Faculty Summit 2012

Walter Alvarez received his Ph.D. in geology at Princeton. His thesis research was in the roadless Guajira desert in Colombia, living with members of the Wayuu tribe and smugglers.

Much of his research has been in Italy, where he worked on archeological geology in Rome, on the tectonics of the geologically complex Mediterranean region, and on Earth’s magnetic reversals recorded in deep-water limestone in the Apennine Mountains.

In 1977, Alvarez joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley and began a study of the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous Period. Evidence from iridium measurements suggested that the extinction was because of the impact on Earth of a giant asteroid or comet. Many years later, that hypothesis was confirmed by the discovery of a huge impact crater, buried beneath the subsurface of the Yucatán Peninsula, dating from precisely the time of the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction.

He currently is interested in Big History and is developing ChronoZoom, the zoomable timeline of Big History, with Roland Saekow at UC Berkeley, with Microsoft Research Connections, and with Moscow State University in Russia.

Krste Asanović is an associate professor in the Computer Science Division at the University of California, Berkeley. Asanović received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Berkeley in 1998, and then joined the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, receiving tenure in 2005. He returned to join the faculty at Berkeley in 2007, where he co-founded the Berkeley Parallel Computing Laboratory.

Magdalena Balazinska is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. Her research interests are broadly in the fields of databases and distributed systems. Her current research focuses on data-intensive scalable computing, sensor and scientific-data management, and cloud computing. Balazinska holds a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2006). She was a Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellow (2007), received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2009), a 10-year most-influential-paper award (2010), an HP Labs Research Innovation Award (2009–2011), a Rogel Faculty Support Award (2006), a Microsoft Research Graduate Fellowship (2003–2005), and several best-paper awards.

Anne Balsamo is a professor at the University of Southern California in the Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism, as well as in the Interactive Media division of the School of Cinematic Arts. Her recent book, Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work (Duke, 2011) examines the relationship between culture and technological innovation, with a particular focus on the role of the humanities in cultural innovation. In 2002, she co-founded, Onomy Labs Inc. a Silicon Valley technology design and fabrication company that builds cultural technologies. Previously, she was a member of Research on Experimental Documents, a collaborative research/design group at Xerox PARC that created several experimental reading devices for an interactive museum exhibit called XFR: Experiments in the Future of Reading. In 2010, the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded her a Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant to create an interactive, tangible interface for the AIDS Memorial Quilt. She is overseeing the design and production of several digital experiences for QUILT 2012 events occurring in Washington, D.C., this summer.

Nilanjan Banerjee is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Computer Engineering at the University of Arkansas. He graduated with an M.S. and a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass) in 2009 and a B.Tech. (Hons.) from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur in 2004. He has won the Yahoo! Outstanding Dissertation award at UMass, a best-undergraduate-thesis award at IIT Kharagpur, and an Outstanding Researcher award at the University of Arkansas. He is a 2011 National Science Foundation CAREER awardee. His research interests span renewable-energy-driven systems, health-care systems, and mobile systems.

Patrick Baudisch is a professor in Computer Science at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Berlin/Potsdam and chair of the Human Computer Interaction Lab. His research focuses on the miniaturization of mobile devices and touch input. Previously, Baudisch worked as a research scientist in the Adaptive Systems and Interaction research group at Microsoft Research and at Xerox PARC, and he served as an affiliate professor in Computer Science at the University of Washington. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Germany’s Darmstadt University of Technology.

Josh Benaloh joined Microsoft in 1994 and is senior cryptographer for Microsoft Research’s eXtreme Computing Group. He received an S.B. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and M.S., M.Phil., and Ph.D. degrees from Yale University, where his dissertation, Verifiable Secret-Ballot Elections, introduced the homomorphic-tallying paradigm. His research has focused on multiparty protocols, including secret sharing, secure function evaluation, and voting.

Hrvoje Benko is a researcher at Microsoft Research. He explores novel, interactive computing technologies and their impact on human-computer interaction. In particular, he is interested in surface computing, multitouch and freehand gestural input, 2-D and 3-D interactions, and augmented reality. Benko is the author of more than 25 scientific conference papers and journal articles. His work has been featured in the mainstream media, such as The New York Times, The 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. Learn more.

Sergey Berezin is associate professor and head of the Mathematical Modeling Tools Laboratory in the Department of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics at Moscow State University. He graduated from Moscow State in 1999, and in 2002, he received Ph.D. His thesis focused on the application of computer-graphics methods to the problems of dynamic search. Since then, he has worked at the Department of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics, leading two courses, on computer graphics and .NET technologies.

In 2003, Berezin became head of the Microsoft Technologies Student Laboratory, an informal group of students who were enthusiastic about applying the latest information technologies to science and education. This group evolved into the laboratory of Mathematical Modeling Tools, which successfully collaborates with Microsoft Research on a number of projects, such as Dynamic Data Display, FetchClimate, and ChronoZoom.

Berezin’s interests include visualization and processing of large data sets and the application of cloud computing and modern programming technologies to problems of computational sciences.

Christian Bird is a researcher in the Empirical Software Engineering group at Microsoft Research. He is interested in the relationship between software design, social dynamics, and processes in large development projects. He has studied software development teams at Microsoft, at IBM, and in the open-source realm, examining the effects of distributed development, ownership policies, and the ways in which teams complete software tasks. He has published in the top software-engineering venues and is the recipient of the ACM SIGSOFT distinguished-paper award. Bird received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis under Prem Devanbu and was a National Merit Scholar at Brigham Young University, where he received his B.S. in Computer Science.

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.

Mark Bolas is the associate director for the MxR lab at the Institute for Creative Technologies and associate professor in the Interactive Media Division of the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts. He is a research scientist and designer who explores the body and its role in synthetic agency. His work focuses on creating virtual environments and transducers that fully engage one’s perception and cognition to create visceral experiences. Among his courses at the undergraduate and graduate level are The Design for Interactive Media and The Business of Interactive Media.

Bolas’ 1988–89 thesis work at Stanford University’s School of Engineering, Design and Virtual Environments, was among the first efforts to map the breadth of virtual reality as a new medium.

Bolas has been a professor at Stanford and Keio University and is chairman of Fakespace Labs, located in Mountain View, California, which he co-founded in 1989 with Ian McDowall and Eric Lorimer to build instrumentation for research labs to explore virtual reality and grow that emerging field. Bolas holds more than 20 patents and is the recipient of numerous product awards and the 2005 IEEE Virtual Reality Technical Achievement Award.

danah boyd is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research, a research assistant professor in Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, a research fellow of the Born This Way Foundation, and an adjunct associate professor at the University of New South Wales. Her research examines the intersection of technology, society, and youth culture. Currently, she’s focused on privacy, youth meanness and cruelty, and human trafficking. She co-authored Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media. She’s working a new book called, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. She blogs at danah boyd | apophenia (opens in new tab) and tweets @zephoria (opens in new tab).

David Breashears is the executive director and founder of GlacierWorks. Since 1979, he has combined his skills in mountaineering and photography to become an internationally acclaimed adventure filmmaker, having led more than 40 expeditions to the Himalayan region and worked on dozens of documentary film projects. Breashears has produced and photographed films for the PBS series NOVA and FRONTLINE, and for National Geographic Television, the BBC, ABC, NBC, and Universal Pictures. He was director, and expedition leader of the IMAX film EVEREST, the most successful large-format film of all time. He is the recipient of numerous awards for achievement in filmmaking, including four Emmy Awards. Breashears has reached the summit of Mount Everest five times.

