Microsoft Research recognizes these outstanding new faculty members who were nominated by their universities and represent a selection of the best and the brightest in their fields.
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Microsoft Research Faculty Fellows for 2009
Luis Ceze
University of Washington
Assistant Professor
Computer Science and Engineering
Luis Ceze focuses on improving programmability and reliability of multicore systems. His research spans computer architecture, compilers, operating systems, and programming languages. One of his group's key projects is to completely remove nondeterminism from multiprocessor systems, potentially changing the way we debug, test, and deploy multithreaded code. In addition, his group is designing systems that automatically avoid software bugs in the field, and is rethinking the role of memory in modern computer systems to better match programmability and scalability challenges.
Nicole Immorlica
Northwestern University, McCormick School of Engineering
Assistant Professor
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department
Nicole Immorlica studies the design and deployment of modern platforms and technologies. Using techniques from economics, social science, and theoretical computer science, Nicole develops theories predicting how people behave. These predictions in turn allow Nicole to propose platforms that, by their very design, guide individuals' self-motivated actions toward a globally optimal outcome. Her work has applications to social networks like Facebook, auction design—including sponsored search auctions, and two-sided markets like the National Residency Matching Program (NRMP).
Rafael Pass
Cornell University
Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science
Rafael Pass is a cryptographer who studies how untrusting agents can collaborate towards common goals. He uses mathematically rigorous techniques to design and analyze cryptographic protocols for real-world settings where millions of executions are taking place at the same time. His work also focuses on developing computational models of knowledge and rationality, and impacts fundamental questions in game theory and complexity theory.
Svetlana Lazebnik
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science
Svetlana Lazebnik's research focuses on computer vision and visual recognition. Her goal is to create a new generation of recognition systems that can make sense of the "open universe" of large-scale, complex, evolving image collections such as those found on the Internet. Automated recognition technologies can change the way that users interact with ever-growing and ubiquitous collections of digital photos, and lead to new ways of accessing information through pictures.
Gill Bejerano
Stanford University
Assistant Professor
Developmental Biology and Computer Science
Gill Bejerano is a pioneer of Human Genome research. He is the discoverer of "Ultraconserved Elements", a human genome phenomenon that defies our understanding of molecular evolution. Gill has also done influential work in applying Markovian models to biosequence analysis. Dr. Bejerano's lab strives to understand the many thousands of genomic regions involved in gene regulation during human development. Their major interests are to (1) study the origins and evolution of these regions, (2) how they encode their individual as well as combined roles, (3) how they contribute to human disease, and (4) how they contribute to species adaptation.
Microsoft Research Faculty Fellows for 2008
Kristen Grauman
University of Texas at Austin
Assistant Professor
Computer Sciences
Kristen Grauman’s research focuses on designing the algorithms and learning processes that will allow computers to understand and organize visual information. In particular, she is interested in tackling the major scalability issues that surround visual recognition and search. The goal is to make it possible to efficiently index large volumes of visual data (images or videos) based on their content—a functionality that has the potential to greatly benefit a variety of users, from personal consumers to scientists and engineers.
Susan Hohenberger
Johns Hopkins University
Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science
Susan Hohenberger focuses on cryptography: the art of securely communicating. She is interested in designing secure solutions for pervasive settings, where devices everywhere are constantly talking to their environments, which may require low energy, short overhead, and the ability to quickly process a large number of incoming messages. Her research includes an emphasis on developing privacy-friendly technologies, such as anonymous communication and electronic cash.
Robert Kleinberg
Cornell University
Assistant Professor
Computer Science
Robert Kleinberg studies the theory of algorithm design under informational limitations. His research looks at practical questions in computer science—such as how to design more robust adaptive systems for Web search, network routing, online auctions, and product recommendations—and addresses these questions using mathematically rigorous techniques that build on ideas from learning theory, game theory, and information theory.
Philip Levis
Stanford University
Assistant Professor
Departments of Computer Science and Engineering
Philip Levis researches software and networking for tiny, low-power, wireless sensors. He focuses on making these networks of sensors easier to deploy and maintain by researching ultra-simple algorithms that use robust local rules to achieve desirable global behaviors. Software he develops is used by hundreds of research groups worldwide and runs on millions of nodes.
