacities in line with the needs of the industry. He is also president of the council of the Mexican Association of Information Technology Industry (AMITI) and a member of the US-Mexico Foundation. Juan Alberto graduated from La Salle University in Mexico City with a bachelor’s in cybernetics and computer science. He also did several management and leadership programs at Microsoft, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and at the Wharton School of University of Pennsylvania.

Dean Guo is a principal program manager in Microsoft Research Connections. He has 14 years of software development experience, ranging from developing expert systems to integrating enterprise applications of complex systems. He has been the lead program manager for shipping several Microsoft Research projects, including Project Trident, a scientific workflow workbench; Terapixel, which provides the largest and clearest image of the night sky and is available in the WorldWide Telescope and Bing Map; Try F#, a programming language for running F# programs in a browser; WorldWide Telescope Add-in for Excel; and the Microsoft Translator Hub. He holds a PhD in bioinformatics from the University of Utah.

Adrian Hernandez is a program manager in Microsoft Research Connections based in Mexico, where he works on the development of scientific projects using Microsoft technologies. His research focuses primarily in the areas of electrical impedance tomography, parallel computing, and artificial intelligence algorithms; he has presented his findings in publications and at several international conferences. Adrian also collaborates in image processing as part of a research team from IPN and Universidad La Salle, which is working on the electrical impedance tomography equation.

José Tiberio Hernandez is a professor of systems and computing engineering in the School of Engineering at the University of the Andes (UniAndes) and director of the IMAGINE Team. His research interests are focused on visual computing applications and on urban systems. In recent years, he has been involved in applied research on innovation in engineering education. He was formerly dean of the Engineering School at UniAndes and deeply involved in the renovation of the school, an $80-million investment in infrastructure, human capital, and research facilities. Jose obtained his PhD in computing engineering (CAD/CAM) at ENSTA-Paris.

As vice president in Microsoft Research, Tony Hey is responsible for worldwide university research collaborations with Microsoft researchers. He also directs the multidisciplinary eScience Group within Microsoft Research. Prior to Microsoft, Tony served as director of the UK’s e-Science Initiative, where he oversaw government efforts to build a scientific infrastructure for collaborative, multidisciplinary, data-intensive research. Before that, he led a research group in parallel computing and was head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science and dean of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Southampton. Tony is a fellow of the UK’s Royal Academy of Engineering and in 2005 was awarded the rank of Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for services to science. He is a fellow of the British Computer Society, the Institute of Engineering and Technology, the Institute of Physics, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Passionate about communicating the excitement of science, he has co-authored popular books on quantum mechanics and relativity.

Harold Javid is director of the Microsoft Research Connections regional programs for North America, Latin America, and Australia/New Zealand. His team works with the academic research communities in these regions to build rich collaborations, including joint centers in the United States, Brazil, and Chile; faculty summits and other events; and talent development programs such as the Microsoft Research Faculty Fellows program. Harold has a long career in research organizations, working for General Electric, Boeing, and now Microsoft. He has made advances in the application of optimization and computing algorithms in such industries as power, aerospace, and pulp and paper. Harold is the chair of the Industry Advisory Board of the IEEE Computer Society. He received his PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign.

Sing Bing Kang is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research. His areas of interest are computer vision and computer graphics, specifically image-based modeling along with image and video enhancement. Sing Bing has co-authored two books, Image-Based Rendering and Image-Based Modeling of Plants and Trees, and co-edited two others, Panoramic Vision and Emerging Topics in Computer Vision. He has served as area chair and a member of the technical committee for the major computer vision conferences (ICCV, CVPR, ECCV), and is also a member of the papers committee for SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia. Sing Bing was program chair for ACCV 2007 and CVPR 2009. He is currently associate editor-in-chief for IEEE Transactions on Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence, and was recently elevated to IEEE fellow (class of 2012). He received his PhD in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University.

Peter Lee is distinguished scientist and managing director of Microsoft Research Redmond. Prior to Microsoft, Peter served at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), where he developed and implemented the strategic vision and technical plans for an office that conducted high-risk, high-payoff research projects in computer security, social networking, and supercomputing. Peter was also formerly a professor and head of the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. An active researcher, educator, administrator, and servant to the academic community, Peter’s research contributions lie mainly in software reliability, program analysis, security, and language design. He is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, a member of the National Research Council’s Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, and former chairman of the board of directors of the Computing Research Association and its government affairs committee. Peter has written two books and authored or co-authored more than 50 refereed papers. He earned his doctorate at the University of Michigan.

