The first 14 years of my professional career was in product development, mostly in the Microsoft Windows Operating System division, and working primarily in the area of networking and telephony (network load balancing, ATM, telephony, dial-up networking, fax protocols). In 2005 I left Redmond to join Microsoft Research India, where, until recently, I headed the Advanced Development and Prototyping (ADP) Group. In November 2007 I transitioned to being Principal Software Architect, driving specific projects. My primary interests are in advancing the state of software engineering, and in semi-structured information retrieval. My personal page (http://josephmjoy.spaces.live.com/) lists other interests.

Products Shipped

Here are the list of software products that I contributed to as developer or development lead:

Interests

Building verifiable systems
I feel the way we currently build systems, especially high-performance systems, is tedious and error prone. I am interested in changing the way we build systems software so that more modular building blocks can be used and so that higher level properties can be statically and dynamically verified. This is ongoing work with Sriram Rajamani who heads the Rigorous Software Engineering (RSE) group, as well as certain product teams in Microsoft. One of the projects in this area is CLARITY, a new programming language for building asynchronous systems.

Semi-structured search
I am interested in domain-specific search over semi-structured data, such as estimating the geographic location referred to in text such as a postal address (see our Robust Location Search papers below for details). This is ongoing work with Vibhuti Sengar and Tanuja Joshi of the ADP group , as well as folk from the Multi Lingual Systems (MLS) group (concerning cross-lingual search), the Windows Live Local product group, and newly initiated work with the RSE group and the Windows Sustained Engineering division.

Web-based collaboration involving small tasks
Several of us in the ADP and RSE group and elsewhere are interested in making it easier for people to collaborate on completing tasks over the Internet or corporate intranet. This is an ongoing project. Amazon Mechanical Turk, and Louis von Ahn's games are interesting and related developments in this space.

Geographic narratives
Community-created geographic content is on the rise, with sites like wikimapia. I am interested in mechanisms that enable a richer expression of content that has a strong geographic component. This is a rapidly evolving space.

My personal page (http://josephmjoy.spaces.live.com/) lists other interests, which include conducting puzzle-based treasure hunts for different age groups, and digitally preserving our heritage.

Publications

• T. Joshi, J. Joy, T. Kellner, U. Khurana, A. Kumaran, V. Sengar. Crosslingual Location Search. To appear in SIGIR '08: The 31st Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference, July 2008.
• V. Sengar, T. Joshi, J. Joy, S. Prakash. Building a Global Location Search Service. Demo at ACM SIGMOD 2008.
• Vibhuti Sengar, Tanuja Joshi, Joseph M. Joy, Samarth Prakash, Kentaro Toyama. Robust location search from text queries. ACM GIS '07: 15th ACM International Symposium on Advances in Geographic Information Systems, November 2007.
• P. Chandrashekaran, C. Conway, J. M. Joy, S. Rajamani. Programming asynchronous layers with CLARITY. FSE '07: 15th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering, September 2007.
• J. M. Joy, R. D. Bergeron, The hypercube as a dynamically reconfigurable processor mesh, Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing 48(1): 130-142 (1998).
• J. D. Irish, J. M. Joy, R. M. Gelinas, D. D. Ball, Quasi-real time measurements of density in the Gulf of Maine, “Proceedings, IEEE Oceans ‘87”, CH2498-4/87/0000, pp 899-904.

Selected Patents

• Method and apparatus for emulating Ethernet functionality over serial bus
• Method and apparatus for providing quality-of-service functionality over a bus
• Exposing Bluetooth compliant wireless device connections as modems or sockets
• Luminance emphasized color image rendering
• Method and apparatus for mapping colors in an image through dithering and diffusion

Activities

• Member, Task Force on GeoVisualization, Department of Science and Technology, Government of INDIA, 2006-2008.
• Judge, Imagine Cup 2006 World Finals.
• Program Committee Member, ACM GIS 2007.
• Program Committee Member, ACM GIS 2008.

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