New England Lab Current Members' Bios

Open since July 2008, Microsoft Research New England would like to introduce and welcome our permanent members, post-docs, visiting researchers, weekly visitors, and interns. Since July 2011, our lab also has a group of remote researchers in Herzelia, Israel.

Permanent Members

	Boaz Barak, Senior Researcher Boaz Barak received his Ph.D in 2004 from the Weizmann Institute of Science. Following a postdoc at the Institute for Advanced Study, he joined the faculty of Princeton University where he was most recently an associate professor of Computer Science. He is interested in theoretical computer science, and in particular cryptography and computational complexity. He has won the ACM doctoral dissertation award in 2004 and a Packard fellowship in 2007. Read more...

	Nancy Baym, Principal Researcher Nancy Baym was previously a Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign writing the first dissertation about online community. Her primary research interests are the roles social media play in personal relationships and between artists and audiences and qualitative research methods in internet research. Her recent books include Personal Connections In The Digital Age (Polity Press) and, with co-editor Annette Markham, Internet Inquiry: Conversations About Methods (Sage Publications). In the late 1990s she co-founded the Association of Internet Researchers and served as its first vice-president and second president. She serves on the editorial boards of numerous journals including New Media & Society, The Journal of Communication, The Information Society and others. Read more...

	Christian Borgs, Deputy Managing Director Christian Borgs is deputy managing director of Microsoft Research lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is also an affiliate professor of mathematics at the University of Washington. Before becoming deputy managing director of the New England lab, he was a principal researcher and co-manager of the Theory Group at Microsoft Research. Borgs’ research areas include properties of self-engineered networks, phase transitions in theoretical computer science, and algorithmic game theory. Read more...

	danah boyd, Senior Researcher danah boyd's research centers on the intersection of people, social practices, and technology. She is interested in how mediated environments alter the structural conditions in which people operate and how people navigate and repurpose these environments for their own needs. Her current work investigates how youth culture, privacy, online safety, and unintended outcomes of social technologies. danah is also a Research Scholar at New York University's Media, Culture, and Communication program, a Visiting Researcher at Harvard Law School, and an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales. When bored or frustrated, danah is known to blow off steam by ranting on her blog. Read more...

	Jennifer Chayes, Managing Director Jennifer Tour Chayes is managing director of the newly opened Microsoft Research New England lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Before this, she was research area manager for Mathematics, Theoretical Computer Science and Cryptography at Microsoft Research Redmond. Chayes joined Microsoft Research in 1997, when she co-founded the Theory Group. Her research areas include phase transitions in discrete mathematics and computer science, structural and dynamical properties of self-engineered networks, and algorithmic game theory. She is the co-author of almost 100 scientific papers and the co-inventor of more than 20 patents. Read more...

	Henry Cohn, Principal Researcher Henry Cohn’s mathematical interests include symmetry and exceptional structures; more generally, he enjoys any area in which concrete problems are connected in surprising ways with abstract mathematics. He came to Microsoft Research as a post-doc in 2000 and joined the theory group in 2001. In 2007 he became head of the cryptography group, and in 2008 he moved to Cambridge with Jennifer Chayes and Christian Borgs to help set up Microsoft Research New England. He stays up late at night worrying about why the 16th dimension isn’t like the 8th or 24th. Read more...

	Kate Crawford, Principal Researcher For ten years, Kate Crawford has researched the social, political and cultural practices that surround and inform media technologies. She is an Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales and former Deputy Director of the Journalism and Media Research Centre. Prior to this, she was a founding member of the Media and Communications Department at the University of Sydney. She has conducted large-scale studies of mobile and social media use at sites around the world, including India and Australia, and has been awarded both the R.M Crawford Medal and the Manning Clark Cultural Award. Her work has featured in The Wall Street Journal, BBC’s The World Today, ABC TV, and The Sydney Morning Herald among others. Her current projects include the long-term implications of Big Data, social news, mobiles and privacy, the changing spaces of social and anti-social media, and the way media technologies are used during disasters and other acute events. Read more...

	Mary L. Gray, Senior Researcher Mary Gray studied anthropology before receiving her Ph.D. in Communication from the University of California, San Diego in 2004. Her research looks at how media access and everyday uses of technologies shape people's lives. Her most recent book, Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America (New York University Press, 2009), which won awards from scholarly societies in anthropology, media studies, and sociology, examines how lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender young people negotiate and express their identities in rural parts of the United States—and the role that media, particularly the Internet, play in their lives and political work. She served on the executive board of the American Anthropological Association from 2008 until 2010 and holds a seat on that group's Committee on Public Policy. She’s been an associate professor of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, with adjunct appointments in American Studies, Anthropology, and Gender Studies. Read more...