Rustan Leino is a principal researcher in the Research in Software Engineering (RiSE) group at Microsoft Research, Redmond. He is a leader in building automatic program verifiers and is generally known for his work on programming methods and program verification tools. He has led a number of programming language and verification projects, including Spec# (which extends C# with contracts and was a forerunner of the Code Contracts in Microsoft .NET 4.0), Chalice (for concurrent programs), Dafny (for functional-correctness verification), and, previously, ESC/Java. Rustan is the architect of the Boogie program verification framework, which underlies more than a dozen program verifiers for C, Spec#, and other languages. Before earning his PhD from Caltech in 1995, Rustan designed and wrote object-oriented software as a technical lead in the Windows NT group at Microsoft. He collects thinking puzzles on a popular webpage and has started the Verification Corner video blog on channel9.msdn.com.

Henrique (Rico) Malvar is a Microsoft distinguished engineer and the chief scientist for Microsoft Research. Before moving to industry, he was a professor of electrical engineering at Universidade de Brasília in his native Brazil. At Microsoft, Rico started a signal processing group that developed such innovative technologies as new media compression formats, microphone array processing technologies, and machine-learning technologies for music identification—all of which became component of Microsoft products. The group also developed the first prototype of the RoundTable videoconferencing device. In addition, Rico was a key architect for the media compression formats WMA and HD Photo/JPEG XR. He received the Technical Achievement Award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society in 2002, and was elected a member of the US National Academy of Engineering in 2012. He obtained a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Simon Mercer has a background in zoology and has worked in various aspects of bioinformatics. Having managed the development of the Canadian Bioinformatics Resource, a national life science service-provision network, he later served as director of software engineering at Gene Codes Corporation before moving to the Microsoft Research Connections team in 2005. In his current role as director of health and wellbeing, he manages collaborations between Microsoft and academia in the area of healthcare research. Simon’s interests include bioinformatics, translational medicine, and the management of scientific data.

Jorge Meza Aguilar is a full-time professor and head of the Design Department at Universidad Iberoamericana, in Mexico City, where he established the bachelor in interactive design program in 2004. In addition to his academic duties, he works in the fields of strategic design and digital media innovation at his own company, Estrategas Digitales. He earned a bachelor’s degree in graphic design followed by a MFA in visual communication and an MSc in systems engineering. He also studied at the Jan Majteko Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków and has a PhD in digital arts.

Eduardo Morales is a professor and head of the Department of Computer Science of the National Institute for Astrophysics, Optics, and Electronics (INAOE) in Mexico, where his professional interests focus on machine learning and robotics. He has overseen 20 research projects sponsored by different funding agencies and has published more than 100 journal articles, book chapters, and conference proceedings. In addition to research positions in Mexico, Eduardo has worked as an invited researcher at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) in Palo Alto, California, and as a technical consultant for the The Machine Learning Toolkit European Project at the Turing Institute in Glasgow, Scotland. He serves on the editorial board of Applied Intelligence and is a member of the National Researchers System (SNI) in Mexico and the Academia Mexicana de Informatica (AMIAC), as well as having been named an ACM Distinguished Lecturer for Central and South America. Eduardo received his PhD in computer science from the Turing Institute – University of Strathclyde, in Scotland.

Enrique Morales Méndez is a digital animation engineering student at Universidad Panamericana who loves technology, animation, and audiovisual productions. A proud Mexican, he is eager to help improve Mexico’s image in the world through advances in technology and education, and is thrilled to be part of the winning team that will represent Mexico in the 2012 Imagine Cup finals.

Eduardo Nakamura is a researcher and professor at the Research and Technological Innovation Center, Brazil, and at the Federal University of Amazonas, Brazil. His research interests include data fusion, distributed algorithms, localization algorithms, wireless ad-hoc and sensor networks, and mobile and pervasive computing. He has served as a TCP member for numerous international conferences and as an associate editor of international journals, including IEEE Sensors and the International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks. He received the Latin America Region Young Professional Award, granted by the IEEE LA ComSoc, for his “contribution to the area of wireless sensor networks”; he also received the Brazilian Ministry of Education’s Best PhD Thesis Award in the category of Engineering and Exact and Earth Sciences for his thesis, “Information Fusion for Wireless Sensor Networks.” He earned his PhD in Computer Science from the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil.

