Mark Manasse joined Microsoft in October 2001.

From 1985 until he joined Microsoft, Mark was a researcher at Compaq's Systems Research Center in Palo Alto, California (previously Digital Equipment Corporation, subsequently Hewlett-Packard and now extinct).

Mark Manasse works in a variety of theory-related areas of distributed computer systems research. He was the inventor of MilliCent (defunct link: http://www.millicent.com); as such, Wired Magazine dubbed him "the guru of micropayments," and was co-chair of the microcommerce working group for the World Wide Web Consortium. Mark has worked on Web search technologies; with Andrei Broder, Steve Glassman, and Jeff Zweig, his work on syntactic similarity was awarded best paper at the Sixth International World Wide Web Conference. Mark was a member the design committee for the Inter-Client Communications Manual for the X Window System. Mark's work on on-line algorithms helped to establish this field, and remains among his most-often cited papers. Mark organized, ran, and developed much of the code for some of the earliest uses of the Internet in distributed computations, when he and Arjen Lenstra factored many large integers, the most noteworthy being the first factorization of a "hard" 100-digit number, and the factorization of the ninth Fermat number.

Mark holds U.S. patents in three of the previously mentioned areas. His doctorate was earned at the University of Wisconsin in Mathematical Logic in 1982, and he spent the following three years at Bell Labs and the University of Chicago.

Mark's projects since joining Microsoft include Koh-i-Noor, PageTurner, Dryad, and a minor role in Penny Black. Additionally, Mark has been working with product groups on MSN Search and with the Windows group on aspects of file systems and storage.

In 1994, Newsweek described Severe Tire Damage (the band Mark founded and for which he plays bass) as "lesser-known" than the Rolling Stones, following STD's unauthorized appearance as the opening act in a multicast performance.

Patents allowed and issued

• Guarav Sareen, Mark Manasse, Martin Abadi, and Michael Isard. Searching For Information Utilizing A Probabalistic Detector. U.S. Patent 7,730,058, June 2010.
• Mark Manasse, Alice Silverberg, and Chandu Thekkath. Erasure coding and group computations using rooted binary and ternary trees.  U.S. Patent, 7,716,250, May 2010.
• Frank McSherry, Kunal Talwar, and Mark Manasse. Consistent weighted sampling of multisets and distributions. U.S. Patent, 7,716,144, May 2010.
• Ulfar Erlingsson, Mark Manasse, Frank McSherry, and Abraham Flaxman. Hash Tables. U.S. Patent, 7,664,927, February 2010.
• Nikolaj Bjorner, Mark Manasse, Guilherme Fujiwara. Scalable differential compression of network data. U.S. Patent 7,640,354, December 2009.
• Mark Manasse, Dan Teodosiu, and Akhil Wable. Efficient algorithm for finding candidate objects for remote differential compression. U.S. Patent 7,613,787, November 2009.
• Mark Manasse. Systems and methods for providing improved encoding and reconstruction of data. U.S. Patent 7,581,156, August 2009.
• Mark Manasse, Alice Silverberg, and Chandu Thekkath.  Nodal pattern configuration. U.S. Patent 7,542,431, June 2009.
• Mark Manasse. Method and apparatus for improving the performance of a disk drive. U.S. Patent 7,430,091, September 2008.
• Steve Glassman and Mark Manasse. System and method for providing multi-class processing of login requests. U.S. Patent 7,421,733, September 2008.
• Steve Glassman, Mark Manasse, John Court, Jim Grohn, Andrew Palka, and Nigel Norris. Anonymous purchases while allowing verifiable identities for refunds returned along the paths taken to make the purchases. U.S. Patent 7,257,554, August 2007.
• Andrei Broder and Mark Manasse. System and method for determining likely identity in a biometric database. U.S. Patent 7,203,343, April 2007.
• Mike Burrows, Martin Abadi, Mark Manasse, Ted Wobber, and Ron Daniel. Memory bound functions for spam deterrence and the like. U.S.Patent 7,149,801, December 2006.
• Steve Glassman and Mark Manasse. Delegation of permissions in an electronic commerce system. U.S. Patent 6,523,012, February 2003.
• Steve Glassman and Mark Manasse. Method and system for enforcing licenses on an open network. U.S. Patent 6,453,305, September 2002.
• Steve Glassman and Mark Manasse. Encrypting secrets in a file for an electronic micro-commerce system. U.S. Patent 6,424,953, July 2002.
• Andrei Broder, Steve Glassman, Greg Nelson, Mark Manasse, and Geoffrey Zweig. Method for clustering closely resembling data objects. U.S. Patent 6,349,296, February 2002.
• Andrei Broder, Steve Glassman, and Mark Manasse. System and method for monitoring web pages by comparing generated abstracts. U.S. Patent 6,269,362, July 2001.
• Andrei Broder, Steve Glassman, Greg Nelson, Mark Manasse, and Geoffrey Zweig. Method for clustering closely resembling data objects. U.S. Patent 6,119,124, September 2000.
• Mark Manasse. A mechanism for low-priced electronic commerce. U.S. and international patents filed. U.S. Patent 5,802,497, September 1998.
• Mark Manasse. Competitive snoopy caching for large-scale multiprocessors. U.S. Patent 5,345,578, October 1994.  

Extracurricular activities

You can find more about Mark on his personal website.