Faculty Summit 2019
July 17, 2019 – July 18, 2019

Faculty Summit 2019 | The future of work

Location: Redmond, Washington, USA

Keynotes

Portrait of Bill Gates

Bill Gates
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

  • Bill Gates is co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In 1975, Bill Gates founded Microsoft with Paul Allen and led the company to become the worldwide leader in business and personal software and services. In 2008, Bill transitioned to focus full-time on his foundation’s work to expand opportunity to the world’s most disadvantaged people. Along with co-chair Melinda Gates, he leads the foundation’s development of strategies and sets the overall direction of the organization. In 2010, Bill, Melinda, and Warren Buffett founded the Giving Pledge, an effort to encourage the wealthiest families and individuals to publicly commit more than half of their wealth to philanthropic causes and charitable organizations during their lifetime or in their will. In 2015, Bill created the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, a group of individuals and entities committed to clean energy innovation, followed by Breakthrough Energy Ventures in 2016, an investor-led fund focused on providing patient capital to support cutting-edge clean energy companies.

Portrait of Johannes Gehrke

Johannes Gehrke
Microsoft

  • Johannes Gehrke is a Technical Fellow at Microsoft in the Experiences and Devices Group, working on machine learning and Big Data. From 1999 to 2015, he was on the faculty in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University where he graduated 25 PhD students. Johannes has received an NSF Career Award, a Sloan Research Fellowship, a Humboldt Research Award, the 2011 IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award, and he is an ACM Fellow. He co-authored the undergraduate textbook “Database Management Systems (McGrawHill (2002),” currently in its third edition), and he was Program co-Chair of ACM KDD 2004, VLDB 2007, IEEE ICDE 2012, ACM SOCC 2014, and IEEE ICDE 2015.

Portrait of Eric Horvitz

Eric Horvitz
Microsoft

  • Eric Horvitz is a technical fellow at Microsoft, where he serves as director of Microsoft Research, including research centers in Redmond, Washington, Cambridge, Massachusetts, New York, New York, Montreal, Canada, Cambridge, UK, and Bangalore, India. He has pursued principles and applications of AI with contributions in machine learning, perception, natural language understanding, and decision making. His research centers on challenges with uses of AI amidst the complexities of the open world, including uses of probabilistic and decision-theoretic representations for reasoning and action, models of bounded rationality, and human-AI complementarity and coordination.

Portrait of Mira Lane

Mira Lane
Microsoft

  • Mira Lane (opens in new tab) is the Partner Director of Ethics & Society within Cloud & AI at Microsoft. Mira runs a multidisciplinary team within an engineering context that is responsible for guiding technical and experience innovation towards ethical, responsible, and sustainable outcomes. The technology areas of interest to her team include speech & language, computer vision, ambient devices, intelligent meetings, intelligent agents, and mixed reality (AR, VR, HoloLens). Mira’s history at Microsoft has focused on experience strategy, incubation of new product concepts, and bringing products to market. She holds numerous patents across platforms and collaborative interfaces. She has held various roles through her technology career in development, product management, UX architect and design. Mira has a background in art, computer science, and mathematics. Her video art has been featured in film festivals and galleries.

Portrait of Gloria Mark

Gloria Mark
University of California, Irvine

  • Gloria Mark (opens in new tab) is a Professor in the Department of Informatics, University of California, Irvine. Her research focuses on studying how the use of digital technology impacts our lives in real-world contexts. She has studied in situ workplace behavior in a number of different organizations. She received her PhD in Psychology from Columbia University. Prior to UCI she worked at the German National Research Center for Information Technology (GMD, now Fraunhofer Institute), has been an ongoing visiting researcher at Microsoft Research since 2012 and had been a visiting researcher at IBM, National University of Singapore, and the MIT Media Lab. She was inducted into the ACM SIGCHI Academy in 2017, has been a Fulbright scholar and has received a number of best paper awards. She was the general co-chair for the ACM CHI 2017 conference and is on the editorial boards of the ACM TOCHI and Human-Computer Interaction journals. Her work has appeared in the popular press such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, the BBC, NPR, Time, The Wall Street Journal and she has presented her work at SXSW and the Aspen Ideas Festival.

Portrait of Jaime Teevan

Jaime Teevan
Microsoft

  • Jaime Teevan is Chief Scientist for Microsoft‘s Experiences and Devices, where she is helping Microsoft create the future of productivity. Previously she was the Technical Advisor to Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, and a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research AI, where she led the Productivity team. Dr. Teevan has published hundreds of award-winning technical articles, books, and patents, and given keynotes around the world. Her groundbreaking research earned her the Technology Review TR35 Young Innovator, BECA, Karen Spärck Jones, and SIGIR Test of Time awards. She was most recently named Distinguished Member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for her significant contributions that have revolutionized how we live, work, and play. She holds a Ph.D. from MIT and a B.S. from Yale, and is an affiliate professor at the University of Washington.

 

Speakers

Portrait of Mark Ackerman

Mark Ackerman
University of Michigan

  • Mark Ackerman (opens in new tab) is the George Herbert Mead Collegiate Professor of Human-Computer Interaction, and a Professor in the School of Information and in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His major research area is Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), primarily Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). Ackerman has published widely in HCI and CSCW, investigating collaborative information access in online knowledge communities, medical settings, expertise sharing, and most recently, pervasive environments. Ackerman is a member of the CHI Academy (HCI Fellow) and an ACM Fellow.

    Previously, Ackerman was a faculty member at the University of California, Irvine, and a research scientist at MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science (now CSAIL). Before becoming an academic, Ackerman led the development of the first home-banking system, had three Billboard Top-10 games for the Atari 2600, and worked on the X Window System’s first user-interface widget set. Ackerman has degrees from the University of Chicago, Ohio State, and MIT.

Portrait of Gustavo Alonso

Gustavo Alonso
ETH Zurich

  • Gustavo Alonso (opens in new tab) is a professor at the Department of Computer Science of ETH Zurich in Switzerland. Alonso studied Telecommunications, with a focus in Electrical Engineering, at the Madrid Technical University (ETSIT, Politecnica de Madrid). As a Fulbright scholar, Alonso completed an MS and PhD in Computer Science at UC Santa Barbara. After graduating from Santa Barbara, he worked at the IBM Almaden Research Center before joining ETH Zurich. At ETH, Alonso is part of the Systems Group (opens in new tab). Alonso is a Fellow of the ACM and of the IEEE, as well as a Distinguished Alumnus of the Department of Computer Science of UC Santa Barbara.