	Luong Hoang, Research Software Design Engineer (RSDE) II Luong (Louie) received a B.S. in Mathematics, Computer Science and Quantitative Economics from Drake University in 2008. He was named the Outstanding Student in Mathematics and is a recipient of the Best Undergraduate Research Paper award at MICS 07 conference. After graduation he joined Microsoft on the Dynamics AX team, helping to build kernel window controls for application developers. He is currently also a graduate student at MIT studying Computer Science with a specific focus on Computational Mathematics and Algorithms. His present interest lies in methods and analysis of Parallel/Super Computing.

	Nicole Immorlica, Researcher Nicole's research lies broadly within the field of algorithmic game theory. Using tools and modeling concepts from both theoretical computer science and economics, Nicole hopes to explain, predict, and shape behavioral patterns in various online and offline systems, markets, and games. Her areas of specialty include social networks and mechanism design. Nicole received her Ph.D. from MIT in Cambridge, MA in 2005 and then completed three years of postdocs at both Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA and CWI in Amsterdam, Netherlands before accepting a job as an assistant professor at Northwestern University in Chicago, IL in 2008. She joined the Microsoft Research New England Lab in 2012.

	Sham Kakade, Senior Researcher Sham Kakade was previously an associate professor of statistics at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and an assistant professor at the Toyota Technological Institute. He received his B.A. from the California Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. from the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit affiliated with University College London. He was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania, with Michael Kearns. His research focuses on artificial intelligence and machine learning, and their connections to other areas such as game theory and economics. Read more...

	Adam Tauman Kalai, Senior Researcher Adam was previously an assistant professor of computer science at Georgia Tech and TTI-Chicago. He received a PhD at CMU from the ingenious Avrim Blum, followed by an NSF post-doc at MIT under the wise guidance of Santosh Vempala. His main research interests are machine learning and crowdsourcing. Read more...

	Yael Tauman Kalai, Senior Researcher Most recently an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Georgia Tech. Before this, Yael was a post-doc at the Weizmann Institute in Israel and Microsoft Research in Redmond. She graduated from MIT, working in cryptography under the superb supervision of Shafi Goldwasser. Read more...

	Butler Lampson, Technical Fellow Butler is a Technical Fellow at Microsoft and an Adjunct Professor at MIT. He has worked on computer architecture, local area networks, raster printers, page description languages, operating systems, remote procedure call, programming languages and their semantics, programming in the large, fault-tolerant computing, transaction processing, computer security, WYSIWYG editors, and tablet computers. He was one of the designers of the SDS 940 time-sharing system, the Alto personal distributed computing system, the Xerox 9700 laser printer, two-phase commit protocols, the Autonet LAN, the SPKI system for network security, the Microsoft Tablet PC software, the Microsoft Palladium high-assurance stack, and several programming languages. He received the ACM Software Systems Award in 1984 for his work on the Alto, the IEEE Computer Pioneer award in 1996 and von Neumann Medal in 2001, the Turing Award in 1992, and the NAE’s Draper Prize in 2004. Read more...

	Ce Liu, Researcher Ce Liu just joined MSRNE as a postdoc researcher right after he obtained his PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received the BS degree in automation and the ME degree in pattern recognition from the Department of Automation, Tsinghua University in 1999 and 2002, respectively. From 2002 to 2003, he worked at Microsoft Research Asia as an assistant researcher. His research interests include computer vision, computer graphics, and machine learning. He has published more than 20 papers in the top conferences and journals in these fields. He received a Microsoft Fellowship in 2005, the outstanding student paper award at the Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) in 2006, a Xerox Fellowship in 2007, the best student paper award at IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) in 2009. Read more...

	Markus Mobius, Senior Researcher Markus Mobius was formerly an Associate Professor of economics at Harvard University and a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His main research interests lie in social networks, with a particular focus on cooperation and trust in social networks. He does both theoretical and experimental research (mainly field experiments). Markus received his PhD from MIT in 2000 and previously earned an M.Phil in economics and a B.A. in mathematics from Oxford University. He and his wife Tanya Rosenblat have two daughters. Read more...

