Closing Remarks

Speaker Details

Jaime Puente is a director at Microsoft Research, responsible for engagements in Latin America and the Caribbean. He has been a key contributor to the establishment and operation of two Virtual Research Institutes in Latin America and the Caribbean: the Microsoft Research–FAPESP Institute for ICT Research and the Latin American and Caribbean Collaborative ICT Research Federation (LACCIR). Since 2012, Jaime has chaired the Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship program, which identifies, honors, and supports early-career computing researchers who have the potential to make significant advances in the state of the art.

Jaime was a Fulbright Scholar who earned a master’s in computer engineering from Iowa State University, an MBA and an electronics engineering degree from Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral (ESPOL) in Ecuador, and an Educational Specialist (Ed.S.) post-master’s degree from NOVA Southeastern University in Florida. He is currently a PhD candidate in the Graduate School of Computer and Information Sciences at NOVA Southeastern University. His main research interests concern human-computer interactions and the pervasive integration of digital technologies in education. Prior to joining Microsoft Research in January 2003, Jaime worked for Commerce One, a pioneering business-to-business e-commerce company, as a technical project manager, and before that, he spent 13 years as a professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at ESPOL.

Evelyne Viegas is the Director of Semantic Computing at Microsoft Research, based in Redmond, Washington, United States. Semantic computing is about interacting with data in rich, safe, and semantically meaningful ways, to create the path from data to information, knowledge, and intelligence. In her current role, Evelyne is building initiatives that focus on information seen as an enabler of innovation, working in partnership with universities and government agencies worldwide. In particular, she is creating programs related to computational intelligence research to drive open innovation and agile experimentation via cloud-based services, as well as projects to advance the state of the art in machine learning, knowledge representation, and reasoning under uncertainty at web scale.

Prior to her present role, Evelyne worked as a technical lead at Microsoft delivering Natural Language Processing components to projects for MSN, Office, and Windows. Before Microsoft, and after completing her Ph.D. in France, she worked as a Principal Investigator at the Computing Research Laboratory in New Mexico on an ontology-based Machine Translation project. Evelyne serves on international editorial, program, and award committees.

As vice president in Microsoft Research, Tony Hey is responsible for worldwide university research collaborations with Microsoft researchers. Hey is also responsible for the multidisciplinary eScience Research Group within Microsoft Research. Prior to joining Microsoft, Hey served as director of the U.K.’s e-Science Initiative, managing the government’s efforts to build a new scientific infrastructure for collaborative, multidisciplinary, data-intensive research projects. Before leading this initiative, Hey led a research group in the area of parallel computing and was Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science, and Dean of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Southampton.

Hey is a fellow of the U.K.’s Royal Academy of Engineering and was awarded a CBE for services to science in 2005. He is also a fellow of the British Computer Society, the Institute of Engineering and Technology, the Institute of Physics, and the U.S. American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Tony Hey has written books on particle physics and computing and has a passionate interest in communicating the excitement of science and technology to young people. He has co-authored “popular” books on quantum mechanics and on relativity.

Date:
Speakers:
Evelyne Viegas, Jaime Puente, and Tony Hey
Affiliation:
Microsoft, Microsoft