    His research interests encompass almost all aspects of systems, from design to run time. Alonso works in distributed systems, databases, cloud computing, and hardware acceleration of data science. His recent research is related to multi-core architectures, large clusters, FPGAs, and big data, mainly working on adapting traditional system software (OS, databases, networking) to modern hardware platforms.

    Some of the research awards Alonso has received include the Middleware 2017 Test-of-Time Award, the FCCM 2013 Best Paper Award, the AOSD 2012 Most Influential Paper Award, the VLDB 2010 Ten Year Best Paper Award, and the 2009 ICDCS Best Paper Award.

Portrait of Caroline Appert

Caroline Appert
Université Paris-Sud / Paris Saclay

  • Caroline Appert is a research scientist at Université Paris-Sud. She obtained her PhD degree from Université Paris-Sud in 2007. She then worked as a post-doc at IBM Almaden Research, before getting a full-time research scientist position in 2008. She has developed innovative interaction techniques for both desktop workstations and tactile surfaces, with a particular interest in multi-scale interfaces and geographical information systems. She started working on gesture-based interaction during her post-doc, and recently came into the area of tangible interaction. She publishes on a regular basis in venues such as CHI, UIST, MobileHCI, AVI and ToCHI. She has also served on numerous program committees for the last ten years, including CHI and UIST, and was Papers co-Chair for CHI ’17.

Portrait of Keith Ballinger

Keith Ballinger
Microsoft

  • Keith Ballinger (opens in new tab) is the General Manager of Developer Services at Microsoft, where he drives the mission to engage developers with services they love, make Azure the most developer-friendly cloud, and make 1ES the best engineering system in the world. Before returning to Microsoft, Ballinger was the VP of Product for Xamarin, which Microsoft acquired in March of 2016. Ballinger has a strong background in entrepreneurship, engineering, and product management, dating back to his time as a project manager on the original .NET team. In 2007, he left Microsoft to co-found several startups. Previous to Xamarin, Ballinger was the Chief Architect at the YC-backed startup Standard Treasury, building an API-first bank. He’s the author of two books on programming.

Portrait of Daniel Barowy

Daniel Barowy
Williams College

  • Daniel Barowy (opens in new tab) is an Assistant Professor in the Williams College Department of Computer Science, where he focuses on programming languages.

    In particular, his research is motivated by two questions: “Can this program be made simpler to use?” and “Can this program be made more robust?” Surprisingly, the answers to these questions often complement each other.

    Barowy’s work focuses on new language abstractions, end-user programming, and new debugging techniques. In particular, he addresses improving the user experience when programming with spreadsheets and with crowdsourcing. Barowy employs traditional programming language techniques such as program analysis, often blending them with less-common statistical approaches.

Portrait of Paul Bennett

Paul Bennett
Microsoft

  • Paul Bennett is a Principal Researcher and manager of the Information and Data Sciences group in Microsoft Research AI. He is interested in the development, improvement, and analysis of machine learning methods, with a focus on systems that can aid in the automatic analysis of natural language as components of adaptive systems or information retrieval systems. Bennett’s current focus is on contextually intelligent assistants. He also maintains an active interest in contextual and personalized search, enriched information retrieval, active sampling and learning, hierarchical and large-scale classification, and human computation and preferences.

    Bennett’s past work has examined a variety of areas — primarily ensemble methods, calibrating classifiers, search query classification and characterization, and redundancy and diversity; as well as extending to transfer learning, machine translation, recommender systems, and knowledge bases. In addition to his research, Bennett engages in a variety of professional service activities for the machine learning, data mining, and information retrieval communities.

    Before coming to Microsoft, Bennett obtained his PhD from the Computer Science Department (opens in new tab) at Carnegie Mellon University (opens in new tab).

Portrait of Sara Bird

Sarah Bird
Microsoft

  • Sarah leads research and emerging technology strategy for AI developer products in Azure. Sarah works to accelerate the adoption and impact of AI by bringing together the latest innovations in machine learning and systems research with the best of open source and product expertise to create new tools and technologies. Sarah is active contributor to the open source ecosystem, she co-founded ONNX, an open source standard for machine learning models and was a leader in the PyTorch 1.0 project.

    Sarah’s research interests include machine learning systems and responsible AI. She was an early member of the machine learning systems research community and has been active in growing and forming the community. Previously, Sarah was a machine learning systems researcher in Microsoft Research NYC, where she worked on reinforcement learning systems and AI ethics. She co-founded the SysML research conference and the Learning Systems workshops. She has a Ph.D. in computer science from UC Berkeley advised by Dave Patterson, Krste Asanovic, and Burton Smith.

Portrait of Bobby Bodenheimer

Bobby Bodenheimer
Vanderbilt University

  • Bobby Bodenheimer (opens in new tab) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Vanderbilt University. His area of focus is computer graphics and computer animation, with a particular interest in human-figure animation.

Portrait of Bill Buxton

Bill Buxton
Microsoft

Portrait of Rich Caruana

Rich Caruana
Microsoft

  • Rich Caruana is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research. Before joining Microsoft, Caruana was on the faculty in the Computer Science Department at Cornell University, at UCLA’s Medical School, and at Carnegie Mellon University’s Center for Learning and Discovery. Caruana’s PhD is from Carnegie Mellon University. His thesis on multi-task learning helped create interest in a new subfield of machine learning called transfer learning. Caruana received an NSF CAREER Award, co-chaired KDD, and serves as area chair for NIPS, ICML, and KDD. Caruana’s current research focuses on learning for medical decision making, transparent modeling, deep learning, and computational ecology.

Portrait of Tianqi Chen

Tianqi Chen
University of Washington

  • Tianqi Chen (opens in new tab) is a PhD in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, working on the intersection of machine learning and systems. His leads the creation of many important machine learning systems, including XGBoost, Apache MXNet and Apache TVM. He will be joining CMU as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2020.

Portrait of Lydia Chilton

Lydia Chilton
Columbia University

  • Lydia Chilton (opens in new tab) is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department of Columbia University. Her research is in human-computer interaction, crowdsourcing, and computational design.

    Chilton builds tools to enhance people’s problem-solving ability.

