steven m. drucker

Dr. Steven M. Drucker has returned to Microsoft Research as a Principal Researcher in the vX Group. He is also an affiliate professor at the University of Washington Computer Science and Engineering Department.

From 2006-2009, he was a Principal Scientist in the LiveLabs Research Group at Microsoft and headed the Information Experiences Group. He was working on user interaction and information visualization for web based projects. During his tenure at the group he published papers on web interaction patterns, exploratory search, information visualization, and machine learning, as well as filing 34 patents.

From 1999-2006, he was the lead researcher for the Next Media Research Group in Microsoft Research where he examined how the addition of user interaction transforms conventional media. Particular interests included database visualization for consumers or where art meets technology for user interfaces. While in the group, he demonstrated some of his projects on stage with Bill Gates at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), was written up in the New York Times, filed 38 patents and published papers on technologies as diverse as remotely operated personal video recorders, spectator oriented gaming, and new visualization techniques for media databases.

From 1995-1999, he was the lead researcher in the Virtual Worlds Group also in Microsoft Research. During his time there he helped architect a platform for multi-user virtual environments, filed an additional 12 patents, and published papers in subjects ranging from architectures for multi-user, multimedia systems to online social interaction.

Before coming to Microsoft, he received his Ph.D. from the Computer Graphics and Animation Group at the MIT Media Lab in May 1994. His thesis research was on intelligent camera control interfaces for graphical environments. Dr. Drucker graduated Magna Cum Laude with Honors in Neurosciences from Brown University and went on to complete his masters at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT doing research in robot learning.

His published papers have been in such areas as exploratory search, information visualization, multi-user environments, online social interaction, hypermedia research, human and robot perceptual capabilities, robot learning, parallel computer graphics, and human interfaces for camera control.

His email address is sdrucker (at) microsoft.com

Education

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Media Laboratory, 9/89-6/94
  Ph.D. in Arts and Media Technology: advisor Professor David Zeltzer. Committee: Dr. Alex Pentland, Dr. Pattie Maes, and Glorianna Davenport.
  Thesis title: Intelligent Camera Control for Graphical Environments. Research topics: virtual environments, graphical simulations, human-computer interaction, telerobotics, and parallel computer graphics algorithms.
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, 9/86-6/89
  M.S. in Brain and Cognitive Sciences. Research topics: machine learning, robot juggling, the Utah-MIT dexterous four-fingered robotic hand, tactile sensing systems, human hand capabilities, and real time vision systems.GPA: 5.0/5.0.
• Brown University, 9/81-6/84
  Graduated Magna Cum Laude with Honors, Sc.B. in Department of Neural Sciences.

Employment

• Microsoft LiveLabs Research, Senior Scientist, 4/06-present
  Investigating user interface, information visualization, and graphics.
• Microsoft Next Media Group, Microsoft Research, Senior Researcher, 10/99-3/06
  Researched novel interaction in media and information visualization
• Microsoft Virtual Worlds Group, Microsoft Research, Lead-researcher, 6/95-9/99
  Directed research efforts in social computing and virtual environments
• Interzone Inc., Co-founder 6/94 to 5/95
  Designed and implementing early wine purchase system over the World Wide Web.
• Medical Media Systems, Consultant 6/93 to 3/95
  User Interface design and graphics systems programming for Medical Computer Graphics company.
• MIT Media Laboratory, Teaching Assistant, 9/89 to 6/94
  Teaching Assistant and Research Assistant in Computer Graphics and Animation.
• NHK Japan Broadcasting, Tokyo, Consultant, 1/93
  Installed and taught an experimental 3D graphics system and interfaced with 3D input device.
• Thinking Machines Corporation, Summer Intern 6/91, 6/92
  Developed algorithms for massively parallel linedrawing, raytracing, and radiosity..
• MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Research Assistant 9/86 to 6/89
  Developed learning algorithms for controlling a juggling robot.
• Institute for Information and Scholarship - Brown University, Full-time Employee, 9/84 to 8/86
  Developed prototype Hypertext system and implemented framework layer of Intermedia, a hypermedia system. Development platforms included UNIX 4.2 BSD on Sun Workstations, IBM PC/RTs and Apple Macintoshes.
• Neural Science Department - Brown University , Research Assistant 9/82 to 6/84
  Research Assistant in Neural Science Lab. Led to eventual honors work in plasticity in cat visual system and motion gated visual environments.
• Gould Laboratory , Brown University, Technical Support Staff Leader, 9/82 to 6/84
  Leader of group of students assigned to diagnose and correct problems related to the experimental classroom of networked Apollo Workstations.
• Computer Science Department , Brown University, Research Assistant, 6/82 to 9/82
  Implemented three-dimensional model of the human brain, later used in introductory neuroscience class.

