About
David Heckerman worked at Microsoft Research for 25 years from 1992 to 2017. At MSR, he founded the first AI group in 1992, the first machine-learning group in 1994, the first bioinformatics group in 2004, and the first genomics group in 2015. Notable products he invented include the world’s first machine-learning spam filter, the Answer Wizard (which became the backend for Clippy), and the Windows Troubleshooters. He also led the MSR team in building Microsoft’s first machine-learning platform, which was hosted in SQL Server.
During his tenure, he recruited several prominent members of MSR including Eric Horvitz, Jack Breese, Chris Bishop, and Patrice Simard. On the research side, David is known for developing the first practical platform for constructing probabilistic expert systems, the topic of his PhD dissertation, which won the ACM best dissertation award in 1990. He is also known for (1) developing an approach for learning Bayesian networks from a combination of expert knowledge and data, which has proven useful in causal discovery, (2) developing an HIV vaccine design through machine learning, and (3) developing state-of-the-art methods for genome associations studies.
David received his Ph.D. (1990) and M.D. (1992) from Stanford University, and is an ACM, AAAI, and ACMI Fellow.