Karen Lipkow
University of Cambridge
Department of Biochemistry
Karen is fascinated by the interplay of both how signals are transmitted through a highly structured and heavily crowded cell, and how signalling influences this architecture. Initially concentrating on the well-studied system of bacterial chemotaxis, she has pioneered a computer model to simulate the movement and reactions of thousands of molecules within a spatially structured cell. This very detailed model allowed her to make predictions on the influences of architectural features on protein distribution, molecule lifetimes, and signalling speeds. She came up with and tested the novel concept of dynamic localisation, which enhances speed, robustness, and fidelity of signalling without any cost to the cell. With her fellowship, she is incorporating more architectural details, testing her models experimentally, and extending them to other systems.
Russell TedrakeMassachusetts Institute of Technology
Assistant Professor
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Russell Tedrake works on computational and machine learning approaches to control system design for robots that walk, run, swim, and fly more like real animals. He believes that, to succeed, both the mechanical design of the robots and the algorithms for controller design must exploit the natural, nonlinear dynamics of locomotion. In the next few years, he aims to build bipedal robots that can walk and jump across piles of rocks, and robotic birds with flapping wings that can gracefully land on a perch.
Microsoft Research Faculty Fellows 2007
Magdalena Balazinska
University of Washington
Assistant professor
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Balazinska's research interests are broadly in the fields of databases and distributed systems. Her current research focuses on building data management systems to help us monitor our physical and digital worlds at a fine grain and in real-time. To achieve this goal, she is building a stream processing engine that integrates live sensor data with the rich, historical data that accumulates over time. She is also exploring techniques to enable monitoring systems to handle dirty sensor data. She is working in particular with inaccurate and often ambiguous RFID data. Before joining the University of Washington, Magdalena Balazinska received a PhD from MIT in February 2006 and a B.E and M.S. from École Polytechnique de Montréal in March and May 2000, respectively.
Josh Bongard
University of Vermont
Assistant professor
Department of Computer Science
Bongard most recently worked at the Computational Synthesis Laboratory in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell, where he was a post-doctoral associate working on robotic self-learning and self-constructive methods. He has already published 26 articles – several of them highly cited and referenced. His research on evolvable robots has been funded by NASA and featured in New Scientist Magazine. He is also the co-author of two books: Co-Evolutionary Methods: For System Design and Analysis in Engineering and How the Body Shapes the Way We Think. He taught at the University of Zurich where he worked in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and in the Software Engineering Group while finishing his thesis: Incremental Approaches to the Combined Evolution of a Robot’s Body and Brain.
Yixin Chen
Washington University in St. Louis
Assistant professor
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Chen received his PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2005 and joined the faculty of Washington University that same year. He has been honored as an Early Career Principal Investigator by the Department of Energy, and has co-developed winning, automated planning systems in the recent two International Planning Competitions. Chen’s research interests include nonlinear optimization, artificial intelligence, and data mining. Specifically, Chen hopes that the overall contribution of his research will be a generalized approach that will significantly reduce the complexity of solving constrained nonlinear programming (NLP) problems arising from applications such as medical operations, computational biology, machine learning, planning and scheduling, and engineering design.
Adam Siepel
Cornell University
Assistant professor
Biological Statistics and Computational Biology
Siepel works in the area where computer science, statistics, evolutionary biology, and genomics meet. His main focus is on developing computational methods for the identification of novel functional elements in the human genome, including genes, regulatory elements, and structural RNAs. His general approach is to model the evolution and function of DNA sequences simultaneously, so that functional elements can be identified by their evolutionary signatures, and at the same time, the detailed evolutionary histories of these elements can be reconstructed. Before completing his PhD at University of California – Santa Cruz, Siepel worked for several years as a software developer. He has written widely used computer programs for the detection of evolutionarily conserved elements, gene prediction, phylogenetic modeling, and the detection of recombinant HIV sequences.