Andrés Neyem is an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. His research interests include mobile computing, software engineering, and computer supported collaborative work, and he has published several papers in conferences proceedings and journals in these research areas. He received his PhD in computer science from the Universidad de Chile.

Miguel Nussbaum is professor of computer science at the School of Engineering of the Universidad Católica de Chile. Since 1995, he has been exploring how to transform the classroom experience with the support of technology. He started by using the Nintendo Game Boy to introduce 1:1 interactions and games in the classroom. In 2001, Miguel began working with wirelessly interconnected Pocket PCs to encourage small-group collaborative learning, and in 2007 he introduced the One Mouse per Child project, which enables 50 schoolchildren to share one screen. Miguel has received support from Microsoft, HP, Intel, Plan Ceibal (Uruguay), UNESCO, and the Inter-American Development Bank for his work in schools in Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Guatemala, India, England, the United States, and Uruguay. He has authored 65 publications in journals of the ISI catalog, with more than 1,500 citations in Google Scholar.

Sergio F. Ochoa is an associate professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Chile. His research interests include computer-supported collaborative work, mobile/pervasive computing, and software engineering. Sergio is a member of IEEE, ACM, and the Chilean Computer Society, and he sits on the steering committee of LACCIR (the Latin American and Caribbean Collaborative ITC Research Federation). He also serves as an IT consultant for a number of public and private organizations in Chile. Sergio received his PhD in computer science from the Catholic University of Chile.

Luis Pineda is a titular investigator in the Computer Science Department at Instituto de Investigaciones en Matemáticas Aplicadas y en Sistemas (IIMAS) of Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). His research and publications focus on computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, and related disciplines. Luis is also a national investigator in the Mexican System of Research (SNI), a regular member of the Mexican Academy of Science, and currently the coordinator of the Mexican Network for Research and Development in Computer Science (REMIDEC). After earning undergraduate degrees in electronics and computer science, he received his PhD in cognitive science from the University of Edinburgh.

Jim Pinkelman is a senior director in Microsoft Research Connections, where he leads the regional collaborations efforts and serves as business manager. He previously led Microsoft’s US academic outreach endeavors to find valuable ways in which Microsoft software and services could be used by technical students and educators, both in and out of the classroom. Prior to joining Microsoft, Jim served in senior technology roles at technology start-up firms in Chicago. In 1999, he co-authored Microsoft OLAP Unleashed, a book on business intelligence, for Macmillan/Sams Publishing. He spent seven years as an officer in the United States Air Force, serving as a project management engineer on space systems. Jim is a member of the Board of Advisors at the University of Washington, Bothell. He is an ABET program evaluator for the Computing Sciences Accreditation Board. He has also served as an adjunct faculty member over the past 15 years, teaching courses in computer programming and statistics. He received a PhD in mechanical engineering from the University of Notre Dame.

Jaime Puente is a director at Microsoft Research Connections, responsible for engagements in Latin America and the Caribbean. He has been a key contributor to the establishment and operation of two Virtual Research Institutes in Latin America and the Caribbean: the Microsoft Research–FAPESP Institute for ICT Research (opens in new tab) and the Latin American and Caribbean Collaborative ICT Research Federation (LACCIR (opens in new tab)). Jaime was a Fulbright Scholar who earned a master’s in computer engineering from Iowa State University, an MBA and an electronics engineering degree from Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral (ESPOL) in Ecuador, and an Ed.S. post-master’s degree from NOVA Southeastern University in Florida. He is currently a PhD candidate in the Graduate School of Computer and Information Sciences at NOVA Southeastern University. His main research interests concern human-computer interactions and the pervasive integration of digital technologies in education. Prior to joining Microsoft Research, Jaime spent 13 years as a professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at ESPOL.

Cesar Robles is a member of the Digital Signal Processing group at La Salle University and the Signal and Image Processing unit at IPN. With an academic and research background in cybernetics and computing systems, along with doctoral studies in communications and electronics, Cesar currently works on research in electrical impedance tomography and applied artificial neural networks.