	Madhu Sudan, Principal Researcher Madhu Sudan got his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 1992, and joined MSR in May 2009 after stints in IBM Research (1992-1997) and MIT (1997-2009) where he was the Fujitsu Professor of EECS and Associate Director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Madhu Sudan's research lies in the fields of computational complexity theory, algorithms and coding theory. He is best known for his works on probabilistic checking of proofs, and on the design of list-decoding algorithms for error-correcting codes. His current research interests include semantic communication and property testing. In 2002, Madhu Sudan was awarded the Nevanlinna Prize, for outstanding contributions to the mathematics of computer science, at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Beijing. Read more...

Post-Docs


	Gabriel Carroll, First-Year Post-Doc Gabriel Carroll finished his PhD in economics at MIT, advised by Parag Pathak, Daron Acemoglu, and Glenn Ellison. His main interest is in mechanism design, particularly in incorporating non-equilibrium-based concepts such as bounded rationality and robustness into mechanism design problems. Read more...

	Arun Chandrasekhar, First-Year Post-Doc Arun received his PhD in economics at MIT in May 2012 under the supervision of Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, Matt Jackson and Victor Chernozhukov. He is a development economist and econometrician interested in the role that social networks play in developing countries. Arun's research focuses on social learning and informal insurance as well as the associated econometric problems that arise when studying network data. He will be starting as an assistant professor at the Department of Economics at Stanford in Fall 2013. Read more...

	Dana Dachman-Soled, Second-Year Post-Doc Dana Dachman-Soled received her PhD in Computer Science at Columbia University under the supervision of Tal Malkin. Her research interests include the theoretical foundations of cryptography, property testing of Boolean functions and cryptographic hardness of learning. In particular, she is interested in exploring complexity-theoretic approaches to cryptography. Read more...

	Megan Finn, First-Year Post-Doc Megan Finn received her PhD from University of California, Berkeley from the School of Information. Her research areas include information infrastructure, crisis informatics and history of information. She also holds a Masters in Information Management and Systems from Berkeley and BS in Computer Science from University of Michigan. Read more...

	Anthony Gitter, First-Year Post-Doc Anthony Gitter received his PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University under the supervision of Ziv Bar-Joseph. His research is in computational biology with an emphasis on the networks problems that arise in systems biology. Anthony is especially interested in the mechanisms that underlie human disease and the hidden layers of biological phenomena. Read more...

	Daniel Hsu, Second Year Post-Doc Daniel Hsu received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2010 from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego, where he was advised by Sanjoy Dasgupta. In 2010-2011, he was a postdoc with the Department of Statistics at Rutgers University and the Department of Statistics at the University of Pennsylvania, supervised by Tong Zhang and Sham M. Kakade. His research interests are in algorithmic statistics and machine learning. Read more...

	Yash Kanoria, First-Year Post-Doc Yash’s research focuses on understanding matching markets and social networks, using tools from graphical models, message passing algorithms, probability and game theory. Yash completed his PhD in Electrical Engineering at Stanford, advised by Andrea Montanari. Previously, he obtained a B. Tech. in Electrical Engineering at IIT Bombay. In Fall 2013, he will join the Decision, Risk and Operations faculty at Columbia Business School. Yash won a Student Paper Award at ISIT 2010. For more, click here.

	Jacob Leshno, First-Year Post-Doc Jacob Leshno received his PhD in Economics at Harvard University under the supervision of Alvin Roth, after finishing M.Sc. and B.Sc. in pure math from Tel Aviv University. While being interested in everything, his research focuses on market design, the application of game theory and mechanism design to practical problems such as matching students to schools or assigning patients to nursing homes. Read more...

	Allison Bishop Lewko, First-Year Post-Doc Allison Bishop Lewko received her Phd in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin, advised by Brent Waters. She previously earned a master’s degree in mathematics from the University of Cambridge and a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Princeton University. Her research areas include cryptography, distributed computing, and harmonic analysis. Read more...

	Brendan Lucier, Second-Year Post-Doc Brendan Lucier was a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Toronto under the supervision of Allan Borodin and Mike Molloy. His research interests lie in theoretical computer science and game theory. He is particularly interested in algorithmic mechanism design and the theory of social networks. Read more...

	Sivan Sabato, First-Year Post-Doc Sivan Sabato finished her PhD in Computer Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, under the supervision of Naftali Tishby. She previously earned an M.Sc. in Computer Science from the Technion, under the supervision of Yoad Winter. Her main research interests are in machine learning theory, algorithms and applications. Read more...

