Corporate Vice President
Microsoft Research Redmond
Dr. Peter Lee is the corporate vice president of Microsoft Research Redmond. In this role, he leads a computing research laboratory that advances the state of the art and collaborates with the company's business groups to bring new technologies into products and services. The lab delivers product-focused research for Microsoft, and it also contributes to the broader scientific community by openly publishing basic research results. Lee's primary goal is to partner with Microsoft's business groups to translate the lab's scientific and technical work into innovations that are high-value and potentially disruptive.
Lee was previously a Distinguished Scientist and managing director of Microsoft Research Redmond. Before he joined Microsoft, he held key positions in both government and academia. His most recent position was at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) where he challenged conventional Department of Defense (DoD) approaches to computer science. One of the highlights of his work at DARPA was the DARPA Network Challenge, which mobilized millions of people worldwide in a hunt for red weather balloons — a unique experiment in social media and open innovation that fundamentally altered the thinking throughout the DoD on the power of social networks.
Prior to joining DARPA, Lee was head of Carnegie Mellon University's nationally top-ranked computer science department. He had also served as the university's vice provost for research. At CMU, he carried out research in software reliability, program analysis, security, and language design. He is well-known for his co-development of proof-carrying code techniques for enhanced software security, and has tackled problems as diverse as programming for large-scale modular robotics systems and shape analysis for C programs.
Lee holds a Ph.D. in computer and communication sciences from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and bachelor's degrees in mathematics and computer sciences, also from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
Affiliations
- Fellow, Association for Computing Machinery, 2004
- Former Chair of the Computing Research Association (CRA) Board, Former Chair of CRA Government Affairs Committee
- Former Member of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) of the
- National Academies' National Research Council
- Former Vice Chair of the DARPA Information Science and Technology (ISAT) Board
- Founding Principal Investigator, Computing Innovation Fellows Project
- Witness, Hearing on the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development Act of 2009, U.S. House of Representatives, Science Committee.
Awards and Patents
- 2006 SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award, for the most influential paper from OSDI ten or more years ago. Safe kernel extensions without run-time checking. George Necula and Peter Lee. November 2006.
- ACM SIGPLAN Most Influential 1996 PLDI Paper. TIL: a type-directed optimizing compiler for ML. David Tarditi ,Greg Morrisett, Perry Cheng, Chris Stone, Robert Harper, and Peter Lee. June 2006.
- Method and Apparatus for Enforcing Safety Properties of Computer Programs by Generating and Solving Constraints. Patent pending. Ajay Chander, Nayeem Islam, David Espinosa, Peter Lee, and George Necula.
- Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. November 2004. Safe to Execute Verification of Software. US Patent 6,128,774, issued October 3, 2000, George Necula and Peter Lee.
- 1997 Allen Newell Award for Research Excellence in Computer Science, for Proof-Carrying Code, awarded by the CMU School of Computer Science.
- 1994 Herbert A. Simon Award for Teaching Excellence in Computer Science, awarded by the CMU School of Computer Science.
- 1990 NSF Presidential Young Investigator, NSF CCR-9057567, $200,000. Matching funds from Bell Northern Research, $75,000.
Books
- Peter Lee. Realistic Compiler Generation. The MIT Press Series in the Foundations of Computing, M. Garey and A. Meyer (Eds.), 1989.
- Peter Lee (Editor). Topics in Advanced Language Implementation. The MIT Press, 1991.
