Ken Woodberry

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Ken Woodberry is Principal Software Engineering Lead in charge of Acceleration for Azure Sphere (opens in new tab).  The Acceleration team enables customers to be highly productive during prototyping and productization of Azure Sphere solutions.  The team uses a wide range of mechanisms including code samples, reference solutions, high-touch customer engagements, application notes, code snippets, demos, experimental product development, and more.  Previously, Ken was Deputy Managing Director of the OS Technology Group within MSR NExT from which Azure Sphere was incubated.

In prior roles, Ken led the Cambridge branch of Microsoft Research Technologies whose mission was to work with Microsoft’s product groups to channel research activities and results into strategically important projects for the company, and for many years he was Deputy Managing Director at Microsoft’s Cambridge Research Lab (MSRC) with responsibility for the lab’s business-facing activities, including technology transfer, incubation, licensing, spin-outs, and other models for utilising the intellectual property generated by the lab’s research groups.

At MSRC, Ken also headed the Computer-Mediated Living (CML) research group which he founded in 2003 and which grew to include both the Sensors and Devices (opens in new tab) group and what became the Human Experience and Design (opens in new tab) group.  CML’s vision was fundamentally interdisciplinary, bringing together hardware engineering, computer science, psychology, sociology and design to address the problem of designing innovative technology to support everyday life in its widest sense.  Ken’s personal research interests include human-computer interaction, information retrieval, digital media management, and ubiquitous computing.  He has numerous publications in these areas and holds several patents.

Ken joined Microsoft in September 2002 from RealVNC (opens in new tab), a start-up he co-founded with colleagues from AT&T Labs Cambridge. Previously, in his seven years at AT&T Labs, Ken led research in the areas of multimedia information retrieval and communications, and was involved in the incubation and business planning of a number of projects that were spun out from the lab as successful independent companies. Earlier posts include several years as an academic at Oxford University, three years at Nortel Networks, and a year’s sabbatical at the London School of Economics.

Ken is a Fellow of the British Computer Society, a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology, and he sits on the Board of the Cambridge Network (opens in new tab). He holds a doctorate in Computation from Oxford University and an AB in Applied Mathematics and Economics from Harvard University where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa (opens in new tab).