Portrait of Yejin Choi

Yejin Choi
University of Washington

  • Yejin Choi (opens in new tab)’s primary research interests are the fields of Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, with broader interests in Computer Vision and Digital Humanities.

    Choi’s recent research has been under two broad themes: learning the contextual, grounded meaning of language from various contexts in which language is used — both physical (such as visual inputs) and abstract (such as social or cognitive contexts); and learning the background knowledge about how the world works, latent in large-scale multimodal data. More specifically, Choi’s research interests include: Language Grounding with Vision, Physical Commonsense Reasoning, Social Commonsense Reasoning and Connotation Frames, Language Generation and Conversational AI, and AI for Social Good.

Portrait of Sarah Creem-Regehr

Sarah Creem-Regehr
University of Utah

  • Sarah Creem-Regehr (opens in new tab) works on the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying space perception and spatial cognition, perception and action, spatial transformations and motor imagery, embodied cognition, virtual environments.

    A desire to understand space and object perception drives Creem-Regehr’s research in the University of Utah Visual Perception and Spatial Cognition laboratory. She has pursued the interaction between perception and action in several ways, addressing mechanisms underlying space perception, perception of tools, and imagined spatial transformations. Creem-Regehr’s research serves two goals: to further develop theories of perception‐action processing mechanisms and to apply these theories to relevant real‐world problems in order to facilitate observers’ understanding of their spatial environments.

Portrait of Howard Crow

Howard Crow
Microsoft

  • Howard Crow is the Partner GPM of Microsoft Planner and Project. He thinks about work management and stress reduction every day. Before Planner and Project, Howard was a founding member of the SharePoint team. He has ridden motorcycles professionally, has an audiophile addiction and loves raising his daughter more than anything.

Portrait of Ed Cutrell

Ed Cutrell
Microsoft

  • Ed Cutrell (opens in new tab) is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. He also holds an affiliate faculty appointment in the Information School (opens in new tab) at the University of Washington and also at the Department of Software Information Systems at UNC Charlotte. He received his BA in Psychology and Cognitive Science from Rice University and went on to study Cognitive Neuropsychology at the University of Oregon, where he received his PhD. He has been working in the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) since 2000.

    Over the years, Cutrell has worked on a broad range of HCI topics, with a special interest in interdisciplinary work. Research topics have included input technologies, visual perception and graphics, intelligent notifications and disruptions, and interfaces for search and personal information management. From 2010-2016, he managed the Technology for Emerging Markets group in Microsoft Research India, focusing on technologies and systems useful for people living in underserved rural and urban communities. His research now focuses on computing for disability, accessibility, and inclusive design with the Ability group at Microsoft Research.

Portrait of Mary Czerwinski

Mary Czerwinski
Microsoft

  • Mary Czerwinski is a Research Manager of the Visualization and Interaction (VIBE) Research Group at Microsoft Research.

    Czerwinski’s research focuses primarily on emotion tracking, information worker task management, and health and wellness for individuals and groups. Her background is in visual attention and multitasking. Czerwinski holds a PhD in Cognitive Psychology from Indiana University in Bloomington. Czerwinski was awarded the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award, was inducted into the CHI Academy, and became an ACM Distinguished Scientist in 2010. Czerwinski became a Fellow of the ACM in 2016. She also received the Distinguished Alumni award from Indiana University’s Brain and Psychological Sciences department and a Distinguished Alumni award from the College of Arts and Sciences from Indiana. Czerwinski became a Fellow of the American Psychological Science Association.

Portrait of Premkumar Devanbu

Premkumar Devanbu
University of California, Davis

  • Premkumar Devanbu (opens in new tab) is a Computer Science Professor at UC Davis. He works on research that  models software using statistical methods that are common in natural language processing. This line of work, called “software naturalness”, was pioneered at UC Davis. The goal of this research is to help reduce programmer effort now spent on the boring, repetitive elements that are a big portion of their work.

    Devanbu earned his Bachelor’s degree at IIT Madras, India, and received a PhD from Rutgers University. After spending nearly 20 years as both a developer and researcher at AT&T Bell Labs and its various offshoots, he left industry to join academia in 1997. He has won the 10-year Most Influential Paper award the International Conference on Mining Software Repositories twice (2016 and 2019), and the Test of Time Award at ACM SIGSOFT ESEC/FSE conference twice (2018 and 2019). He is an ACM Fellow.

Portrait of Sidney D'Mello

Sidney D’Mello
University of Colorado

  • Sidney D’Mello (opens in new tab) is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Cognitive Science (opens in new tab) and the Department of Computer Science (opens in new tab) at the University of Colorado Boulder (opens in new tab). He was previously an Assistant (2012 to 2015) and Associate (2015 to 2017) Professor in the departments of Psychology and Computer Science at the University of Notre Dame.

    His primary research interests are in the cognitive and affective sciences, artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, and the learning sciences. More specific interests include affective computing, artificial intelligence in education, speech recognition and natural language understanding, and computational models of human cognition.

    D’Mello’s research focuses on uncovering the incidence, dynamics, and influence of affective and cognitive states (such as confusion, boredom, mind wandering, and frustration) during complex learning and problem solving, applying computational techniques to model these states in context, and integrating the models in learning environments to adaptively respond to the sensed states. His research uses a range of techniques and paradigms ranging from eye tracking, discourse modeling, speech recognition, physiological sensing, facial feature and posture tracking, nonlinear time series analyses, and machine learning. D’Mello has co-edited five books and has published more than 180 journal papers, book chapters, and conference proceedings in these areas.

    D’Mello is an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing and IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies, a senior reviewer for the Journal of Educational Psychology, and serves on the executive board of the International Artificial Intelligence in Education Society and Educational Data Mining Society.

Portrait of Steven Dow

Steven Dow
University of California, San Diego

Portrait of Steven M. Drucker

Steven M. Drucker
Microsoft

  • Steven M. Drucker is a Principal Researcher and manager of the Visualization and Interactive Data Analysis (VIDA) Group at Microsoft Research, focusing on human-computer interaction for dealing with large amounts of information. In particular, he is exploring democratizing the process of understanding and explaining information through the creation of tools that facilitate discovery and communication of insights through natural interaction and storytelling techniques.