Juliana Salles is Microsoft Research Connections’ senior research program manager in Brazil, where she engages with academics to identify globally critical, high-impact research projects. She is currently working on projects that use technology to enable or accelerate knowledge in such areas as tropical environments and their response to climate change, bioenergy, and biodiversity. She is also leading initiatives to attract and retain women in computing in Latin America. Juliana has a PhD in human-computer interaction and since joining Microsoft has worked as a UX researcher for several product teams, including Visual Studio, Windows Live, and Windows Live Mobile. Her interests include user research techniques and methodology and their integration with the software development process.

Chris Stephens is a professor at the Center for Complexity Science and the Institute for Nuclear Sciences of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. He is also a founding partner of Adaptive Technologies, a research company dedicated to the production of agent-based technologies for dynamic optimization in finance and industry, and he serves on the editorial board of Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines. The author or co-author of more than 100 publications, Chris has presented more than 120 invited lectures and has received the Jorge Lomnitz Prize of the Mexican Academy of Sciences and a Leverhulme Professorship from the Leverhulme Trust. He earned his PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Maryland and held several postdoctoral positions, including one at the University of Utrecht, where he worked with Nobel Laureate Gerard ‘t Hooft, and a Marie Curie Fellowship at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. Chris has held visiting positions at leading academic institutions, including the Weizmann Institute, the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, the University of Birmingham, and the University of Essex.

As national technology officer at Microsoft Mexico, Erick Stephens supports policy decision and delivers technologically relevant and scalable solutions into public sector markets in Mexico. His main objectives are to align IT value propositions to public policies in such areas as healthcare, education, the environment, and local social and economic development; and to promote a digital agenda in top policy areas, including innovation, security and privacy, technology neutrality, accessibility, and interoperability. Erick proactively supports the Mexican digital ecosystem as president of South-Center Region at the ICT National Chamber and promotes Internet safety as president of Navega Protegido (a non-profit Internet safety program). Before joining Microsoft, Erick had more than 20 years of IT experience, as both an entrepreneur and IT executive. He holds a degree in computer engineering and an MBA—both from Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM), and has completed post-graduate courses in e-government at Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM) and public policies at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE) to reinforce his public sector expertise. He also has more than 18 years’ experience as a teacher at ITAM and received ITAM’s Professional Award of Merit in 2007.

L. Enrique Sucar is director of research at the National Institute for Astrophysics, Optics and Electronics in Puebla, Mexico. His main research interests are in graphical models and probabilistic reasoning, and their applications in computer vision, robotics, and biomedicine. Enrique has been an invited professor at the University of British Columbia, Canada; Imperial College, London; and INRIA, France, and has authored more than 150 publications and directed 15 PhD theses. He is a member of the National Research System and the Mexican Science Academy and is a senior member of the IEEE. In addition, he has served as president of the Mexican AI Society, has been a member of the advisory board of IJCAI, and is an associate editor of the journal Computación y Sistema. He received his PhD in computing from Imperial College, London.

Alexander Szalay is the Alumni Centennial Professor of Astronomy at the Johns Hopkins University and a professor in the Department of Computer Science. A cosmologist, he works on the statistical measures of the spatial distribution of galaxies and galaxy formation. He was born and educated in Hungary, and he spent postdoctoral periods at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Chicago before accepting a faculty position at Johns Hopkins. Alex architected the Science Archive of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and was project director of the (US) National Science Foundation-funded National Virtual Observatory. His papers cover areas from theoretical cosmology to observational astronomy, spatial statistics, and computer science. He received an Alexander von Humboldt Prize in Physical Sciences in 2004 and the Microsoft Jim Gray Award in 2007. Alex is a Corresponding Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2008, he became Doctor Honoris Clausa of the Eötvös University.

Stewart Tansley is a director at Microsoft Research Connections, where he is responsible for academic research partnerships related to devices in natural user interactions (NUI). These include cyber-physical systems (CPS) and device-oriented computing (DOC), which embraces such areas as robotics research and sensor networks research. Before joining Microsoft in 2001, he spent 13 years in the telecommunications industry in software research and development, focusing on technology transfer. Stewart has published a variety of papers on robotics for education, artificial intelligence, and network management; he holds several patents and has co-authored a book on software engineering for artificial intelligence applications. In 2009, he co-edited The Fourth Paradigm, a collection of visionary essays on the emerging field of data-intensive science. His recent research interests have centered on social human-robot interaction, robotics as a context for computer science education, sensor networks, and ubiquitous computing. Stewart earned a PhD in artificial intelligence applied to engineering from Britain’s Loughborough University.