	Gregory Valiant, First-Year Post-Doc Gregory Valiant finished graduate school at UC Berkeley, under the supervision of Christos Papadimitriou. His recent work has been at the intersection of algorithms, learning theory, and statistics, and his broader research interests also include game theory, and evolution. Read more...

Visiting Researchers


	Jean Burgess, Queensland University of Technology Jean Burgess is Associate Professor of Digital Media Studies and Deputy Director of the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries & Innovation (http://cci.edu.au) at Queensland University of Technology, Australia. Her research focuses on the uses, politics and methodological implications of social and mobile media platforms. Jean is currently involved in a number major funded projects that both apply and critique the emerging digital methods associated with 'big social data' to the study of social media, focusing on natural disasters and other 'acute events', as well as entertainment and popular culture. She is co-author of the first scholarly book on YouTube (YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture, Polity 2009), as well as co-editor of the first books on the iPhone (Studying Mobile Media, Routledge 2012), and Twitter (Twitter and Society, Peter Lang, forthcoming 2013). Her most recent book is A Companion to New Media Dynamics (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013). Read more...

	Nadia Heninger, UCSD Nadia Heninger received her PhD in computer science from Princeton University in 2011 under the supervision of Bernard Chazelle. Most recently, she was an NSF postdoctoral fellow at UC San Diego. Her research interests include cryptanalysis, lattices, error-correcting codes, and mathematical aspects of applied computer security. Read more...

	Sanjeev Khanna, University of Pennsylvania Sanjeev Khanna is a Professor of Computer and Information Science at University of Pennsylvania. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University (1996). From 1996 to 1999, he was a member of the Mathematical Sciences Research center at Bell Labs. He joined University of Pennsylvania in 1999. Sanjeev's research interests are in algorithms and complexity with a focus on approximation algorithms and hardness of approximation. He is also interested in algorithmic game theory and differential privacy. He is a recipient of an Arthur Samuel dissertation award, a Sloan Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

	David A. Miller, UC San Diego David A. Miller is an Assistant Professor of Economics at UC San Diego. A game theorist, he studies game theory topics in repeated games, mechanism design, social networks, and contracts, as well as applied theory topics in industrial organization, finance, and computer science. For example, some of his current research seeks to understand how players in a social network can sustain cooperation by communicating strategically about who should be temporarily "ostracized" for cheating. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford and an A.B. in Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard. Read more...

	Yair Weiss, Hebrew University Yair Weiss is a Professor at the Hebrew University School of Computer Science and Engineering, working on machine vision, machine learning and neural computation. He received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1998 where he worked with Ted Adelson and did postdoctoral work at UC Berkeley. Since 2005 he has been a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Read more...

Weekly Visitors


	Amitabh Chandra, Harvard Kennedy School of Government Amitabh Chandra is an economist and a Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He is a Research Associate at the IZA Institute in Bonn, Germany and at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). He also serves as a Special Commissioner on Provider Price Reform. His research focuses on productivity and cost-growth in healthcare and racial disparities in healthcare. His research has been supported by the National Institute of Aging, the National Institute of Child Health and Development, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and has been published in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, the New England Journal of Medicine, and Health Affairs. He is an editor of the Journal of Human Resources, Economics Letters, and the American Economic Journal. Professor Chandra has testified to the United States Senate, the National Academy of Science, the Institute of Medicine and the United States Commission on Civil Rights. His research has been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, Newsweek, and on National Public Radio. He is the recipient of an Outstanding Teacher Award, the first-prize recipient of the Upjohn Institute's International Dissertation Research Award, the Kenneth Arrow Award for best paper in health economics, and the Eugene Garfield Award for the impact of medical research. Read more...

	Yiling Chen, Harvard Yiling Chen is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University, where she is a member of the Econ CS and AI research groups, and a faculty affiliate of the Center for Research on Computation and Society. She received her Ph.D. in Information Sciences and Technology from the Pennsylvania State University. Prior to working at Harvard, she spent about two years at the Microeconomic and Social Systems group of Yahoo! Research in New York City. Her current research focuses on topics in the intersection of computer science and economics. She is interested in designing and analyzing social computing systems according to both computational and economic objectives. Chen received an ACM EC Outstanding Paper Award, an AAMAS Best Paper Award, and an NSF Career award, and was selected by IEEE Intelligent Systems as one of "AI's 10 to Watch" in 2011. Read more...