    Drucker is also an Affiliate Professor at the University of Washington Computer Science and Engineering Department. In the past, he has been a Principal Scientist in the LiveLabs Research Group at Microsoft, where he headed the Information Experiences Group working on user interaction and information visualization for web-based projects; a Lead Researcher in the Next Media Research Group examining how the addition of user interaction transforms conventional media; and Lead Researcher in the Virtual Worlds Group creating a platform for multi-user virtual environments.

    Drucker has filed over 120 patent, and has published papers on technologies as diverse as exploratory search, information visualization, multi-user environments, online social interaction, hypermedia research, human and robot perceptual capabilities, robot learning, parallel computer graphics, spectator oriented gaming, and human interfaces for camera control.

    Drucker received his PhD from the MIT Media Lab, with a focus on automatic camera control and navigation in virtual environments; an MS from the AI Laboratory at MIT on robot learning; and his BS in neurosciences from Brown University.

Portrait of Henry Fuchs

Henry Fuchs
University of North Carolina

  • Henry Fuchs (opens in new tab) is the Federico Gil Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Adjunct Professor of Biomedical Engineering at UNC Chapel Hill. He has been active in computer graphics since the early 1970s, with rendering algorithms (BSP Trees), hardware (Pixel-Planes and PixelFlow), virtual environments, tele-immersion systems, and medical applications. He received a PhD from the University of Utah.

    He has been an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, and is currently on the faculty at UNC Chapel Hill. Fuchs is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the recipient of the ACM-SIGGRAPH Achievement Award, the Academic Award of the National Computer Graphics Association, 1997 Satava Award of the Medicine Meets Virtual Reality Conference, the IEEE-VGTC Virtual Reality Career Award, and the ACM SIGGRAPH Steven A. Coons Award.

Portrait of Dennis Gannon

Dennis Gannon
Indiana University

  • Dennis Gannon is a computer scientist, researcher working on the application of cloud computing in science. His blog is at https://esciencegroup.com (opens in new tab). He is co-author of the book “Cloud Computing for Science and Engineering (opens in new tab)” published by MIT Press. From 2008 until he retired in late 2014 he was with Microsoft Research and MSR Connections as the Director of Cloud Research Strategy. In this role he helped provide access to cloud computing resources to over 300 projects in the research and education community. Gannon is a professor emeritus of Computer Science at Indiana University and the former science director of the Indiana Pervasive Technology Labs. His interests include large-scale cyber infrastructure, programming systems and tools, distributed and parallel computing, data analysis and machine learning. He has published more than 200 refereed articles and three co-edited books.

Portrait of Andy Gordon

Andy Gordon
Microsoft

Portrait of Mar Gonzalez-Franco

Mar Gonzalez-Franco
Microsoft

  • Mar Gonzalez-Franco is a researcher in the EPIC (Extended Perception Interaction and Cognition) team at Microsoft Research. In her research, Gonzalez-Franco strives to achieve strong immersive experiences using different disciplines: virtual reality, avatars, computer graphics, computer vision, and haptics – all while studying human behavior, perception, and neuroscience.

Portrait of Mary Gray

Mary Gray
Microsoft

  • Mary Gray is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research and a Fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. Gray also maintains an appointment as Associate Professor of the Media School, with affiliations in American Studies, Anthropology, and Gender Studies at Indiana University.

    Her research areas include how ethics, compliance routines and computer science research produce norms of vulnerability and risk in research involving human subjects. She also looks at the role of big data in human communication research and technology studies. Gray serves on the Executive Board of Public Responsibility in Medicine and Research and is a past board member of the American Anthropological Association.

Portrait of Saul Greenberg

Saul Greenberg
University of Calgary

  • Saul Greenberg is a Faculty Professor and Emeritus Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Calgary. While he is a computer scientist by training, the work by Saul and his talented students typify the cross-discipline aspects of human computer interaction, computer supported cooperative work, and ubiquitous computing. He and his crew are well known for their development of:

    • toolkits enabling rapid prototyping of groupware and ubiquitous appliances;
    • innovative and seminal system designs based on observations of social phenomenon;
    • articulation of design-oriented social science theories, and refinement of evaluation methods.

    Saul’s research is well-recognized. He is an ACM Fellow, and has held the AITF/NSERC/Smart Technologies Industrial Chair in Interactive Technologies. He was elected to the ACM CHI Academy for his overall contributions to the field of Human Computer Interaction, and also received the Canadian Human Computer Communications Society Achievement Award and the ACM UIST Lasting Impact Award.

    Saul has also consulted for various well-known companies as an Expert Witness involving patent infringement matters.

    Saul is a prolific author who has authored and edited several books and published many referred articles, available at his research web site (opens in new tab). He is also known for his strong commitment in making his tools, systems, and educational material readily available to other researchers and educators.

Portrait of Danna Gurari

Danna Gurari
University of Texas, Austin

Portrait of Shi Han

Shi Han
Microsoft

  • Shi Han is a Lead Researcher in the Software Analytics and Data Intelligence group at Microsoft Research, Beijing. Han has been working in the same research group since joining Microsoft in April 2006. For more than ten years, Han’s research has focused on using data-driven techniques (such as machine learning, data mining, and more) to develop Microsoft products. Han’s research interests include: data mining, especially for multi-dimensional data analysis; and machine learning, especially for software/system quality and programming languages. Han received his MSE and BE from Zhejiang University.

Portrait of Caitlin Hart

Caitlin Hart
Microsoft

  • Caitlin Hart (opens in new tab), Principal Program Manager at Microsoft, works on software that enables people to be more productive and fulfilled. In her current role on the Microsoft To Do team, she is developing the Microsoft task/list/reminder ecosystem in partnership with a number of internal and external products. She believes that computers can make us better humans if we build the right things.

Portrait of Ahmed E. Hassan

Ahmed E. Hassan
Queens University

  • Ahmed E. Hassan (opens in new tab) is an IEEE Fellow, an ACM SIGSOFT Influential Educator, an NSERC Steacie Fellow, the Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Software Analytics, and the NSERC/BlackBerry Software Engineering Chair at the School of Computing at Queen’s University, Canada. His research interests include empirical software engineering and the application of machine learning to software development and operation data. He received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo. He spearheaded the creation of the Mining Software Repositories (MSR) conference and its research community. He also serves/d on the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Springer Journal of Empirical Software Engineering, and PeerJ Computer Science. More information at: http://sail.cs.queensu.ca/ (opens in new tab)

Portrait of Felienne Hermans

Felienne Hermans
Universiteit Leiden

  • Felienne Hermans (opens in new tab) is an Assistant Professor at Delft University of Technology. Her team at the Spreadsheet Lab works on making spreadsheets better by designing tools to test and improve them. Hermans enjoys sharing her enthusiasm for programming with others. As part of this, she co-organizes the yearly “Joy of Coding” conference in the Netherlands and teaches robotics at a community center.

