(spouse)x(spouse)+foocamp=D2R2?
The Geeks in Question: Jennifer Chayes & Christian Borgs
The job titles: Managing Director and Deputy Managing Director of Microsoft Research, respectively. Also: spouses.
You guys are heading to Foo Camp later today, right? I hear that all attendees had to answer a few questions for their bios, including “Which Star Wars character are you?”
Jennifer: I said Luke Skywalker, because I’m always seeking.
Christian: And I said, “I’m D2R2!”
Jennifer: …It’s R2D2! Forgive him, he’s European.
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Suzanne Hansen
The Geek in question:
Suzanne Hansen
The job title:
Program Manager, Non-Professional Tools
How did you get here?
Well, I was doing my master’s degree at University of Victoria, working on an open source project for Eclipse and other very non-Microsoft things. Some people from Microsoft Research came by campus to look at student projects, and mine was slightly different because I was looking at how novices learn how to program.
I’d applied once to intern at Microsoft and didn’t even get an interview, and I’d thought to myself, “Fine. So that’s how it’s going to be.” But apparently the Microsoft Research team remembered my student project a year later when John Montgomery (my manager) was forming the Non-Professional Tools team, and I was called in.
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Microsoft Live Labs is a catalyst for the convergence of two critical facets of technology development. The aim is to inspire new thinking and new approaches to product innovation.
By Julie Evans
Live Labs founder Gary Flake says the biggest challenge facing his group is to transfer its technology to product teams effectively.
Microsoft Live Labs is going to a place where few have gone before: the intersection of basic research and pure engineering. Its mission: to drive state-of-the-art Internet technologies.
Live Labs was founded by Gary Flake, technical fellow at Microsoft, who saw the need to form a trench in the middle between the long-term nature of researchers and the near-term focus of engineers.
“… there’s an intersecting point somewhere in the middle where there’s this convergence of research and engineering where a lot of interesting things happen,” Flake said. “The notion of being a little bit in the middle is one that’s a little bit awkward for Microsoft. We wanted Live Labs to be a place that was really having a home in the middle between these extremes. We apply this pattern not just on the continuum between engineering and research, but we also think about it in terms of tactics versus strategy, long-term versus short-term, horizontal platforms versus vertical engineering. In every case, we are aspiring to try to make the market connect the dots between the two extremes.”
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My friends over in the Applied Game Theory team at MS Research. They won an MS-sponsored research contest and to celebrate, two of them dyed their hair, and they all got temporary tattoos.
In June I had a 7:30am meeting with some of the guys from the Applied Games research group. The crew was visiting from Cambridge, where they’re based, and despite jetlag and the ungodly hour (seriously, guys: 7:30 breakfast meeting? Gleargh.) we had a hilarious time.
So, WTF do they do? Well, according to their website, Our mission is to leverage the methods of approximate probabilistic inference for addressing relevant applications both in recreational games and in abstract decision games played in the real world. This means these guys make their living thinking of everything as a game … and they certainly seem to have way more fun than the average researchers.
They’re working on some cool super-secret stuff with Bungie and figuring out ways to apply their game-brains to typically un-fun stuff like online advertising. They taught me a few German phrases (quotienfrau!) and I taught them what “Brouhaha” means. (Ah yes: a noisy response to stimulus! Of course.)