Luis von Ahn
Carnegie Mellon University
Assistant professor
Department of Computer Science
Luis von Ahn is focused on inventing novel techniques for utilizing the computational abilities of humans. He is working on CAPTCHA—the automated tests that humans can pass but that computer programs cannot. The applications are huge for security in computing. He is also working on The ESP Game, a game that helps catalog and tag images on the Web to ultimately allow for more accurate image searches. To date, The ESP Game has collected more than 10 million labels for images on the Web. One of Luis’s other interests is anonymous communication and usable, effective security. Luis has been named a MacArthur Fellow for 2006–2011. He was also named one of Popular Science’s Brilliant Scientists of 2006.
Microsoft Research Faculty Fellows 2006
Regina Barzilay
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Assistant professor
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence
Barzilay is up to the challenge. She is focusing her research on computational modeling of linguistic phenomena. She is exploring the ability of a computer to summarize information found in multiple documents that contain related information, such as news articles covering the same event. This will help readers find meaning in the ever-increasing body of information available today.
Aaron Hertzmann
University of Toronto
Assistant professor
Computer Science
Hertzmann is working on building simulated models for computer animation. His work shows that realistic physical models can be created from a small number of precise physical measurements. These models can predict human motion in a variety of circumstances, making them invaluable to animators. Similarly, these methods may have an impact on biomechanics research, ultimately aiding physicians and physical therapists in their work.
Scott Klemmer
Stanford University
Assistant professor
Computer Science
Klemmer also is interested in how to make the computer environment more significant and accessible by seeking ways to bridge the gulf between the physical and digital worlds. He is focusing on enhancing all aspects of human-computer interaction by creating tools to enable a prototyping culture. As a former graphic design major, Klemmer understands the need to use every available space to create a great design, whether with Post-it Notes, scraps of paper, or collages--it all adds up to a way to organize information and create a vision.
Eddie Kohler
University of California, Los Angeles
Assistant professor
Computer Science
Kohler hopes to make computer systems easier to program. His vision is based on innovative synthesis of basic systems research and component-based programming language techniques. In application, his work aims to create a more understandable, robust, and secure foundation for systems programming. Kohler is also hopeful that his designation as a Microsoft Research Faculty Fellow will help his university recruit the best and brightest students.
Fei-Fei Li
Princeton University
Assistant professor
Computer Science
Fei-Fei is interested in vision: the task of making machines see like humans. Just as the art lover’s brain blends individual points of color in an Impressionist painting to create a whole, Fei-Fei is developing algorithms to enable computers to generate comprehensive digital representations of complex objects and scenes. The desired result is new tools for personal photo organization and image searches, and, eventually, assistance for the visually impaired.
Mark Rouncefield
University of Lancaster
Computing Department
Mark Rouncefield is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Computing, Lancaster University. His research interests lie in a wide range of features of ‘Computer Supported Cooperative Work’ involving various aspects of the empirical study of work, organisation, human factors, and interactive computer systems design. This work is strongly inter-disciplinary in nature and has led to extensive and continuing collaborations with colleagues in Sociology, Computing, Informatics, and Management departments both in the U.K. and abroad. His empirical studies of work and technology have contributed to critical debates concerning the relationship between social and technical aspects of IT systems design and use. Recent work, in the ‘DIRC’, ‘Equator’, ‘Chameleon’, ‘Caside,’ and ‘Ideal’ research projects has particularly focused on socio-technical aspects of the design, deployment, and use of technologies in domestic, community, and healthcare settings. He is particularly associated with the development of ethnography as a method for informing design and evaluation, outlined in a recent book (with Richard Harper and Dave Randall), Fieldwork for Design.