Donald Brinkman manages external programs in digital humanities, digital heritage, and games for learning for Microsoft Research. Previously, he had served for two years as a technical program manager for the Microsoft Education group, defining a vision of innovative business intelligence and analytics for education and driving a variety of enterprise-scale server capabilities. Before joining Microsoft, he spent eight years in developmental and technical roles, acquiring and executing government research contracts in areas such as quantum computation, signals intelligence, electromagnetic and kinetic simulations, behavioral economics, game theory, and cross-cultural communications.

He supports the Games for Learning Institute, a consortium of eight universities, 14 principal investigators, and a small army of graduate students exploring what makes games fun, what makes them educational, and how to blend the two. He helped to develop ChronoZoom and is developing Big Time, web services to support tools to visualize massive time scales for the purpose of teaching Big History and enabling massively multidisciplinary research. He is the Microsoft champion for the Just Press Play project, an experiment to transform the undergraduate education of 750 students at the Rochester Institute of Technology into a gameful narrative. Other projects include Project Garibaldi and Game Show NYC.

Emma Brunskill is an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. She has a B.S. in Computer Engineering and Physics from the University of Washington, a M.Sc. in Neuroscience from the University of Oxford, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She completed postdoctoral training at the University of California, Berkeley. She has received a Rhodes Scholarship and a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship, and she recently was selected as a Microsoft Research Faculty Fellow. Her research lies in artificial intelligence and machine learning, where she focuses on novel automatic methods to make good sequences of decisions under uncertainty. Brunskill is particularly interested in applications of this work to intelligent tutoring systems and health care. She also is interested in how information technology can help address challenges that arise in low-resource areas.

A.J. Bernheim Brush is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research Redmond. Her research area is human-computer interaction with a focus on ubiquitous computing and computer-supported collaboration (CSCW). Brush received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington and graduated summa cum laude from Williams College. She is most well-known for her research on technologies for families and her expertise in conducting field studies of technology. She currently focuses on using sensing, inference, and prediction to enable new experiences in the home and on mobile devices. Brush was honored to receive a Borg Early Career Award in 2010. She has two best-paper awards and several best-paper nominations. Brush serves on the UbiComp Conference Steering Committee and the CRA-W board. She served as ACM SIGCHI VP for Membership and Communications from 2006 to 2009 and as the program co-chair for the Pervasive 2009 conference. She also has served on program committees for many conferences, including UbiComp, Pervasive, CHI, and CSCW.

Manuel M T Chakravarty is an associate professor at the University of New South Wales. His main research interests are in functional programming languages, novel compiler technology, and parallel programming. He graduated from the University of Karlsruhe and received a doctoral degree from the Berlin Institute of Technology.

He contributed to Haskell’s foreign function interface, the theory and implementation of type families, and the design and realization of Data Parallel Haskell, an implementation of data parallelism in the Glasgow Haskell Compiler. He receives his inspiration from combining theory with practice.

Yiling Chen is an associate professor of Computer Science at Harvard University. She received her Ph.D. in Information Sciences and Technology from The Pennsylvania State University. Before joining Harvard, she spent two years at the Microeconomic and Social Systems group of Yahoo! Research in New York City. Her general research interests are at the border of computer science and economics. She is interested in designing and analyzing social computing systems according to both computational and economic objectives. Chen has received a CAREER award and an ACM EC outstanding paper award, and was recognized by IEEE Intelligent Systems as one of AI’s 10 to Watch in 2011. She currently serves as the editor-in-chief for SIGecom Exchanges.

Lili Cheng is general manager of the Future Social Experiences (FUSE) Labs in Microsoft Research, focused on delivering new social, real-time, and media-rich experiences for home and work, including projects such as Kodu, tools to teach kids programming and creativity; Montage, visual albums of social data; Docs for Facebook; and social-productivity tools.

At Microsoft since 1995, Cheng was also director of User Experience for Microsoft Windows, where, from 2004 to 2006, she oversaw design, user research, user assistance, and advanced development for Windows Vista. Before joining Microsoft, she worked in Apple Computer’s Advanced Technology Group on the User Interface research team, where she focused on QuickTime Conferencing and QuickTime VR.

Cheng is also a registered architect; she worked in Tokyo and Los Angeles for Nihon Sekkei and Skidmore Owings and Merrill on commercial urban design and large-scale building projects. She was born in Tokyo and is married with three boys.

Antonio Cisternino is a professor in the Computer Science Department of the University of Pisa. His primary research is on meta-programming and domain-specific languages on virtual-machine-based execution environments. He has been active in the .NET community since 2001 and developed VSLab, a Microsoft Visual Studio add-in to support MATLAB-like programming in F# and Visual Studio. He is also author of annotated C#, an extension of C#, and Robotics4.NET, a framework for programming robots with Microsoft .NET. He co-authored Expert F# 2.0, a book on the F# programming language. Cisternino holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Pisa.

Gabe Cohn is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Ubiquitous Computing Lab at the University of Washington. His research involves designing customized hardware for ubiquitous-computing applications. In particular, he is focused on enabling new, ultra-low-power sensing solutions for the home and creating novel human-computer-interaction techniques. He was awarded a Microsoft Research Ph.D. Fellowship in 2012 and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship in 2010. He received his B.S. degree with honors in Electrical Engineering in 2009 from the California Institute of Technology, where he specialized in embedded systems, computer architectures, and digital VLSI. He is pursuing his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at the University of Washington and is advised by Shwetak Patel.

Lillie Coney is associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a public interest research organization in Washington, DC. EPIC was established to focus public attention on civil liberties issues. Coney joined EPIC in 2004 to head up the organization’s voting and privacy project. In 2005, she was named associate director. In 2009, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appointed Coney to the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) Board of Advisors. EAC is an independent, bipartisan commission charged with developing guidance to meet Help America Vote Act requirements. Prior to her appointment to the EAC Board of Advisors, she testified before the commission on the topics of voting system standards, statewide, centralized voter registration list, and voter privacy. Under her leadership, EPIC published two reports on e-deceptive campaign practices in 2008 and 2010. EPIC will soon publish a report on smartphones and the 2012 election.

Scott Counts is a researcher in the neXus group at Microsoft Research Redmond, working in the area of computational social science. He studies technology-mediated social phenomena both at large scales, as in today’s social-media systems, and at small scales, down to the level of neurons. Counts’ broad topics of interest include authority and influence, emotional expression, and the “cognition of the user” in modern information environments. He has served as program co-chair for the AAAI International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media and general co-chair for the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. Counts received a Microsoft Research Graduate Fellowship and a National Research Service Award Fellowship en route to his Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Washington.

Christoph Csallner is an assistant professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of Texas at Arlington. Previously, he worked for Google and Microsoft Research and received a Ph.D. degree from Georgia Tech.

Csallner is working on problems in software engineering, especially in testing, reverse engineering, and automatic data-structure repair. One problem on which he has been working is how to reduce the high ratio of false bug warnings produced by automated bug-finding tools. He has received a Distinguished Paper Award during the 2006 ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis, a Best Paper Award during the 2007 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, and a Best Paper Award during the 2010 IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering.

George Demiris is professor of Biobehavioral Nursing and Health Systems at the School of Nursing and Biomedical and Health Informatics in the School of Medicine at the University of Washington, where he also is the director of the Clinical Informatics and Patient Centered Technologies Program. He obtained his Ph.D. degree in Health Informatics from the University of Minnesota. His research interests include the design and evaluation of home-based technologies for older adults and patients with chronic conditions and disabilities, smart homes, and ambient assisted living applications and the use of telehealth in home care and hospice. Demiris is the chair of the International Medical Informatics Association Working Group on Smart Homes and Ambient Assisted Living, the past chair of the Human Factors Special Interest Group of the American Telemedicine Association, and the lead convener of the Technology and Aging Special Interest Group of the Gerontological Society of America.

Jim Demmel received his B.S. in Mathematics from the California Institute of Technology in 1975 and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1983. After spending six years on the faculty of the Courant Institute at New York University, he joined the Computer Science Division and Mathematics Department at Berkeley in 1990, where he holds a joint appointment.