Awards

• National Science Foundation Finalist
• National Merit Finalist
• Maryland State Distinguished Scholar
• Arthur J. Poitras Fellowship
• Surdna Fellowship

Press

• Beauty and the Beastly PC: Microsoft discovers that software should be—surprise!—a thing of beauty.
  Steven Johnson, Discover Magazine, Vol. 25, No. 4, May, 2004.
• Imagining a digital future: Passion for science drives research to open new Windows,
  Jim Jamieson, The Province, April 4, 2004.
• Navigating Home Networks, Michel Marriott, New York Times, February 19, 2004.
• Gates previews 'amazing decade.' Wired Magazine, January 8, 2004.
• CES Keynote Speech With Bill Gates, (towards the end of transcript) CES, January, 2004.
• StepMail/StepPhoto (Ars Electronica, 3/1/2006)
• Spectator: Microsoft 5000th Patent (XGP Gaming, 3/2006)
• At home with Microsoft Research (ITBusiness.ca, Interview 4/13/2006)
• Microsoft awarded 10000th US patent (ZDnet Feb 10, 2009)

Invited Presentations

• USC (LA,Calilfornia)
• CMU (Pittsburgh, PA)
• E3 (Electronic Entertainment Exposition) “Educational Game Technology”
• GDC (Game Developer Conference) “MSR Graphics and Game”
• Microsoft Faculty Summit
• Microsoft South American Faculty Summit
• MIT CSAIL, Media Laboratory (Cambridge, MA)
• Keynote demo, Bill Gates Presentation Consumer Electronics Show
• Keynote demo, Bill Gates, MGB
• Berkeley, (Berkeley, CA)
• Kunsthochshule für Medien(Cologne, Germany)
• GMD (Bonn, Germany)
• NACB (Providence, RI)
• NHK (Japan)
• Dartmouth University (NH)
• MERL (Cambridge, MA.)

• Making Tools for Making Games, Presented at Education Arcade, E3, May, 2004.
• Creating Novel Experiences for interacting with media, Presented at Strategy Day, November, 2004
• Information Overload meets Information Visualization: Building user interfaces to deal with too much information, MIT, 2006.

Reviews and Committees

• Campus Joint Steering Committee (Microsoft-MIT Educational Technology Grant)
• Graphics Interface Program Committee
• Communications of the ACM, Guest Editor
• SIGGRAPH, SIGCHI, UIST, SIGCHI, TOG reviewer

