As General Manager Engineering and a Research Manager for Microsoft Research, Gavin Jancke built over the last 8 years and currently runs the Advanced Development Group and Web Experience Teams within the organization. He is also a member of the MSR Research Management Team that guides and runs the Redmond Lab and takes a leading role in setting engineering strategy, direction and capability for the global division.
The 35+ person multi-disciplinary Advanced Development team develops software & hardware technologies and components based on Microsoft Research innovations, from technical transfer to the main Microsoft product groups, large scale prototyping and deployment, to internal lab engineering needs. Since the team was created over 250 engineering projects have been fulfilled.
Recently he managed and led the engineering effort for the Kinect for Windows SDK Beta which was honored as one of the “10 Most Innovative Tech Products of 2011” at the 2011 Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Awards.
In his spare time he still engineers code and of late developed a new color barcode format that has a high density storage capability. This evolved into a new Microsoft product & business called Microsoft Tag which Jancke envisioned with a marketeer from the Consumer Marketing Group, secured VP funding, architected, led & managed the development and rollout of the product which launched at the Consumer Electronic Show 2009. Since the launch Microsoft Tag is rapidly gaining traction being used by major corporations & media companies and has surpassed 2 billion impressions. Over 20m Tags could be found in May 2010 issues of various major magazine publications, several Tags appear daily in every print issue of the USA Today national newspaper. The barcode format was exhibited in the New York Museum Of Modern Art Design and Elastic Mind exhibition in 2008 - see Microsoft Researchers at Intersection of Science and Art
Prior to his latest position he worked in the Chairman's Office as part of Bill Gates' technical advisory staff working on a variety of research projects in the fields of Search and Telephony which have eventually become integrated into products such as MSN Desktop Search. Before this Jancke was a research engineer in Microsoft Research's Collaboration and Multimedia team engineering a variety of projects from peripheral awareness interfaces which became the Windows Vista Sidebar, to collaboration software evolving into Microsoft Roundtable.
Prior to Microsoft Research, Jancke was Development Lead in Microsoft's SQL Server product for 8 years, spanning several versions of the product from V4.2 through V7.0. Here he lead the engineering for the graphical administration and query tools for the product line.
Jancke first started Microsoft in the UK subsidary on a 1 year university industry placement program when he was 19 years of age working in Product Support Services supporting the Windows Software Development Kit and OS/2 Presentation Manager Development Kit. From then he worked off and on within Microsoft as an intern working in the SQL Server team which he subsequently joined in full time employment, and a contractor until finally moving out to the United States.
Personal Research Projects
- High Capacity Color Barcode
- Press release: International Organization Licenses Microsoft's New Multicolor Barcode Technology For Identifying Audiovisual Works
- Seattle PI: Software Notebook: Color is key to Microsoft's next generation barcode
- CNET News: Microsoft gives bar codes a splash of color
- IT Jungle: Microsoft Breaks the Color Barrier for Barcode
- Dr Dobbs: Color Bar Codes: More Than Just a Pretty Face
- Biometric ID Card Technology
- Enhanced Telephony
- Stuff I've Seen
- Sideshow: Peripheral awareness software
- Telepresence, Tele-Meetings, and Connected Spaces
- TELEP: Tele-Meetings
- Presenting to Local and Remote Audiences: Design & Use of the TELEP System (CHI2000)
- Silent Partners: Microsoft Research featured article on TELEP
- Video Windows/Virtual Kitchen
- Linking Social Spaces: Technical and Social Issues (CHI2001)
- Fancy Meeting You Here: Microsoft Research feature article on Virtual Kitchen
- TELEP: Tele-Meetings
US Patents
- 7,751,585 - System And Method For Encoding High Density Geometric Symbol Set
- 7,676,066 - System And Method For Selectively Encoding A Symbol Code In A Color Space.
- 7,697,506 - System And Method For Enhanced Computer Telephony Integration And Interaction.
- 5,701,137 - Method for separating a hierarchical tree control into one or more hierarchical tree controls in a graphical user interface.
- 5,764,913 - Computer network status monitoring system.
- 5,917,499 - Interactive graph display system.
- 7,043,572 - Method and System for Providing a Peripheral Service to a Host Computing Device.
- 7,162,473 - Method and system for usage analyzer that determines user accessed sources, indexes data subsets, and associated metadata, processing implicit queries based on potential interest to users.
- 7,185,290 - User interface for a system and process for providing dynamic communication access and information awareness in an interactive peripheral display.
European Patents
- 05105314.8 - System and method for encoding high density geometric symbol
Publications
- Pablo Sala and Gavin Jancke, Robust Segmentation, Registration, and Decoding of Tri-2D High Density Color Barcode, no. MSR-TR-2006-119, September 2006
- Susan Dumais, Edward Cutrell, JJ Cadiz, Gavin Jancke, Raman Sarin, and Daniel C. Robbins, Stuff I've seen: a system for personal information retrieval and re-use, in SIGIR '03: Proceedings of the 26th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in informaion retrieval, ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, January 2003
- JJ Cadiz, Gina D. Venolia, Gavin Jancke, and Anoop Gupta, Designing and Deploying an Information Awareness Interface, no. MSR-TR-2002-87, August 2002
- J. J. Cadiz, Gina Venolia, Gavin Jancke, and Anoop Gupta, Designing and deploying an information awareness interface, in CSCW '02: Proceedings of the 2002 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2002
- JJ Cadiz, Anoop Gupta, Gavin Jancke, and Gina Danielle Venolia, Sideshow: Providing Peripheral Awareness of Important Information, no. MSR-TR-2001-83, September 2001
- Gavin Jancke, Gina Danielle Venolia, Jonathan Grudin, J. J. Cadiz, and Anoop Gupta, Linking public spaces: technical and social issues, in CHI '01: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2001
- JJ Cadiz, Jonathan Grudin, Anoop Gupta, Gavin Jancke, and Gina Danielle Venolia, Linking Public Spaces: Technical and Social Issues, no. MSR-TR-2000-93, September 2000
- Anand Balachandran, JJ Cadiz, Jonathan Grudin, Anoop Gupta, Gavin Jancke, and Elizabeth Sanocki, Distance Learning Through Distributed Collaborative Video Viewing, no. MSR-TR-2000-42, May 2000
- Jonathan Grudin, Anoop Gupta, and Gavin Jancke, Presenting to Local and Remote Audiences: Design and Use of the TELEP System, no. MSR-TR-99-71, September 1999
Patents Pending
- Enhanced Telephony Computer User Interface Allowing User Interaction and Control of a Telephone using a Personal Computer
- Method and System for Providing a Peripheral Service to a Host Computing Device
- System and Methods for Personal Ubiquitous Information Retrieval and Reuse
- A System and Process for Dynamic Communication Access and Information Awareness in an Interactive Peripheral Display