Steve Feiner is professor of Computer Science at Columbia University, where he directs the Computer Graphics and User Interfaces Lab. Feiner is coauthor of Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice and of Introduction to Computer Graphics, received an ONR Young Investigator Award, and was elected to the CHI Academy. With his students, he has won the ACM UIST Lasting Impact Award and best-paper awards at ACM UIST, ACM CHI, ACM VRST, and IEEE ISMAR. His lab created the first outdoor, mobile augmented-reality system using a see-through display in 1996, and the lab has pioneered experimental applications of augmented reality to fields such as tourism, journalism, maintenance, and construction.

In recent years, Feiner has been program co-chair for IEEE Virtual Reality 2012 and Foundations of Digital Games 2012, general chair or co-chair for ACM VRST 2008 (15th Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology) and INTETAIN 2008 (Second International Conference on Intelligent Technologies for Interactive Entertainment), and doctoral-symposium chair for ACM UIST from 2009 to 2012.

Bill Gaver is professor of Design and leads the Interaction Research Studio at Goldsmiths, University of London. With his group, he has developed approaches to design ranging from Cultural Probes to the use of documentary film to help assess people’s experience with designs, pursued conceptual work on topics such as ambiguity and interpretation, and produced highly finished prototypes that have been deployed for long-term field trials and exhibited in major international exhibitions. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts and a member of the CHI Academy. Current projects concern designing computational devices for older people, batch production of research prototypes for large-scale field trials, and co-designing communities and devices to explore energy use.

Patrice Godefroid is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research. He received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering, with a Computer Science elective, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Belgium’s University of Liege, in 1989 and 1994 respectively. From 1994 to 2006, he worked at Bell Laboratories, part of Lucent Technologies, where he was promoted to “distinguished member of technical staff” in 2001. His research interests include program (mostly software) specification, analysis, testing, and verification.

Godefroid is probably best known for his pioneering work on partial-order reduction for model checking concurrent systems (his Ph.D. thesis is published as LNCS volume 1032 by Springer), for his work on VeriSoft, the first software model checker for mainstream programming languages such as C and C++, for his work on 3-valued model checking with may/must abstractions for sound program verification and falsification, and for his work on automatic test generation with DART. More recently, he co-developed SAGE, the first white-box fuzzer for security testing, which was credited to have found roughly a third of the security vulnerabilities discovered by file fuzzing during the development of Windows 7.

Sharad Goel is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research New York City. His primary research area is computational social science, an emerging discipline at the intersection of computer science, statistics, and the social sciences. He is particularly interested in large-scale empirical analyses that address questions motivated by sociology and economics. Before joining Microsoft Research, Goel worked in the Microeconomics and Social Systems group at Yahoo! Research. He holds a B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Cornell University.

Gerardo Gonzalez is a postdoc researcher from Lancaster University who is working in collaborative projects between the School of Computing and Communications and Microsoft Research Cambridge’s Socio-Digital Systems group. He is involved in the development of human-computer-interaction systems that explore the use of touchless technology within the operating theater. Gonzalez’s background is in computer-assisted surgery and medical visualization, working previously in projects related to augmented reality for surgical navigation and real-time simulation of the human cardiovascular system.

J. Alex Halderman is an assistant professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan, where his research spans applied computer security and tech-centric public policy. Halderman has studied topics ranging from web security, data privacy, digital-rights management, and cybercrime to technological aspects of intellectual-property law and government regulation. He is known for helping to introduce the ”cold-boot attack,” which breaks encryption by literally freezing a computer’s memory, and for exposing Sony’s rootkit digital-rights management and other harmful copy-protection technologies. A noted expert on electronic voting security, Halderman demonstrated the first voting-machine virus and helped lead California’s ”top-to-bottom” electronic-voting review. He has uncovered vulnerabilities in numerous deployed voting systems. His recent work includes the first independent security analysis of India’s electronic-voting machines and hacking into the District of Columbia’s proposed system for enabling overseas and military voters to cast absentee ballots over the Internet. He holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University.

Ahmed E. Hassan is the NSERC/RIM Software Engineering Chair at the School of Computing in Queen’s University of Canada. Hassan spearheaded the organization and creation of the Mining Software Repositories (MSR) conference and its research community. He co-edited special issues of the IEEE Transaction on Software Engineering and the Journal of Empirical Software Engineering on the MSR topic.

Early tools and techniques developed by Hassan’s team already are integrated into products used by millions of users worldwide. Hassan’s industrial experience includes helping architect the Blackberry wireless platform at RIM and working for IBM Research, at the Almaden Research Lab, and Nortel Networks, at the Computer Research Lab. He is the named inventor of patents in several jurisdictions around the world, including the United States, Europe, India, Canada, and Japan.

Marti Hearst is a professor in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. She received B.A., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from UC Berkeley and was a member of the research staff at Xerox PARC from 1994 to 1997.

A primary focus of Hearst’s research is user interfaces for search. She has invented or participated in several well-known search-interface projects, including scatter/gather clustering of search results, TileBars query-term visualization, BioText search over bioscience literature, and the Flamenco project, which investigated and promoted the use of faceted metadata for collection navigation. She has published extensively on these and other topics.

The Flamenco project has had a significant impact in industry and practice; interfaces similar in design to Flamenco are now the standard on e-commerce, image-navigation, and library-catalog sites, and support for faceted navigation is now standard in content-management systems. Hearst also has acted as a consultant for a wide range of search companies.

Hearst has advised more than 50 master’s-level interface-design projects, from problem formation and needs assessment through three rounds of evaluation. She has taught Information Organization and Retrieval and a course called Search Engines: Technology, Society, and Business, which includes a set of popular video lectures.

Larry Heck has been with Microsoft since 2009. He leads a scientific-research team in the Online Services Division focusing on natural language conversational technologies, with a dual appointment in Microsoft Research. From 2005 to 2009, he was vice president of Search & Advertising Sciences at Yahoo!, responsible for the creation, development, and deployment of the algorithms powering Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! Sponsored Search, Yahoo! Content Match, and Yahoo! display advertising. From 1998 to 2005, he was with Nuance Communications and served as vice president of R&D, responsible for natural language processing, speech recognition, voice authentication, and text-to-speech synthesis technology. He began his career as a researcher at the Stanford Research Institute, from 1992 to 1998, initially in the field of acoustics and later in speech research with the Speech Technology and Research Laboratory. Heck received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Tech in 1991. He is well-published in the scientific literature, has dozens of patents, and has served on numerous technical boards for the IEEE and the ISCA.

Tony Hey, vice president of Microsoft Research Connections, is responsible for worldwide university research collaborations with Microsoft researchers. Hey is also responsible for the multidisciplinary eScience research group within Microsoft Research. Before joining Microsoft, Hey served as director of the U.K.’s e-Science Initiative, managing the government’s efforts to build a new scientific infrastructure for collaborative, multidisciplinary, data-intensive research projects. Before leading this initiative, Hey led a research group in the area of 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.

Hey is a Fellow of the U.K.’s Royal Academy of Engineering and was awarded a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire honor in 2005 for services to science. He is also a Fellow of the British Computer Society, The Institution of Engineering and Technology, the Institute of Physics, and the U.S. American Association for the Advancement of Science. Hey has written books on particle physics and computing and has a passionate interest in communicating the excitement of science and technology to young people. He has co-authored “popular” books on quantum mechanics and on relativity.

Eric Horvitz is a Microsoft distinguished scientist and deputy managing director of Microsoft Research Redmond. He has pursued theoretical and practical challenges with sensing, learning, and decision-making under uncertainty, with applications in human decision-making and in computational systems that perceive, learn, and reason. He has served as president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and is the immediate past president of the organization. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the AAAI. He received his Ph.D. and M.D. degrees at Stanford University.