Portrait of Louise Hickman

Louise Hickman
University of California, San Diego

  • Louise Hickman (opens in new tab) is an activist and scholar of communication, and uses ethnographic, archival, and theoretical approaches to consider how access is produced for disabled people. Her current project focuses particularly on access produced by real-time stenographers and transcriptive technologies in educational settings. She uses an interdisciplinary lens drawing on feminist theory, critical disability studies, and science and technology studies to consider the historical conditions of access work, and the ways access is co-produced through human (and primarily female) labor, technological systems, and economic models and conditions. Hickman has previously served as an access consultant for ‘Catalyst: Feminism, Theory and Technoscience,’ a peer-reviewed, open-source journal advocating for a platform where access remains a reflexive, collaborative, and distributed effort in digital and disability design. She holds a PhD in Communication from the University of California, San Diego, and is currently working on her first manuscript: “The Automation of Access.”

Portrait of Ehsan Hoque

Ehsan Hoque
University of Rochester

Portrait of Ayanna Howard

Ayanna Howard
Georgia Institute of Technology

  • Ayanna Howard (opens in new tab) focuses on technology development for intelligent agents. Howard has made significant contributions in the technology areas of artificial intelligence, computer vision, and robotics. Her published research, currently numbering over 250 peer-reviewed publications, has been widely disseminated in international journals and conference proceedings.

    Currently, Howard is the Linda J. and Mark C. Smith Professor and Chair of the School of Interactive Computing (opens in new tab) in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She also holds a faculty appointment in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, where she functions as the Director of the Human-Automation Systems Lab (HumAnS) (opens in new tab). In 2015, she founded and now directs the $3M traineeship initiative in healthcare robotics (opens in new tab) and functions as the lead investigator on the NSF undergraduate summer research program in robotics (opens in new tab). She received her BS from Brown University, her MSEE from the University of Southern California, her PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California, and her MBA from Claremont University, Drucker School of Management. In 2013, she founded Zyrobotics (opens in new tab) as a university spin-off and holds a position in the company as Chief Technology Officer. Howard has also worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, where she was a Senior Robotics Researcher and Deputy Manager in the Office of the Chief Scientist. She has also served as the Associate Director of Research for the Georgia Tech Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines, Chair of the multidisciplinary Robotics PhD program at Georgia Tech, and the Associate Chair for Faculty Development in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Portrait of Shamsi Iqbal

Shamsi Iqbal
Microsoft

  • Shamsi Iqbal is a Senior Researcher in the Information and Data Sciences group at Microsoft Research. Iqbal’s primary research expertise is in the area of attention management for multitasking domains. Currently, he is focusing on how productivity is defined in the new era of multitasking and distraction, introducing novel ways of being productive and determining metrics for evaluating productivity. More specifically, Iqbal develops experiences and technology that helps people maintain focus when needed, but at the same time introduces new concepts of getting things done in limited focus environments.

    Iqbal received a PhD in Computer Science and an MS in Computer Science, both from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a BS in Computer Science and Engineering from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology.

Portrait of Ece Kamar

Ece Kamar
Microsoft

  • Ece Kamar is a Senior Researcher at the Adaptive Systems and Interaction Group at Microsoft Research. Kamar earned her PhD in computer science from Harvard University, where she was advised by Barbara Grosz. Kamar’s research spans several subfields of AI, including planning, machine learning, multi-agent systems, and human-computer teamwork, and is inspired by real-world applications that can benefit from the complementary abilities of people and AI. Kamar is particularly interested in the impact of AI on society and developing AI systems that are reliable, unbiased, and trustworthy.

Portrait of Matthew Key

Matthew Kay
University of Michigan

  • Matthew Kay (opens in new tab) is an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information working in human-computer interaction and information visualization. His research areas include uncertainty visualization, personal health informatics, and the design of human-centered tools for data analysis. He is intrigued by domains where complex information, like uncertainty, must be communicated to broad audiences (as in health risks, transit prediction, or weather forecasting). He co-directs the Midwest Uncertainty Collective (opens in new tab) along with Jessica Hullman.

Portrait of Jon Kleinberg

Jon Kleinberg
Cornell University

Portrait of Walter Lasecki

Walter Lasecki
University of Michigan

  • Walter Lasecki (opens in new tab) is an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan, where he is the director of the CROMA Lab and a faculty member of the Computer Science and Engineering department.

    He creates systems that use both human and machine computation to solve problems quickly and reliably. Lasecki has helped introduce the idea of continuous real-time crowdsourcing, as well as the crowd agent model, which uses computer-mediated groups of people submitting input simultaneously to create a collective intelligence capable of completing tasks better than any constituent member.

    Lasecki’s areas of research include crowdsourcing, human computation, human-computer interaction, collective intelligence, artificial intelligence, and accessibility.

Portrait of Nicolai Marquadt

Nicolai Marquadt
University College London

  • Nicolai Marquardt (opens in new tab) is Associate Professor in Physical Computing at University College London, where he is part of the Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Engineering and the Faculty of Brain Sciences. At the UCL Interaction Centre, he works on projects in the research areas of cross-device interaction, interactive surfaces, ubiquitous computing, sensor-based systems, prototyping toolkits and physical user interfaces. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Calgary, Canada. Nicolai is co-author of the Sketching User Experiences Workbook (Morgan Kaufmann 2011) and the Proxemic Interactions textbook (Morgan & Claypool 2015).

Portrait of Kathleen McCoy

Kathleen McCoy
University of Delaware

  • Kathleen McCoy (opens in new tab), who joined the University of Delaware in 1985, is Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer and Information Sciences. Her research focuses on computational linguistics/natural language processing and accessibility for people with disabilities. McCoy earned her BS degree in computer and information sciences from the University of Delaware. She received her MS and PhD degrees in computer and information sciences from the University of Pennsylvania. McCoy served as Director of University of Delaware’s Center for Applied Science and Engineering in Rehabilitation from 2000-2009. She has also been co-chair and chair of the College of Engineering Standing Committee on Diversity. McCoy is currently Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing.

