I received my D.Phil in computer vision from the Oxford University Engineering Science Department in 1998. In 1999 I started work as a Researcher at the Compaq Systems Research Center in Palo Alto, and I have worked for Microsoft Research in Silicon Valley since 2002. The majority of my early research was in the field of visual tracking and sequential filtering, and I helped to introduce particle filters to the computer vision community with the Condensation algorithm. From the time I joined Compaq my interests have broadened to include distributed systems research, and this is where I am spending the majority of my time at Microsoft.

I spent much of mid-2003 to early 2005 working closely with the MSN Search product group on the design and implementation of their V1 search engine. I was involved from the start of the project and owned several production components in the live query pipeline. I was particularly involved in the design and implementation of the monitoring and failure recovery systems, the query distribution and result aggregation system, and the inverted file lookup.

Current research projects cover a range from applications of inference to computer vision tasks, particularly in video; to programming models for large-scale distributed systems and many-core processor architectures. I led the Dryad project to build a large-scale distributed execution platform for datacenters that is now widely used internally by Microsoft product groups. I have also worked on the successor DryadLINQ project. I have recently worked with several colleagues on AME, a new concurrent programming model that makes use of transactional memory without explicit atomic blocks. My main systems activity at the moment is as a collaborator on the Naiad project, which combines support for iterative and incremental computation in a large-scale distributed system.