Eduard Hovy directs the Human Language Technology Group at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California (USC), and he holds adjunct professorships at universities in China, Korea, and Canada. He is also a research associate professor of USC’s Computer Science Department and co-director of Research for the DHS Center for Command, Control, and Interoperability Data Analytics. Hovy completed a Ph.D. in Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence) at Yale University in 1987. His research addresses areas in natural language processing, including machine reading of text, question answering, information extraction, automated text summarization, the semi-automated construction of large lexicons and ontologies, and machine translation. Hovy is the author or co-editor of six books and more than 300 technical articles, and he is a popular invited speaker. In 2001, Hovy served as president of the Association for Computational Linguistics and, in 2001–2003, as president of the International Association of Machine Translation. Hovy regularly co-teaches courses and serves on advisory boards for institutes and funding organizations in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United States.

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. Javid has had a long career in research organizations, working for companies such as General Electric and Boeing before joining Microsoft. He has made advances in the application of optimization and computing algorithms in industries such as power, aerospace, and pulp and paper.

Javid is the chair of the Industry Advisory Board of the IEEE Computer Society. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he made advances to optimization for multiple-time-scale dynamic systems.

Rane Johnson engages with academics worldwide to identify high-impact areas for research investigations. She is working on projects that use technology to transform how we learn about history and how we eradicate human trafficking. Johnson also serves as Microsoft Research’s lead for growing, attracting, and retaining women in research, science, and engineering. She actively works with NCWIT, Anita Borg, CRA-W, and researchers to grow the pipeline of women in research and STEM fields. She is passionate about education and technology, with 16 years of experience in the field. Johnson is a graduate of Bucknell University with a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and a B.A. in Economics/Finance, and of George Fox University with an Executive MBA in Transformational Leadership.

Ece Kamar is a researcher in the Adaptive Systems group at Microsoft Research Redmond. She received her Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Harvard University in 2010. Her research interests are in the areas of decision-making, multiagent systems, and human-computer interaction. She is interested in theoretical models, as well as practical challenges for building computer systems that can work effectively with people in the real world.

David Karger (Ph.D., Stanford University, 1994) is a professor of Computer Science and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

His work spans many areas of computer science, including algorithms, information retrieval, databases, machine learning, natural language processing, distributed systems, coding and communication, networking, and human-computer interaction.

Karger’s work in information management includes document classification and clustering, probabilistic models for information retrieval and extraction, Semantic Web tools, personal-information management, the social web, and crowdsourcing. An ongoing interest has been developing tools that give individual users more power to define the way their information is modeled, organized, visualized, and managed. His group’s Haystack system (CIKM ’99) was one of the first Semantic Desktop applications offering flexible, unified management of a personal-information repository. He also co-led MIT’s SIMILE project, a collaboration with MIT Libraries and the World Wide Web consortium developing Semantic Web tools to improve the management and retrieval of information at an institutional level.

Karger received the National Academy of Sciences’ 2003 Award for Initiatives in research and was elected an ACM Fellow in 2009. He was program co-chair for the 2009 International Semantic Web Conference and regularly serves on the program committees for ISWC, WWW, and CHI.

Cliff Lampe is an assistant professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. He studies how socio-technical systems can be designed and used to support large-scale cooperative behavior, and the outcomes of interaction in social-computing systems. In this work, Lampe studies sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Wikipedia, and makes social-media sites for use in collective-action efforts. His work has been funded by such organizations as the National Science Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Great Lakes Protection Fund.

Jaron Lanier’s interests include biomimetic-information architectures, user interfaces, heterogeneous scientific simulations, advanced information systems for medicine, and computational approaches to the fundamentals of physics.

Lanier’s name is also often associated with virtual-reality research. He either coined or popularized the terms ”virtual reality” and ”mixed reality” and, in the early 1980s, founded VPL Research, the first company to sell virtual-reality products. In the late 1980s, he led the team that developed the first implementations of multiperson virtual worlds using head-mounted displays, for both local- and wide-area networks, as well as the first ”avatars,” or representations of users within such systems.

From 1997 to 2001, Lanier was the chief scientist of Advanced Network & Services and served as the lead scientist of the National Tele-Immersion Initiative. From 2001 to 2004, he was visiting scientist at Silicon Graphics Inc. He was scholar at large for Microsoft from 2006 to 2009 and has been a partner architect for Microsoft Research since 2009.

Lanier is also a well-known author and speaker. TIME Magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2010. His book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, released in 2010, was an international bestseller.

Mark Latonero is the research director and deputy managing director at the Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership & Policy and a research assistant professor at the University of Southern California (USC).

His research focuses on emerging communication technology, social change, and human rights. Latonero’s recent work examines the intersection of technology and human trafficking. Specific interests include technologies that disrupt the social dynamics of the trafficking trade and technological platforms that leverage real-time data to provide actionable information for counter-trafficking efforts.

Recently, he began a two-year appointment to a National Academies of Sciences Institute of Medicine committee to study domestic minor sex trafficking and the commercial sexual exploitation of children. He is also a member of the California attorney general’s working group on human trafficking. He has published in journals such as Information, Communication & Society, the International Journal of Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management, and Communication Research. Latonero received his Ph.D. from the USC Annenberg School for Communication and was a postdoctoral research scholar at the London School of Economics.

Joseph J. LaViola Jr. is the Science Applications International Corporation Faculty Fellow and an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Central Florida, where he directs the Interactive Systems and User Experience Lab. He is also an adjunct assistant research professor in the Computer Science Department at Brown University. His primary research interests include sketch-based interactive computing, 3-D spatial interfaces for video games, human-robot interaction, multimodal interaction, and user-interface evaluation. His work has appeared in journals such as ACM TOCHI, IEEE PAMI, IEEE TVCG, and IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, and he has presented research at conferences including ACM SIGGRAPH, ACM CHI, the ACM Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games, and IEEE Virtual Reality. He also has co-authored 3-D User Interfaces: Theory and Practice, the first comprehensive book on 3-D user interfaces. In 2009, he won a National Science Foundation Career Award to conduct research on mathematical sketching. LaViola received a Sc.M. in Computer Science in 2000, a Sc.M. in Applied Mathematics in 2001, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2005, all from Brown University.

Mary G. Leary is an associate professor of law at the Catholic University of America. A former prosecutor, Leary previously served the Office of Legal Counsel at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the National Center for the Prosecution of Child Abuse.

Leary’s scholarship examines the intersection of contemporary social problems, technology, and criminal law and procedure. She focuses on areas of exploitation and abuse of women, children, and “vulnerable people.” Her most recent publications include “The Missed Opportunity of United States v. Jones – Commercial Erosion of the Fourth Amendment,” forthcoming in the winter of 2012 in The University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law; “New Frontier in Debate Over Child Pornography Sentencing? Judicial Challenges to Mandatory Minimum Sentences” in Sex Offender Law Report, Vol. 13, No. 1 (2011); “Reasonable Expectations of Privacy for Youth in a Digital Age” in Mississippi Law Review, Vol. 80, No. 3 (2011); and “Sexting or Self-Produced Child Pornography? The Dialogue Continues—Structured Prosecutorial Discretion within a Multidisciplinary Response” in the University of Virginia Journal of Social Policy and the Law, Vol. 17 (2010). Her current work in progress examines the role of technology in human trafficking and in eroding privacy expectations.

Ben Livshits is a researcher at Microsoft Research Redmond. Originally from St. Petersburg, Russia, he received a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Math from Cornell University in 1999, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2002 and 2006, respectively. Livshits’ research interests include application of sophisticated static and dynamic analysis techniques to finding errors in programs.