Portrait of Jennifer Neville

Jennifer Neville
Purdue University

  • Jennifer Neville (opens in new tab)’s research interests lie in the fields of machine learning and data mining. In particular, she focuses on the development and analysis of algorithms for relational domains, including social, information, and communication networks, as well as physical networks and distributed systems. Neville’s work can be broadly categorized into three areas: design and implementation of machine learning and data mining techniques; discovery of, and adjustment for, statistical biases due to network data characteristics; and application to real-world tasks.

Portrait of Besmira Nushi

Besmira Nushi
Microsoft

  • Besmira Nushi is a Researcher in the Adaptive Systems and Interaction group in Microsoft Research. Nushi’s research work lies in the intersection of human and machine intelligence. She is currently excited about two main directions in this realm: human-AI collaboration for enhancing human capabilities while solving complex tasks, as well as troubleshooting and failure analysis for AIML systems for improving and accelerating the software development lifecycle of intelligent systems. Nushi is also involved in various research initiatives and projects that study the societal impact of artificial intelligence, as well as various quality-of-service aspects of AI, including interpretability, transparency, accountability and fairness.

    Prior to joining Microsoft Research, in 2016, Nushi completed her PhD at ETH Zurich in the Systems Group. Her doctoral thesis focuses on building cost- and quality-aware models for integrating crowdsourcing in the process of building machine learning algorithms and systems. In 2011, she completed her MS in computer science in a double-degree MSc program at RWTH University of Aachen (Germany) and University of Trento (Italy) as an Erasmus Mundus scholar. She also has a diploma in Informatics from University of Tirana (Albania) from where she graduated in 2007.

Portrait of Eyal Ofek

Eyal Ofek
Microsoft

  • Eyal Ofek is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research. Ofek’s research interests include computer vision for human-computer interaction, Augmented Reality (AR)/Virtual Reality (VR), haptics, and interactive projection mapping.

    Ofek is on the editorial board of IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications (opens in new tab), co-chaired the 19th ACM SIGSPATIAL (opens in new tab) 2011, and is on the program committee for several leading conferences. Ofek was a Visiting Lecturer at the School of Computer Science, Interdisciplinary Center, Herzelia, Israel.

    Ofek obtained his PhD at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (opens in new tab), then founded a couple of companies in the area of computer graphics, including the successful Photon-Paint (opens in new tab) for the Amiga computer. He also managed software research and development at 3DV Systems and developed the world’s first active real-time depth cameras, later bought by Microsoft in 2008.

    Ofek was previously a researcher at Microsoft Research Asia, working on issues such as video completion, reconstruction of hair from images, and camera-based interaction, followed by founding the Virtual Earth Research Lab (aka, Bing Mapping and Mobile Research Lab). The lab developed and shipped new innovations to Microsoft Virtual Earth and Bing, such as the first Street-View Site (2006), Image Privacy, automatic geo-positioning user images, and text detection in images. Ofek also managed a group of researchers at Microsoft’s eXtream Computing Group (XCG) in the areas of AR and Graphics.

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Jacki O’Neill
Microsoft

  • Jacki O’Neill works in the Technologies for Emerging Markets area at Microsoft, with the aim to understand where and how technology can be used to improve the lives of people with lower socio-economic status, whether that be through work, health, education, or play.

    To this end, O’Neill conducts ethnographies of people’s everyday practices – both with and without technology – and uses this to inform the design of new technologies. Such prototypes are then tested ‘in the wild’ as part of an iterative design cycle that aims to produce useful and usable technologies. Her research falls into the domains of human-computer interaction, computer supported co-operative work and, more recently, information and communication technologies for development.

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Phil Pizzo
Stanford University

  • Philip Pizzo, MD, is the David and Susan Heckerman Professor and Founding Director of the Stanford Distinguished Careers Institute. Pizzo served as Dean of the Stanford School of Medicine from 2001 to 2012, where he was also the Carl and Elizabeth Naumann Professor of Pediatrics and of Microbiology and Immunology. Pizzo has devoted much of his distinguished medical career to the diagnosis, management, prevention and treatment of childhood cancers and the infectious complications that occur in children whose immune systems are compromised by cancer and AIDS. He has also been a leader in academic medicine, championing programs and policies to improve the future of science, education and healthcare in the US and beyond.

    Pizzo received his MD degree from the University of Rochester, and completed a teaching fellowship at Harvard Medical School, and a clinical and research fellowship in pediatric oncology at the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Pizzo served as head of NCI’s infectious disease section, chief of its pediatric department, and acting scientific director for its Division of Clinical Sciences. Before joining Stanford in 2001, he was the physician-in-chief of Children’s Hospital in Boston and Chair of the Department of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.

    Pizzo is the author of more than 615 scientific articles and 16 books and monographs, including Principles and Practice of Pediatric Oncology. He has received numerous awards and honors, among them the Public Health Service Outstanding Service Medal, the Elizabeth Kubler-Ross Award and the John Howland Award, the highest honor for lifetime achievement bestowed by the American Pediatric Society.

    He has been elected to a number of prestigious organizations and societies, and has served as Chair of the Association of Academic Health Centers, Chair of the Council of Deans of the Association of American Medical Colleges, and on the board for the American Society for Clinical Oncology and the Infectious Diseases Society of America. He also serves as Editor-in-Chief of Current Opinion in Pediatrics.

Portrait of Victor Poznanski

Victor Poznanski
Microsoft

  • Victor Poznanski (opens in new tab) has a PhD in Computational Linguistics from the University of Cambridge. He managed a team of research scientists for Sharp Corporation, working on a wide variety of projects, ranging from portable translation devices to improving the quality of TV images. For the past 10 years, Victor has worked in Product Management at Microsoft, where he focusses on harnessing cutting-edge technologies to improve our user’s lives, especially using Machine Learning and Search.

Portrait of Gonzalo Ramos

Gonzalo Ramos
Microsoft

  • Gonzalo Ramos is a Researcher at Microsoft Research AI where he works at the intersection of HCI and ML to empower people to achieve more through novel interactions with information and technology.

    He received his M.Sc and PhD from the University of Toronto’s Computer Science Department, specializing in Scientific Visualization and HCI, respectively. Prior to Microsoft Research, Gonzalo was part of the leadership team at Amazon’s Concept Lab, worked as a UX Scientist at Amazon’s Grand Challenges Group, as well as a Scientist at Microsoft’s Live Labs and Online Services Division.