Nikolai Tillmann is a principal research software design engineer at Microsoft Research, where he works on combining dynamic and static program analysis techniques. He currently leads the Pex project, a framework for runtime verification and automatic test-case generation for Microsoft .NET applications based on parameterized unit testing and dynamic symbolic execution. He also works on the Spur project, a tracing just-in-time compiler for .NET and JavaScript code. Previously, Nikolai worked on AsmL, an executable modeling language, and the Spec Explorer 2004 model-based testing tool. He co-developed XRT, a concrete/ symbolic state exploration engine and software model-checker for .NET.

Kristin Tolle is director of natural interactions in the Microsoft Research Connections team and a clinical associate professor at the University of Washington College of Medicine. Since joining Microsoft, Kristin has acquired numerous patents and worked for several product teams, including the Natural Language Group, Visual Studio, and the Microsoft Office Excel Team. Prior to Microsoft, Kristin was an Oak Ridge Science and Engineering Research Fellow for the National Library of Medicine and a research associate at the University of Arizona Artificial Intelligence Lab, where she managed the group on medical information retrieval and natural language processing. Her research interests include ubiquitous computing, global public health, contextual computing, natural language processing and machine translation, mobile computing, user intent modeling, and information extraction from large heterogeneous data sources. She earned her PhD in the management of information systems with a minor in computational linguistics.

Osman Unsal is a senior researcher and member of the management board at the BSC – Microsoft Research Center (opens in new tab). Dr. Unsal also co-manages the Computer Architecture for Parallel Paradigms research group at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), Spain. His current research interests include many-core computer architecture, reliability, low-power computing, programming models, and transactional memory. He has published more than 100 papers in peer-reviewed conferences and journals, has received four best-paper awards, and holds six issued US patents. He was the coordinator for VELOX, a €5 million European project in transactional memory. Dr. Unsal received the BS, MS, and PhD degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Istanbul Technical University (Turkey), Brown University (United States), and University of Massachusetts, Amherst (United States) respectively.

Genoveva Vargas-Solar is a senior researcher at both the Data and Knowledge Management Group at Universidad de las Américas Puebla and the French Council of Scientific Research (CNRS). She is a member of the HADAS group of the Informatics Laboratory of Grenoble, France, and the deputy director of the Franco-Mexican Laboratory of Informatics and Automatic Control. Genoveva’s academic background and research interests span two distinct fields: computer science, where she is focused on distributed and heterogeneous databases, query processing and optimization, and cost-based data management in cloud- and service-based database systems; and literature, where her concerns center on the literature of the Middle Ages and on mythology, particularly criticism and analysis of different myths of origins. Genoveva has coordinated several research projects in Europe and Latin America that were financed by governments and industrial partners. She actively promotes cooperation in computer science between Latin America and Europe, particularly between France and Mexico. She has a PhD in computer science from Joseph Fourier University and a PhD in literature from Stendhal University.

José Enrique Villa-Rivera, the director general of the National Council of Science and Technology, has extensive experience in leading higher education and scientific and technological research institutions. He formerly served as the director general of the Mexican Petroleum Institute and the National Polytechnic Institute and is the author of numerous books and scientific articles. A member of the American Academy of Engineering, the Mexican Academy of Engineering, and the Association of Petroleum Engineers, he has received numerous distinctions, including honorary doctorates from the National Engineering University of Nicaragua, the National Institute of Applied Sciences in Lyon, and the Autonomous University of Sinaloa, along with awards from the World Intellectual Property Organization, the French Republic, the Guerrero State Congress, and the government of Sinaloa. He has been included five times among the 300 most influential leaders of Mexico. He received his doctorate in petroleum engineering from the National School of Petroleum and Engines of the French Petroleum Institute.

Michael Zyskowski is the lead program manager in the Microsoft Research Connections engineering team, productizing state-of-the-art technologies for broad consumption by both academic and commercial research. He is currently responsible for leading the engineering effort behind ChronoZoom, a visualization tool for exploring Big Data multimedia mashups, using zoom as the mechanism for travelling through resolutions of time. He is also responsible for the next incarnation of TryF#, a web-based interactive development environment for functional programming.