Andrey Rybalchenko
Max Planck Institute for Software Systems
Andrey Rybalchenko leads the Verification Systems research group at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Saarbrücken. He holds Dipl.-Inf. (2002) and Dr.-Ing. (summa cum laude, 2005) degrees from the University of Saarland. Andrey's research interests focus on automated methods and tools for formal software verification, ranging from the design of program analysis methods to the development of algorithms for symbolic computation and automated deduction. Andrey's doctoral research revolutionized verification of liveness properties for software systems by introducing 'transition invariants'. Jointly with Microsoft Research, Andrey developed the Terminator tool, which is the first tool to perform automatic verification of liveness properties for software. He is also developing the ARMC tool for automatically proving safety properties of complex infinite state systems, which has been successfully applied for the verification of safety critical parts of the European Train Control System. Andrey is a recipient of Guenther Hotz medal (2002) from the University of Saarland and the Otto Hahn medal (2005) from the Max Planck Society.
Microsoft Research Faculty Fellows 2005
Ruth Baker
University of Oxford
Centre for Mathematical Biology
Ruth Baker's research focuses on the development and application of mathematical and computational techniques for the study of biological systems. In particular, she is interested in phenomena that arise during embryonic development, such as pattern formation and cell migration, and the impact of domain growth upon them. The goal is to use observation-driven hypotheses to formulate concrete mathematical frameworks in order to analyse such systems, and then to make experimentally testable predictions that may be used to further our insight into the mechanisms underlying development.
Frédo Durand
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Assistant professor
Computer Graphics
Durand’s research addresses all aspects of image synthesis and capture, and this integration enables him to address transversal issues such as 3-D modeling from 2-D images, relighting of photographs, real-time photorealistic effects, and material appearance capture. His research combines computer science, mathematics, physics, visual perception, and the visual arts.
Subhash Khot
Georgia Institute of Technology
Assistant professor
College of Computing
Khot works in the area of theoretical computer science, with an emphasis on complexity theory. He tackles problems that are among the most difficult and long-standing in computer-science theory, using novel techniques that draw on fields such as coding theory, linear algebra, and Fourier analysis. He has provided specific leadership in the use of Probabilistically Checkable Proof Systems to prove many inapproximability results, an approach that has been proven powerful.
Dan Klein
University of California at Berkeley
Assistant professor
Computer Science Division
Klein’s research demonstrates the feasibility of unsupervised methods of learning to natural language processing problems such as grammar induction and machine learning. His efforts to enable computers to learn important language information, such as grammar, from abundantly occurring data, as opposed to hand-labeled data, could have an enormous impact.
Radhika Nagpal
Harvard University
Assistant professor of Computer Science
School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Nagpal is interested in robust programming paradigms for systems composed of large numbers of embedded, locally interacting, identically programmed nodes, such as sensor-actuator networks, smart materials, and self-assembling and swarm robotics. Her research draws on concepts from embryo development suggested by biologists to explain how globally robust behavior can emerge from the decentralized interactions of less reliable cells.
Wei Wang
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Assistant professor
Department of Computer Science
Wei proposes to use novel techniques in data mining, automatic classification, and natural language text retrieval to address a central challenge of molecular biology: linking proteins to their function. She has developed algorithms to find recurring amino acid packing patterns in protein structures and to select those patterns whose occurrences are highly associated with known functionalities.
Klaus-Peter Zauner
University of Southampton
School of Electronic and Computer Science
Klaus-Peter Zauner is a Lecturer in the Science and Engineering of Natural Systems Group of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. He was born in Stuttgart, soldered together a Sinclair ZX81 as his first computer, and went on to study Biochemistry at the University of Tuebingen. Intrigued by Nature's molecular scale information processing mechanisms, he left Tuebingen in 1992 for Detroit, Michigan, to join Michael Conrad's Biocomputing Group. Under Michael Conrad's mentorship he worked on conformational computing and enzymatic computing. Klaus-Peter received his PhD in computer science from Wayne State University, Detroit in 2001. He started his academic career as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Wayne State University, and then returned to Europe in 2002 to work with Peter Dittrich in the Bio Systems Analysis Group at the University of Jena, before taking up his current position in 2003. He served on the Governing Board of the International Society of Molecular Electronics and BioComputing and is an Editorial Board Member of the International Journal of Unconventional Computing. He is a Microsoft Research European Fellow (2005) and recipient of a Leverhulme Research Leadership award (2007)