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Chris Re
Stanford University

Portrait of Nathalie Riche

Nathalie Riche
Microsoft

  • Nathalie Riche has been a researcher at Microsoft Research since December 2008. She holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Paris XI and Inria, France, as well as from the University of Sydney, Australia. Her research focuses on human-computer interaction and information visualization.

    Riche’s research interests include data-driven storytelling, data and visualization literacy, visual exploration of graphs and networks, and interfaces for thinking with data.

Portrait of Sean Rintel

Sean Rintel
Microsoft

  • Sean Rintel is a Researcher in the Human Experience & Design group at Microsoft Research Cambridge. His work investigates how communication technologies interact with language, social action, and culture.

    His work in video-mediated collaboration, enterprise social media platforms, cross-device interaction and device ecologies, and engineering culture draws on ethnographic data analyzed using qualitative methods such as conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis.

    Rintel has published on topics ranging from video calling in personal relationships, to ambient audio technologies to support independent living, social media in the workplace, crisis memes, error mascots, Internet culture, and cross-device interaction in video-mediated collaboration.

    Rintel has been a member of three global first-place winning projects in Microsoft OneWeek Hackathons, including one on Mobile Sharing and Companion Experiences for Microsoft Teams Meetings.

Portrait of Skip Rizzo

Skip Rizzo
University of Southern California

  • Skip Rizzo (opens in new tab) is the Associate Director for Medical Virtual Reality at the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies. He conducts research on the design, development, and evaluation of VR systems targeting the areas of clinical assessment, treatment rehabilitation, and resilience. This work spans the domains of psychological, cognitive and motor functioning in both healthy and clinical populations. Rizzo, whose work using VR-based exposure therapy to treat PTSD, received the American Psychological Association’s 2010 Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Treatment of Trauma. Rizzo also holds research professor appointments with the USC Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and at the USC Davis School of Gerontology.

    Rizzo is working with a team that is creating artificially intelligent virtual patients that clinicians can use to practice the skills required for challenging clinical interviews and diagnostic assessments. His cognitive work has addressed the use of VR applications to test and train attention, memory, visuospatial abilities, and executive function. In the motor domain, he has developed VR game systems to address physical rehabilitation post-stroke and traumatic brain injury, and for prosthetic use training.

    Rizzo is senior editor of the MIT Press journal, Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments. He also sits on a number of editorial boards for journals in the areas of cognition and computer technology (Cognitive Technology; Journal of Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds; Media Psychology).

Portrait of Yvonne Rogers

Yvonne Rogers
University College London

  • Yvonne Rogers is the director of the Interaction Centre at University College London, a professor of Interaction Design and the deputy head of department in the Computer Science Department. Former positions include professorships at the Open University, Indiana University and Sussex University; she has also been a visiting professor at University Cape Town, University of Melbourne, Queensland University of Technology, Stanford University, Apple and UCSD. She is internationally renowned for her work in human-computer interaction, interaction design and ubiquitous computing. She was awarded a prestigious EPSRC dream fellowship to rethink the relationship between ageing, computing and creativity. She is passionate about designing computers that are engaging, exciting and even provocative. She has published over 250 articles and is a co-author of the definitive textbook on Interaction Design that has sold over 200,000 copies worldwide and been translated into 6 languages.

Portrait of Shree Sahasrabudhe

Shree Sahasrabudhe
Microsoft

  • As a Program Manager on the Bing Experiences team, Shree and his team strive to deliver the best product quality and whole page experience for the most ubiquitous and essential online habit—search—in Bing (opens in new tab). Before joining the Bing team, Shree was on the Health Solutions Group development team. Going back further, he helped build products in various early and mid-stage companies, focusing on areas of machine diagnostics, two-step authentication, and mobile software.

Portrait of Flora Salim

Flora Salim
Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology

  • Flora Salim (opens in new tab) is an Associate Professor at the School of Computer Science and Information Technology, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. She obtained her PhD in Computer Science from Monash University. Her research areas are mobile and pervasive computing, urban computing, activity, and behavior recognition, and applied data mining and machine learning for ambient intelligence. She has secured nationally competitive grants from ARC, Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network, and local and global industry partners, including Microsoft, IBM, and Northrop Grumman.

Portrait of Constantine Sandis

Constantine Sandis
University of Hertsfordshire

  • Constantine Sandis (opens in new tab) is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hertfordshire, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and an international collaborator of the Centre de Recherche en Éthique (CRÉ) in Montréal. Sandis was previously Professor of Philosophy at Oxford Brookes University and Visiting Fellow at the Collegium for Advanced Studies in Helsinki. He received his first degree from St Anne’s College, Oxford and his PhD from the University of Reading.

Portrait of Elizabeth Stokoe

Elizabeth Stokoe
Loughborough University

  • Elizabeth Stokoe (opens in new tab) is Professor of Social Interaction in the School of Social Sciences at Loughborough University; Professor II at University of South-Eastern Norway, and an Industry Fellow at Typeform. She uses conversation analysis to understand how talk works – from first dates to medical communication and from sales encounters to hostage negotiation. She has also developed ways of working with membership categorization analysis to investigate categorial topics, mostly gender and identity in interaction. Outside the university, she runs workshops with doctors, mediators, salespeople, police and other professionals using her research-based communication training method called the “Conversation Analytic Role-play Method”. She is a WIRED Innovation Fellow and her research and biography were featured on the BBC Radio 4’s The Life Scientific. In addition to publishing over 120 scientific papers and books, she is passionate about science communication, translating the world of conversation analysis for audiences of all kinds. She has given TED, New Scientist, Google and Royal Institution lectures, and performed at Latitude Festival and Cheltenham Science Festival. Her book, Talk: The Science of Conversation, is published by Little, Brown (2018).

Portrait of Margaret-Anne Storey

Margaret-Anne Storey
University of Victoria

  • Margaret-Anne Storey (opens in new tab) is a Professor of Computer Science and the Co-Director of the Matrix Institute for Applied Data Science at the University of Victoria. She holds a Canada Research Chair in Human and Social Aspects of Software Engineering, and held the Lise Meitner Guest Professorship at Lund University in Sweden from 2016 to 2018, a professorship that promotes gender diversity in science.

