(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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New “vertical campus” in Boston area gives Microsoft a presence in a bustling tech community. Recruit-rich MIT and Harvard are nearby.
By Steve Birge
Microsoft’s new vertical campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, occupies this building very close to Harvard, MIT, and downtown Boston.
Microsoft is working to dispel the perception by many in the United States that it is a Seattle company.
It has development offices in Silicon Valley, North Dakota, North Carolina, and sales offices elsewhere in the U.S. Its extensive global presence includes development centers in India, Ireland, Israel, and China.
Now, in hopes of stepping even farther away from its Seattle-centric image, Microsoft is substantially expanding its presence in the Boston area. It opened offices there last fall and now is aggressively recruiting for a “vertical campus” in Cambridge, an office that will have many groups on separate floors in one building, as opposed to Redmond’s “horizontal” campus model. The new campus is located across the Charles River from downtown Boston, in the heart of the East Coast’s hottest technology center and down the road from technology powerhouses MIT and Harvard.
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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.)