He is known for his work in software reliability and especially for tools to improve software security, with a primary focus on approaches to finding buffer overruns in C programs and a variety of security vulnerabilities, such as cross-site scripting and SQL injections in web-based applications. He is the author of several dozen academic papers and patents. Lately, he has been focusing on how web application and browser reliability, performance, and security can be improved through a combination of static and runtime techniques.

Suresh Lodha is a professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His current research interests include data analytics and visualization, computer vision, and educational innovation. He has an M.Sc. from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, an M.A. in Mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rice University. He has published more than 100 articles in journals and conferences and has served on several panels for grant reviews.

He has co-authored a book titled The Atlas of Global Inequalities using data curation and visualization. He has more than 20 years of teaching experience and has won excellence in teaching awards at UC Berkeley and at UC Santa Cruz. He recently used TouchDevelop as the programming language for an introductory computer-science course and will be sharing his experience with Faculty Summit attendees.

Ratul Mahajan is a researcher at Microsoft Research Redmond and an affiliate professor at the University of Washington. His research interests include all aspects of networked systems, especially their architecture and design. His work spans Internet routing and measurements, incentive-compatible protocol design, practical models for wireless networks, and vehicular networks. He has published more than 30 papers in top-tier venues such as SIGCOMM, SOSP, NSDI, MobiCom, and MobiSys. He is a winner of the ACM SIGCOMM Rising Star Award, the William R. Bennett Prize, a SIGCOMM best-paper award, and a Microsoft Research Graduate Fellowship. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 2005 and his B.Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi in 1999.

Tim Mattson is an old-fashioned parallel programmer specializing in scientific computing—quantum chemistry, exploration geophysics, and bioinformatics. He was part of the team that created the first TFLOP computer, ASCI Red; the OpenMP API for shared memory programming; the OpenCL programming language for heterogeneous platforms; Intel’s first TFLOP chip, the 80-core Terascale chip; and Intel’s 48-core, Single Chip Cloud Computer research processor. Mattson has published extensively, including the books Patterns for Parallel Programming, with Beverly Sanders and Berna Massingill (Addison-Wesley, 2004); Introduction to Concurrency in Programming Languages, with Matthew J. Sottile and Craig E Rasmussen (CRC Press, 2009); and OpenCL Programming Guide, with Aaftab Munshi, Ben Gaster, James Fung, and Dan Ginsburg (Addison-Wesley, 2011).

Deborah McGuinness is the Tetherless World Senior Constellation Professor of Computer Science and Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), where she also is founding director of the Web Science Research Center. McGuinness is a leading authority on the Semantic Web and has been working in knowledge representation and reasoning environments for more than 25 years. Her primary research thrusts include work on explanation, trust, ontologies, e-science, open data, and semantically enabled schema and data integration. Before joining RPI, she was the acting director of the Knowledge Systems and the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Stanford University and was a senior research scientist in the Computer Science Department there.

McGuinness is also known for her leading role in the development of the W3C Recommended Web Ontology Language (OWL) and her work on earlier description-logic languages and environments. She has published more than 150 peer-reviewed papers and has authored granted patents in knowledge-based systems, ontology environments, configuration, and search technology.

She received her bachelor’s degree in Math and Computer Science from Duke University, her master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, and her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rutgers University.

Miriah Meyer is a USTAR assistant professor in the School of Computing at the University of Utah and a faculty member in the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute. Her research focuses on the design of visualization systems for helping scientists make sense of heterogeneous data. She obtained her bachelor’s degree in Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State University and earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Utah. Before joining the faculty at Utah, she was a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard University and a visiting scientist at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT.

Meyer was named a Microsoft Research Faculty Fellow in 2012, and has been listed on Technology Review’s TR35 in 2011 and on Fast Company’s compilation of the 100 most creative people in 2012. She is the recipient of a NSF/CRA Computing Innovation Fellow award and an AAAS Mass Media Fellowship that landed her a stint as a science writer for the Chicago Tribune.

Paul Mitchell is senior director of Technology Policy for Microsoft. Mitchell, who assumed his role in July 2011, is responsible for strategic technology-policy initiatives in the areas of spectrum, power consumption, and broadband.

Previously, Mitchell held a variety of senior positions, including general manager of Interoperability and Standards, general manager of Policy and Standards, chief of staff for Microsoft TV, and general manager of Microsoft TV’s Tools and Applications product unit, delivering authoring and development products supporting Microsoft TV, as well as a suite of .NET-based interactive TV applications.

Before joining Microsoft TV, he headed a digital TV content team working with networks and studios to develop enhanced TV based on Internet technologies. In 1993, as a member of the Advanced Consumer Technology Division, Mitchell was involved in Microsoft’s early trials of the Microsoft Interactive TV System in Redmond (Washington) and Japan. He joined Microsoft as a product manager in the Developer Tools Division, where he helped secure developer adoption of Microsoft’s professional C and C++ products. He was responsible for launching Microsoft C7, Microsoft Visual C++, and Microsoft Visual C++ for Windows NT.

Robin Moeur is a principal program manager lead at Microsoft Research Redmond. Her career at Microsoft, which she joined in 1995, includes Internet startup management, product planning, network security, and program management. She currently works closely with researchers in a cross-lab collaboration to enable software-engineering analytics research for data-driven decision-making with the largest product groups at Microsoft. Moeur’s facilitation of product-group requirements and operations support ensures data availability for the world-class research and analysis performed at Microsoft Research labs in Redmond, Beijing, Bangalore, and Cambridge, U.K.

Meredith Ringel Morris is a computer scientist in the Natural Interaction group at Microsoft Research Redmond. She is also an affiliate associate professor in the department of Computer Science & Engineering and in the Information School at the University of Washington. Morris’ research area is human-computer interaction, with a particular emphasis on computer-supported cooperative work and social computing. She has published numerous technical articles and patents on multiuser interactive systems, and she recently co-authored the book, Collaborative Search: Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How? (Morgan & Claypool, 2010). Morris served as 2009 co-chair of the technical program for CHI, the ACM’s flagship conference on human-computer interaction, and is serving as program chair for CSCW 2014, the ACM’s premier conference on collaborative and social computing. She was named one of 2008’s 35 Innovators Under 35 by Technology Review. Morris earned a Ph.D. and an M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University, and an Sc.B. in Computer Science from Brown University.

Ranga Narasimhan has worked at Microsoft for more than 14 years. He was hired into Product Support Services as a support engineer and, three years later, became a software-design engineer (SDE), a role he has held for more than 11 years, primarily in services. As an SDE, he first worked on the Commerce Platform, which still powers subscription and billing services for large services such as Xbox LIVE. Seven years later, he moved to the Server & Tools Business to work on OneCare, then Windows Directory Services, and finally Forefront online protection for Exchange. In April 2011, Narasimhan joined the Online Services Division (OSD) to lead their engineering analytics effort. He currently is applying the insights gained from analytics toward enabling and enhancing new developer experiences to make OSD engineers more agile.

David Padua is the Donald Biggar Willet Professor of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he has been a faculty member since 1985. At the university, he has been associate director of the Center for Supercomputing Research and Development, a member of the Center for Simulation of Advanced Rockets’ Science Steering Committee, and chair of the College of Engineering Faculty Advisory Committee. He has served as a program-committee member, program chair, or general chair for more than 60 conferences and workshops. He served on the editorial board of the IEEE Transactions of Parallel and Distributed Systems and the ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems. He was editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Parallel Programming (IJPP) and steering-committee chair of ACM SIGPLAN’s Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming. He is member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing and IJPP, and editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Parallel Computing (Springer‐Verlag, 2012). His areas of interest include compilers, programming tools, machine organization, and parallel computing. He is a fellow of the IEEE and the ACM.