    Storey’s research goal is to understand how software tools, communication media, data visualizations, and social theories can be leveraged to improve how software engineers and knowledge workers explore, understand, analyze and share complex information and knowledge. She has published widely on these topics and over the past several years has collaborated with product teams and researchers at Microsoft to understand developer satisfaction and developer productivity, with the goal of improving their engineering systems and processes.

Portrait of Neel Sundaresan

Neel Sundaresan
Microsoft

  • Neel Sundaresan (opens in new tab) is the Partner Director of Cloud and AI at Microsoft, where he leads advanced engineering and applied research in the area of the Internet of Code (IoC). With the availability of massive amounts of code and associated metadata, the world of software development is undergoing a major revolution. Sundaresan leads work in the area that combines cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and compiler technologies.

    Sundaresan combines his original training and experience in compilers, program generators, and distributed scientific computing, with his experience in building scalable AI systems in the Internet of search and commerce to build systems for IoC.

    Sundaresan has been published in more than 100 publications, has more than 170 issued patents.

Portait of Melissa Valentine

Melissa Valentine
Stanford University

  • Melissa Valentine is an Assistant Professor at Stanford University in the Management Science and Engineering Department, and co-director of the Center for Work, Technology, and Organization (WTO).

    Prof. Valentine’s research focuses on understanding how new technologies change work and organizations. She conducts in-depth observational studies to develop new understanding about new forms of organizing. Her work makes contributions to understanding classic and longstanding challenges in designing groups and organizations (e.g., the role of hierarchy, how to implement change, team stability vs. flexibility) but also brings in deep knowledge of how the rise of information technology has made possible new and different team and organizational forms. Her most recent study examined how the deployment of new algorithms changed the organizational structure of a retail tech company.

    Prof. Valentine has won awards for both research and teaching. She and collaborators won a Best Paper Award at the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems and the Outstanding Paper with Practical Implications award from the Organizational Behavior division of the Academy of Management. In 2013, she won the Organization Science/INFORMS dissertation proposal competition and received her PhD from Harvard University.

Portrait of Markus Weimer

Markus Weimer
Microsoft

Portrait of Daniel Weld

Daniel Weld
University of Washington

Portrait of Eoin Whelan

Eoin Whelan
National University of Ireland, Galway

  • Eoin Whelan (opens in new tab) is a Senior Lecturer in Business Information Systems at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is also a visiting professor at the Institute d’Economie Scientifique et de Gestion (IESEG), France, and a visiting researcher at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. Whelan received his PhD from NUI Galway in 2010. His current research interests focus upon understanding how social media technologies influence worker stress, decision making, productivity, creativity, and work-life conflict. His publications have appeared in the journals MIT Sloan Management Review, Information Systems Journal, R&D Management, Journal of Information Technology, and Information & Organization. Whelan’s MIT Sloan paper on open innovation networks won the prestigious Richard Beckhard Memorial Prize. The findings of his research have also been featured in mainstream international outlets such as Forbes, Financial Times, Fortune, Reuters, Irish Independent, and the Irish Times.

    Whelan received the NUI Galway President’s Early Stage Researcher Award. Whelan is a Senior Editor of Information & Organization, and Information Technology & People and was also lead editor for two special issues: Journal of the Association of Information Systems (2014, The role of IS in enabling open innovation), and Information Systems Journal (2013, Interpreting digital enabled social networks). Prior to his academic career, Whelan held a variety of business analyst positions in Ireland, New Zealand, and the US.

Portrait of Steve Whitaker

Steve Whittaker
University of California, Santa Cruz

  • Steve Whittaker is Professor of Human Computer Interaction at University of California at Santa Cruz. Probably best known for his work on email overload and computer mediated communication, he uses approaches that are motivated by the social sciences to design novel interactive systems that address important human problems. He is a member of the CHI Academy, and Editor of the journal Human Computer Interaction. He received a Lifetime Research Achievement Award from SIGCHI (Special interest group on Computer Human Interaction). He is also a Fellow of the Association for Computational Machinery. He has worked both in industry and academia, at IBM Labs, AT&T Bell Labs, and University of Sheffield, UK. His current interests are in personal informatics and computational well-being. His most recent book with Ofer Bergman is The Science of Managing Our Digital Stuff, from MIT Press.

Portrait of Ryen White

Ryen White
Microsoft

  • Ryen White is a Partner Researcher and Research Manager at Microsoft Research. Recently, White led the applied science organization for Cortana, served as chief scientist at Microsoft Health, and was a principal researcher at Microsoft Research.

Portrait of Jaime Woodcock

Jamie Woodcock
Oxford Internet Institute

  • Jamie Woodcock (opens in new tab) is a researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. He is the author of Working The Phones, a study of a call center in the UK. His current research involves developing co-research projects with workers in the so-called gig economy. He is on the editorial board of Notes from Below and Historical Materialism.

    Woodcock’s current research focuses on digital labor, the sociology of work, the gig economy, resistance, and videogames. Woodcock completed his PhD in sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London and has held positions at Goldsmiths, University of Leeds, University of Manchester, Queen Mary, NYU London, Cass Business School, and the LSE.

Portrait of Matei Zaharia

Matei Zaharia
Stanford University

  • Matei Zaharia (opens in new tab) is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and Chief Technologist at Databricks. His research covers systems for large scale data analysis, machine learning and cloud computing. During his PhD at UC Berkeley, Matei started the Apache Spark cluster computing engine, co-started the Apache Mesos cluster manager, and contributed to other widely used distributed software such as Apache Hadoop. Matei’s work was recognized through the 2014 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for the best PhD dissertation in computer science, the VMware Systems Research Award, and an NSF CAREER Award.

Portrait of Ce Zhang

Ce Zhang
ETH Zurich

  • Ce Zhang (opens in new tab) is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at ETH Zürich. Zhang believes that by making data—along with the processing of data—easily accessible to laypeople, there is the potential to make the world a better place. Zhang’s current research focuses on building data systems to support machine learning and help facilitate other sciences. Before joining ETH, Zhang was advised by Christopher Ré. He finished his PhD round-tripping between the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Stanford University, and spent another year as a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford. His PhD work produced DeepDive, a trained data system for automatic knowledgebase construction. Zhang participated in the research efforts that won a SIGMOD Best Paper Award and a SIGMOD Research Highlight Award, and was featured in special issues, including “Best of VLDB” and Nature magazine.

Portrait of Ben Zorn

Ben Zorn
Microsoft