	Chris Dellarocas, Boston University Chrysanthos (Chris) Dellarocas is Professor and Chair of Information Systems at Boston University. He is best known for his work on online reputation and social media. Other interests include collective intelligence, online advertising and the economics of media industries. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT. He previously taught at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, NYU’s Stern School of Business and U. Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business and also worked at McKinsey and Accenture. Chris holds 9 patents in business process modeling and online reputation technologies. Read more...

	Michal Feldman, Hebrew University/Harvard Michal Feldman received her Ph.D in 2005 from the University of California at Berkeley. Following a postdoc at the Hebrew University and at Tel-Aviv University, she joined the faculty of the School of Business Administration at the Hebrew University (in 2007). Her research focuses on the intersection of game theory, computer science and microeconomics, a field often termed "Algorithmic Game Theory". She has been recently awarded a Marie Curie grant, and is currently a visiting scholar at the Center for Research on Computation and Society (CRCS) at Harvard University. Read more...

	Ernest Fraenkel, MIT Ernest Fraenkel studied Chemistry and Physics as an undergraduate at Harvard College and obtained his Ph.D. in Structural Biology at MIT in the department of Biology. After doing post-doctoral work in the same field at Harvard, he turned his attention to the emerging field of Systems Biology. His research now focuses on using high-throughput techniques and computational methods to uncover the molecular pathways that are altered in disease and to identify new therapeutic strategies. Read more...

	Bill Freeman, MIT Bill Freeman is a professor in the EECS Department at MIT, directing a computer vision research group in CSAIL. He is interested in novel camera designs (computational photography) and in topics at the intersections of computer vision, computer graphics, and machine learning. Questions of interest include how to characterize and represent images and image sequences, how to sample signals, and how to re-render videos to reveal otherwise unseen signals of interest. In 2010, he was an Associate Director of CSAIL. Read more...

	Michael Mitzenmacher, Harvard University Michael Mitzenmacher is a Professor of Computer Science in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University, and currently serves as Area Dean for Computer Science. He graduated summa cum laude with a degree in mathematics and computer science from Harvard in 1991. After studying math for a year in Cambridge, England, on the Churchill Scholarship, he obtained his Ph. D. in computer science at U.C. Berkeley in 1996. He then worked at Digital Systems Research Center until joining the Harvard faculty in 1999. Michael has authored or co-authored over 150 conference and journal publications on a variety of topics, including Internet algorithms, hashing, load-balancing, erasure codes, error-correcting codes, compression, bin-packing, and power laws. His work on low-density parity-check codes received the 2002 IEEE Information Theory Society Best Paper Award and the 2009 SIGCOMM Test of Time Award. His textbook on probabilistic techniques in computer science, co-written with Eli Upfal, was published in 2005 by Cambridge University Press. Read more...

	Hector Postigo, Temple University Hector Postigo is Associate Professor in the Department of Media Studies and Production in the School of Media and Communication at Temple University. His research focuses on new digital media and user participatory practices in varied categories of social media environments that include: video games, YouTube, blogs, Facebook, etc. Recently, Professor Postigo has also started writing about privacy and participation in web platforms. He recently finished a 30-month study of the US security/privacy industry and its branding and marketing practices. That project was funded by the European Commission 7th Programme Framework. With European collaborators he recently published a co-edited a volume titled Privacy Through Accountability. It’s available from Palgrave Macmillan Press. Lastly, Professor Postigo is cofounder of www.culturedigitally.org, made possible with the generous support of the National Science Foundation. The blog is a well-visited and respected research forum where researchers studying digital media and its impact on society and culture gather to present and discuss their ideas and emerging work. Learn more here: http://www.hectorpostigo.com/.

	T.L. Taylor, MIT T.L. Taylor is a qualitative sociologist (Ph.D., Brandeis University) whose work focuses on the interrelation between culture, social practice, and technology in online leisure environments. She is currently at work on two new projects - one focused on console gaming and a second around live-streaming and online play. She has just moved back to the U.S. after living and working in Scandinavia for nine years and has joined the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT as an Associate Professor. More info about her work, as well as links to many of her articles, can be found at her website.

Interns

Jade E. Davis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Jade E. Davis is a Doctoral Student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Department of Communication Studies where she studies under the direction of Ken Hillis. Her primary research centers on how digitization and social media effect how we know and understand culture and society. She is also interested in big data, ethnomining, and their effects and potential for use in critical ethnographic work in digital environments.

Remote Researchers in Herzelia, Israel