Rajesh Patel is a senior program manager at Microsoft with Bing.com. He owns the direction, strategy, and execution of the crowdsourcing platform at Bing. Building software to solve business problems and enabling many users’ scenarios via a platform is his passion and expertise. He has been engaged in understanding crowdsourcing trends and their impact on business. In the Bing Core Relevance group, Patel has delivered Microsoft’s first crowdsourcing platform to enable flexible human annotations for Bing to improve the relevance of search results and relevance measurement. The usage of crowdsourcing on this platform is increasing across Microsoft. Patel is engaged in crowdsourcing research areas and participates in crowdsourcing presentations and panel discussions.

David Patterson joined the University of California, Berkeley in 1977. He is director of the Parallel Computing Laboratory. In the past, he served as director of the Reliable Adaptive Distributed Systems Laboratory, as chair of Berkeley’s Computer Science Division, chair of the Computing Research Association, and president of the ACM. His most successful projects have been Reduced Instruction Set Computers, Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks, and Network of Workstations. All three research projects helped lead to multibillion-dollar industries. This research led to many papers and six books, with the most recent being Engineering Long-Lasting Software: An Agile Approach Using SaaS and Cloud Computing, co-authored with Armando Fox.

James W. Pennebaker is the Regents Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. He graduated from Eckerd College in Florida and received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas, specializing in Social Psychology.

Much of Pennebaker’s research focuses on the links among natural language, emotional upheavals, and health. Whereas his earlier work examined how writing about traumatic experience can improve physical health and immune function, his more recent studies have explored natural language. He finds that low-level word use is related to personality, deception, status, group dynamics, and emotional states. Author or editor of 10 books and more than 250 scientific articles, Pennebaker is among the most cited scientists in psychology and psychiatry. His current work is funded by the National Science Foundation and the Army Research Institute.

As Microsoft chief research officer, Richard F. (Rick) Rashid oversees worldwide operations for Microsoft Research, an organization encompassing more than 850 researchers across 13 labs worldwide. Microsoft Research conducts basic and applied research across more than 55 disciplines. His team collaborates with the world’s foremost researchers in academia, industry, and government to expand the state of the art across the breadth of computing and to help ensure the future of Microsoft’s products.

After joining Microsoft in September 1991, Rashid served as director and vice president of Microsoft Research and was promoted to his current role in 2000. In his earlier roles, he led research efforts on operating systems, networking, and multiprocessors, and he authored patents in such areas as data compression, networking, and operating systems. Before joining Microsoft, Rashid was a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. 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 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.

Michael Reiter is the Lawrence M. Slifkin Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). He received a B.S. degree in Mathematical Sciences from UNC in 1989, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Cornell University in 1991 and 1993, respectively. Before returning to UNC in 2007, Reiter held the positions of director of Secure Systems Research at Bell Labs and professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.

Reiter’s research interests include all areas of computer and communications security and distributed computing. He has served as program chair for the flagship computer-security conferences of the ACM, the IEEE, and the Internet Society, and as editor-in-chief of ACM Transactions of Information and System Security. He serves on the Emerging Technology and Research Advisory Committee for the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Reiter was named an ACM Fellow in 2008.

Lucy Sanders is CEO and co-founder of the National Center for Women & Information Technology, a consortium of more than 300 corporations, universities, and nonprofits working to increase the participation of girls and women in computing and information technology. She also serves as executive-in-residence for the ATLAS Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Sanders has an extensive industry background, having worked in R&D and executive positions at AT&T Bell Labs, Lucent Bell Labs, and Avaya Labs for more than 20 years, specializing in systems-level software and solutions, multimedia communication, and customer-relationship management. In 1996, she was awarded the Bell Labs Fellow Award, the highest technical accomplishment bestowed at the company. In 2004, she was awarded the Distinguished Alumni Award from the Department of Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder, and in 2011, she was recognized with the university’s George Norlin Award, for distinguished lifetime service. She has been inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame and recently was named by the U.S. secretary of Commerce to serve on the department’s Innovation Advisory Board.

Sanders received her B.S. and M.S. in computer science from Louisiana State University and the University of Colorado Boulder, respectively.

Mary Saunders serves as director of the Standards Coordination Office at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). She represents NIST and its significant interests in the standards- and conformity-assessment community and advises NIST leadership on policy and strategy relating to NIST’s role in standardization. Her responsibilities include serving as a central point of focus for standards and conformity-assessment policy for NIST, coordinating with the private sector and other federal agencies on standardization activities, leading interagency standards coordination, and leading NIST’s standards interactions with foreign governments.

Before her return to NIST, Saunders served as deputy assistant secretary for Manufacturing and Services, where she managed the day-to-day operations of the International Trade Administration’s Manufacturing and Services division of more than 200 industry specialists, economists, and international trade experts. She helped strengthen the competitive position of U.S. industries in the U.S. and world markets by coordinating Commerce Department strategies, policies, and programs with U.S. industries in mind. At NIST, she served in a variety of positions during a 15-year career, including chief of the Standards Services Division. In that capacity, she administered a range of standards-related programs to provide solutions to regulatory and industry needs and to increase trade opportunities.

Albrecht Schmidt is a professor of human-computer interaction at the University of Stuttgart. Previously, he was a professor of user-interface engineering and pervasive computing at the University of Duisburg-Essen. In 2006–2007, he had a joined position between the University of Bonn and the Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems, working in the area of media informatics. He studied computer science in Ulm, Germany, and Manchester, U.K., and received a Ph.D. from Lancaster (U.K.) University in 2003. His research interest is in human-computer interaction beyond the desktop, including user interfaces for mobile devices and cars. Schmidt has published more than 100 refereed archival publications, and his work is widely cited. He is co-founder of the ACM conference on Tangible and Embedded Interaction, and he initiated the conference on Automotive User Interfaces (auto-ui.org). He is an area editor of IEEE Pervasive Computing and edits a column on invisible computing for the IEEE’s Computer magazine.

Scarlet Schwiderski-Grosche is a senior research program manager for Microsoft Research Connections. She is based in Cambridge, U.K., where she is responsible for academic research partnerships relating to sensors and devices, especially regarding the .NET Gadgeteer project; natural user interfaces; and medical imaging. Moreover, Schwiderski-Grosche manages the Microsoft Research Ph.D. Scholarship Programme in the Europe, Middle East, and Africa region.

She has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge and worked in academia for almost 10 years before joining Microsoft in March 2009. She was a lecturer in Information Security at Royal Holloway, University of London, from 2003 to 2009. She has a number of publications relating to distributed and mobile/wireless systems, databases, and security.

James Scott is a researcher in the Sensors and Devices group at Microsoft Research Cambridge. His research interests span a wide range of topics in ubiquitous and pervasive computing, and they include novel sensors and devices, mobile interaction, rapid prototyping, wireless and mobile networking, energy management, and security and privacy. He has authored more than 30 peer-reviewed publications and has served on the program committees of leading international conferences such as UbiComp, MobiSys, and Pervasive. Scott is the current steering- committee chair of the UbiComp conference series. Learn more about his research.

Robert Sim is an applied research manager in the Windows Live Safety Platform (WLSP) group. Before joining WLSP in 2008, he was a research scientist at Braintech Inc., Microsoft adcenter Labs, and the University of British Columbia. He completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science at McGill University in 2003. WLSP is responsible for building large-scale intelligence systems for protecting user security and safety across several Microsoft products, including IE Smartscreen for phishing and malware protection, Hotmail anti-spam protection, Windows Live account abuse, and Windows Live Family Safety.

Burton J. Smith, a Microsoft technical fellow, works with various groups within the company to help address challenges associated with the emergence of many-core systems and the increasing importance of distributed services. Before joining Microsoft in 2005, he co-founded Cray Inc., formerly Tera Computer Company, where he variously served as its chief scientist, a member of the board of directors, and its chairman until 1999. Before that, Smith spent six years with Denelcor, Inc. and three years at the Institute for Defense Analyses Supercomputing Research Center.

