About the Talk:
In 1991 Microsoft was only the second largest software company in Redmond, with significantly smaller revenues than Nintendo of America located just across the street. The company was best known for a text-based operating system called DOS and was working hard to establish its Windows operating system in a DOS dominated world. It was an unlikely candidate to house a major basic research organization in computer science.
That year Microsoft Research began as a very small group of computer scientists working in natural language processing, programming languages and operating systems. Today virtually every product Microsoft ships has been influenced by the work done in Microsoft Research. The research organization has grown to over 280 people working in 25 research areas with laboratories located in Redmond, San Francisco and Cambridge, England. And it's still growing. It is expected to reach over 600 researchers by the year 2000.
In this presentation I will talk about the creation of Microsoft Research, the philosophy behind its organization and growth and the impact research has had on Microsoft as a company. I'll also talk about the key research projects going on within Microsoft Research and future directions for the company.
About the speaker:
Rick joined Microsoft in the fall of 1991 as its first Director of
Research and now holds the title of Vice President of Research. He
received Bachelor's degrees in Mathematics and Comparative Literature from
Stanford University in 1974 and he received his PhD in Computer Science
from the University of Rochester in 1980. He was a Professor at Carnegie
Mellon University for 12 years and was best known during that time for the
creation of the Mach operating system. He has published papers in a
number of areas of computer science including computer vision, AI,
programming languages, data compression, networking, and distributed and
parallel operating system design. He is well known for his interest in
computer gaming and as a graduate student implemented (with Gene Ball)
Alto Trek -- the first real-time network space game for the Xerox Alto.
Among other odd facts, he is the inventor of the term NUMA (non-uniform
memory architecture), is often credited with the term
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