In 2003, Smith received the Seymour Cray Award from the IEEE Computer Society and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. He received the Eckert-Mauchly Award in 1991, given jointly by IEEE and ACM, and was elected a fellow of each organization in 1994. He was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010. Smith attended the University of New Mexico, where he earned a B.S.E.E. degree, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned S.M., E.E., and Sc.D. degrees.

Dawn Song is an associate professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining UC Berkeley, she was an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University from 2002 to 2007. Her research interest lies in security and privacy issues in computer systems and networks, including areas ranging from software security, networking security, database security, and distributed-systems security to applied cryptography. She is the recipient of various awards, including the MacArthur Fellowship, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the Technology Review

TR-35 Award, the IBM Faculty Award, the George Tallman Ladd Research Award, the Okawa Foundation Research Award, the Li Ka Shing Foundation Women in Science Distinguished Lecture Series Award, and best-paper awards from top conferences.

Don Syme is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge. He is architect of the F# language and has made significant contributions to the designs of Microsoft .NET, C#, and Microsoft Visual Basic. Learn more.

Kenji Takeda is solutions architect and technical manager for the Microsoft Research Connections team in the Europe, Middle East, and Africa region. He has extensive experience in cloud computing, high-performance and high-productivity computing, data-intensive science, scientific workflows, scholarly communication, engineering, and educational outreach. He has a passion for developing novel computational approaches to address fundamental and applied problems in science and engineering. He previously was co-director of the Microsoft Institute for High Performance Computing and senior lecturer in Aeronautics at the U.K.’s University of Southampton.

Stewart Tansley is responsible for academic research partnerships related to devices in natural user interactions, including cyber-physical systems and device-oriented computing—which includes such areas as robotics research and sensor-networks research—as part of Microsoft Research Connections. Before joining Microsoft in 2001, he spent 13 years in software research and development in the telecommunications industry, focusing on technology transfer. Tansley has a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence applied to Engineering from Loughborough University in the United Kingdom. He has published a variety of papers on robotics for education, artificial intelligence, and network management; he has several patents; and he co-authored a book on software engineering for artificial-intelligence applications. In 2009, he co-edited The Fourth Paradigm, a book collating 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.

Jaime Teevan is a senior researcher in the Context, Learning, and User Experience for Search Group at Microsoft Research Redmond and an affiliate assistant professor in the Information School at the University of Washington. She studies how people use digital information, particularly as related to their social and temporal context, and builds tools to help support these information interactions. Teevan was named a Technology Review TR35 Young Innovator in 2009 for her research on personalized search. She co-authored the first book on collaborative web search and was chair of the Web Search and Data Mining 2012 conference. Teevan also edited a book called Personal Information Management (PIM), edited a special issue of Communications of the ACM on that topic, and organized workshops on PIM and query-log analysis. She has published numerous technical papers, including several best-paper winners, and received a Ph.D. and S.M. from MIT and a B.S. in Computer Science from Yale University.

Nikolai Tillmann is a principal research software-design engineer at Microsoft Research Redmond. He recently started the TouchDevelop project, which enables anyone to write programs for mobile devices on mobile devices. He leads the Pex project, an automatic test-case generator for .NET applications based on parameterized unit testing and dynamic symbolic execution. Pex4fun, using the same underlying technology, hosts a serious, cloud-based game that helps students improve their programming skills. He also works on the Spur project, a tracing, just-in-time compiler for .NET and JavaScript code. Previously, he worked on AsmL, Spec Explorer, and XRT, tools for model-based testing.

Josep Torrellas is a professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the director of the Center for Programmable Extreme Scale Computing, and the director of the Illinois-Intel Parallelism Center (I2PC). He is a Fellow of IEEE and ACM. He was a Willett Faculty Scholar and the chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Computer Architecture (2005–2010). He has graduated 30 Ph.D. students, who are now leaders in academia and industry.

Torrellas’ research interests are shared-memory parallel computer architectures. He has contributed with designs for thread-level speculation and speculative synchronization; cache hierarchy organizations for high-performance sequential consistency; embedded-ring snoopy cache-coherence protocols; incremental in-memory checkpointing; popular models of process variation and wearout; and new techniques for software debugging, including deterministic replay of parallel programs. He has received nine best-paper awards. His current research projects are The Bulk Multicore Architecture for parallel programming productivity, funded by I2PC, and The Thrifty-Runnemede Extreme Scale Architecture for energy and power efficiency, funded by DARPA in collaboration with Intel.

Torrellas received a Ph.D. from Stanford University.

Zeynep Tufecki is an assistant professor in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as well as an affiliate adjunct professor in the Department of Sociology. She has been a fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and next year, she’ll be a fellow at the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy. Her research focuses on the interaction between technology and society, with special emphasis on sociality, privacy, the public sphere, social movements, and collective actions. Tufecki has published on a range of topics ranging from social-media use by protestors in Cairo’s Tahrir Square to privacy practices of young adults and the cultural and social dimensions of the digital divide(s). She co-edited Inequity in the Technopolis: Race, Class, Gender, and the Digital Divide in Austin.

Cameron Turner is the group program manager for Telemetry in Windows Fundamentals. His team is responsible for delivering actionable analytics to Windows, Microsoft, and the Microsoft ecosystem through various systems including Windows Error Reporting, Software Quality Metrics, and Activation and Validation Services. Turner’s team is responsible for collecting and processing more than 4 billion web transactions per day and delivering timely analytics and intelligence to improve end users’ experiences on all of Microsoft’s platforms, including Windows, Windows Phone, and Xbox. Before his current role, he served as CEO of ClickStream Technologies, a Bay Area online market-analytics firm that was acquired by Microsoft in 2009. Turner holds a B.A. in Architectural Engineering from Dartmouth College and an MBA from Oxford University.

Andries van Dam is the Thomas J. Watson Jr. University Professor of Technology and Education and professor of Computer Science at Brown University, where he has been since 1965. He was a co-founder of Brown’s Computer Science Department and its first chairman from 1979 to 1985 as well as Brown’s first vice president for Research, from 2002 to 2006. His research includes work on computer graphics, hypermedia systems, educational software, and, most recently, pen- and touch-centric computing. He has been working for more than four decades on software for electronic books with interactive illustrations, for use in teaching and research.

Van Dam is the co-author of nearly a dozen books, including Computer Graphics:

Principles and Practice, with James D. Foley, Steven K. Feiner, and John F. Hughes. In 1967, van Dam co-founded ACM SICGRAPH, the precursor to SIGGRAPH, and from 1985 to 1987 was chairman of the Computing Research Association. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and has received honorary doctorates from Technische Universität Darmstadt, Swarthmore College, the University of Waterloo, and ETH Zurich.

Surya Vanka is principal manager of user experience at Microsoft, overseeing best practices and engineering standards to create high-quality user experiences for Microsoft customers. He has worked as a designer and user-experience manager on several products during his 13 years at Microsoft. His mission is to put users rather than technology at the center of the development process for all Microsoft products. Vanka serves as chief of staff of the User Experience Leadership Team and as discipline owner for user experience. He is the winner of two Microsoft Best Practice Awards, the Microsoft accessibility achievement award, and several industry recognition awards. Before joining Microsoft, Vanka was a professor of Design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Fellow at the prestigious Center for Advanced Study. He is the author of two books on design, as well as several publications, and has lectured on design in more than 20 countries. His work has appeared in numerous venues, including Form, I.D., Design Council, WIRED, Interactions, the BBC, and National Public Radio. He regularly speaks on interaction design, user experience, product development, and strategic innovation, and he teaches courses and seminars on these subjects around the world.

Juan Vargas earned a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Vanderbilt University in 1988. He was a member of the Computer Science and Engineering faculty at the University of South Carolina from 1988 to 2004, teaching and conducting research on data mining, Bayesian networks, and embedded and distributed systems. Vargas was Microsoft’s senior academic-relations manager from May 2004 to September 2007 and Google’s university-relations manager from 2007 to 2009. He has been a principal research manager with Microsoft since 2009.

Evelyne Viegas is the director of Semantic Computing at Microsoft Research Redmond. Semantic Computing is about interacting with data in rich, safe, semantically meaningful ways to create the path from data to information, knowledge, and intelligence. In her current role, she 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.

Before her present role, Viegas 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. She serves on international editorial, program, and award committees.

Luis von Ahn is the A. Nico Habermann Associate Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He is working to develop a new area of computer science that he calls Human Computation, which aims to build systems that combine the intelligence of humans and computers to solve large-scale problems that neither can solve alone. An example of his work is reCAPTCHA, in which more than a billion people—15 percent of humanity—have helped digitize books and newspapers. Among his many honors are a MacArthur Fellowship, a Packard Fellowship, a Sloan Research Fellowship, a Microsoft New Faculty Fellowship, the ACM Grace Hopper Award, and Carnegie Mellon’s Herbert A. Simon Award for Teaching Excellence and the Alan J. Perlis SCS Student Teaching Award. Von Ahn has been named one of the “50 Best Brains in Science” by Discover Magazine, one of the 50 most influential people in technology by Silicon.com, and one of the ”Brilliant 10 Scientists” by Popular Science.

Kuansan Wang is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research Redmond. He manages the Internet Services Research Center, a group dedicated to advancing the state of the art and transferring Microsoft Research technologies to Microsoft’s Online Services Division. Wang joined Microsoft Research in March 1998 as a researcher in the Speech Technology group, conducting research in the areas of spoken-language understanding and multimodal dialog systems. His research work in these areas has been adopted as 11 industrial standards by W3C, ECMA, ETSI, and ISO. From 2003 to 2007, Wang was a software architect in product groups, responsible for Microsoft Speech Server 2004, Speech Application Interface 5.2, Microsoft Voice Command, Microsoft call-center automation, and Microsoft Response Point. Since his return to Microsoft Research in October 2007, he has been conducting research in the area of semantic search and the Bing Dialog Model.

Wei Wang is a professor in the Department of Computer Science and a member of the Carolina Center for Genomic Sciences and the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). She received her Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1999. She was a research staff member at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center between 1999 and 2002. Wang’s research interests include data mining, bioinformatics and computational biology, and databases. She has filed seven patents and has published one monograph and more than 150 research papers in international journals and major peer-reviewed conference proceedings.

Wang received the IBM Invention Achievement Awards in 2000 and 2001. She was the recipient of a UNC Junior Faculty Development Award in 2003 and a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Award in 2005. She was named a Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellow in 2005. She was honored with the 2007 Phillip and Ruth Hettleman Prize for Artistic and Scholarly Achievement at UNC.

XiaoFeng Wang is an associate professor in the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University Bloomington (IU). He received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 2004 and has since been a faculty member at IU. Wang is a recognized active researcher on system and network security. His group extensively publishes at leading security conferences and vigorously pursues innovative, high-impact research directions. His current work focuses on web and cloud security and genome privacy. He is a recipient of the 2011 Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies and the Best Practical Paper Award at the 32nd IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. His work frequently receives attentions from the media, including CNN, MSNBC, Slashdot, CNET, and PC World. Wang also has been actively serving the research community, participating in the program/organization committees of numerous conferences and workshops. His research is supported by the National Science Foundation, the department of Homeland Security, the Air Force, and Microsoft Research. In 2010, he served as director for the IU Security Informatics program, including the Master Program in Security.

Ethan Watrall is assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and associate director of MATRIX: The Center for Humane Arts, Letters and Social Sciences Online at Michigan State University. In addition, he is director of the Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative and the Cultural Heritage Informatics Fieldschool at Michigan State University. Watrall’s interests fall in the domain of cultural-heritage informatics, with particular focus on digital archaeology, as well as serious games and meaningful play for cultural-heritage learning and. He is the principal investigator of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)-funded Red Land/Black Land: Teaching Ancient Egyptian History Through Game-Based Learning project, as well as co-principal investigator of the NEH-funded Pox and the City: A Digital Role-Playing Game for the History of Medicine project. In addition, Watrall is co-editor of Archaeology 2.0: New Tools for Communication and Collaboration (UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, 2012), an open-access volume. In addition to his scholarly work, he has written trade books on web and interactive design, including Head First Web Design (O’Reilly, 2008).

Sally Shipman Wentworth joined the Internet Society in May 2009 as senior manager of public policy. She is responsible for working with governments and decision-makers on critical policy issues regarding online access.

Before joining the Internet Society, Wentworth was the assistant director for Telecommunications and Information Policy in the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House from 2007-2009. She was responsible for government-wide coordination and implementation of policies related to Internet governance; cybersecurity; telecommunications policy; the digital-television transition; intellectual property and patent reform; privacy; broadband deployment; spectrum auctions; and other information-technology policies.

From 1999 to 2007, Wentworth was the principal policy adviser on Internet-policy issues in the U.S. Department of State. She organized U.S. negotiations for several U.N. treaty conferences, Phases I and II of the U.N. World Summit on the Information Society, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, the Organization of American States, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Wentworth holds an M.A. in International Political Economy from the Claremont (California) Graduate University and a B.A. in Political Science from Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California.

Janis Wolak, J.D., is a senior researcher at the Crimes against Children Research Center (CCRC) at the University of New Hampshire. She has directed U.S. national studies of youth Internet use and national surveys of law enforcement about technology-facilitated child sexual-exploitation crimes, funded by the U.S. Department of Justice, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, and the National Science Foundation. She co-directed, with colleague Kimberly Mitchell, a national study of law-enforcement responses to prostituted minors. She is the author and co-author of numerous reports, book chapters, and peer-reviewed articles about child sexual exploitation, online predation, child pornography, and other Internet-related sex crimes, with CCRC colleagues David Finkelhor and Mitchell. Wolak has provided training and has served on expert panels nationally and globally in the field of child sexual exploitation and technology-facilitated sex crimes against minors.

Yinglian Xie has been a researcher at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley since August 2006. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. Her research interests are in the areas of Internet security, privacy, distributed systems, and networking. Her current work focuses on fighting large-scale attacks to online services, and she combines parallel-computing techniques, algorithms for mining large data sets, and security-domain knowledge into a new theme of research to prevent and combat attacks ranging from spamming, service abuse, and user-hijacking attacks to search-result poisoning and malvertising attacks. Collaborating with multiple Microsoft product groups, including Hotmail, Bing, adCenter, and Forefront, Xie and her colleagues have developed more than 15 systems that systematically explore network-host properties, user social connectivity, and web-service topologies from large data sets to improve the security of millions of online users. In addition to working with product groups, she also has extensive collaborations in academia. Xie has filed more than 18 patents on her work and has been widely published in top networking, systems, and security conferences.

Thomas Zimmermann received his Ph.D. degree from Saarland University in Germany. He is a researcher in the Research in Software Engineering group at Microsoft Research Redmond, adjunct assistant professor at the University of Calgary, and affiliate faculty at University of Washington. His research interests include empirical software engineering, mining software repositories, computer games, recommender systems, development tools, and social networking. He is best known for his research on systematic mining of version archives and bug databases to conduct empirical studies and to build tools to support developers and managers. He received two ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards for his work published during the ICSE ’07 and FSE ’08 conferences. He has served on a variety of program committees, including those for ICSE, ECOOP, ISSTA, MSR, ICSM, and the ACM Conference on Recommender Systems. He was co-chair of the program committee for MSR 2010 and 2011.