publications

• INSTRUMENTING THE DYNAMIC WEB Edmonds, A., White, R. , Morris, D., Drucker, S., Journal of Web Engineering, Vol. 6, No. 3, 2007.
• Proceedings of SIGCHI 2007 Workshop White, R., Drucker, S., Marchionini, G., Hearst, M., schraefel, m.c., Editors, 2007.
• Investigating Behavioral Variability in Web Search White, R., Drucker, S., International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2007), Banff, Canada, May 2007.
• Face Recognition using Discriminatively Trained Orthogonal Rank One Tensor Projections, Hua, G., Viola, P., Drucker, S. IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2007, Minneapolis, June, 2007.
• Relations, Cards, and Search Templates: User-Guided Web Data Integration and Layout 5. Dontcheva, M., Drucker, S., Cohen, M., Salesin, D.,To appear UIST 2007, Newport, RI, October, 2007.
• Changes in Webpage Structure over Time 6. Mira Dontcheva, Steven M. Drucker, David Salesin, Michael F. Cohen, UW CSE Technical Report (TR2007-04-02), April 2007.
• Comparing and managing multiple versions of slide presentations. Drucker, S.M. , Petschnigg, G., and Agrawala, M. 2006. In Proceedings of the 19th Annual ACM Symposium on User interface Software and Technology (Montreux, Switzerland, October 15 - 18, 2006). UIST '06. ACM Press, New York, NY,
• Summarizing personal web browsing sessions. Dontcheva, M., Drucker, S.M., Wade, G., Salesin, D., and Cohen, M. F. 2006.. In Proceedings of the 19th Annual ACM Symposium on User interface Software and Technology (Montreux, Switzerland, October 15 - 18, 2006). UIST '06. ACM Press, New York, NY, 115-124.
• The Cartoon Animation Filter, Jue Wang, Drucker, S.M. Agrawala, M., and Cohen, M.F, ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2006), July 2006
• Code Thumbnails: Using Spatial Memory to Navigate Source Code. DeLine, R., M. Czerwinski, B. Meyers, G. Venolia, S.M. Drucker, and G. Robertson. Proc. VL/HCC 2006
• Introduction. Communications of the ACM. White, R. W., Kules, B., Drucker, S.M. and schraefel, m. 2006. 49, 4 (Apr. 2006), 36-39.
• Find that photo!: interface strategies to annotate, browse, and share. Shneiderman, B., Bederson, B. and Drucker, S.M. 2006 Commun. ACM 49, 4 (Apr. 2006), 69-71.
• Dance your work away: exploring step user interfaces. Meyers, B., Brush, A. B., Drucker, S.M., Smith, M. A., and Czerwinski, M. 2006. In CHI '06 Human Factors in Computing Systems (Montréal, Québec, Canada, April 22 - 27, 2006). CHI '06. ACM Press, New York, NY, 387-392.
• The visual decision maker: a recommendation system for collocated users. Drucker, S.M, Regan, T., Roseway, A., and Lofstrom. M, , DUX 2005
• v4v: a View for the Viewer, Dontcheva M., Drucker, S.M., and Cohen M, Proceedings DUX 2005
• Time Quilt: Scaling up Zoomable Photo Browsers for Large, Unstructured Photo Collections. Huynh, D., Drucker, S.M., Baudisch, P., and Wong, C. CHI 2005. Portland, OR. Apr. 2005
• Interactive Digital Photomontage. Aseem Agarwala, Mira Dontcheva, Maneesh Agrawala, Drucker, S.M, Alex Colburn, Brian Curless, David Salesin,and Michael CohenACM Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2004), 2004.
• MediaBrowser: Reclaiming the Shoebox. Drucker, S.M., C. Wong, A. Roseway, S. Glenner, S. De Mar, in Proceedings of AVI2004, Gallipoli, Italy, 2004.
• Toward universal mobile interaction for shared displays, T. Paek, M. Agrawala, S. Basu, S. Drucker, T. Kristjansson, R. Logan, K. Toyama & A. Wilson.. Proceedings of CSCW 2004, 2004, pp. 266-269.
• Photo-triage: Rapidly annotating your digital photographs. Drucker, S.M., C. Wong, A. Roseway, S. Glenner, S. De MarMSR Tech Report.
• Spectator Games: A New Entertainment Modality for Networked Multiplayer Games,: Drucker, S.M, Li-wei He, Michael Cohen, Curtis Wong, and Anoop Gupta, 2003.
• MyLifeBits: Fulfilling the Memex Vision. Gemmell, J. G. Bell, R. Lueder, Drucker, S.M., C. Wong. ACM Multimedia, 02, France. 2002
• SmartSkip: Consumer level browsing and skipping of digital video content Drucker, S.M., Glatzer, A., De Mar, S and Wong, C. . In Proceedings of CHI 2002, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2002
• Flatland: Rapid prototyping of distributed internet applications. Chesley, H. Drucker, S. Gupta, A., Kimberly, G. White, S. .MSR-TR-2001-73.
• Graphical Enhancement For Voice Only Conference Calls. Alex Colburn, Michael F. Cohen, Steven M. Drucker, Scott Lee-Tiernan, Anoop Gupta, MSR-TR-2001-95, 2001.
• The Role of Eye Gaze in Avatar Mediated Conversational Interfaces. Alex Colburn, Michael F. Cohen, Steven M. Drucker, MSR-TR-2000-81, July, 2000
• The Effect of Communication Modality on Cooperation in Online Environments. Jensen, C., Farnham, S., Drucker, S.M., & Kollock, P. In Proceedings of CHI 2000, The Hague, Netherlands March 2000.
• The Social Life of Small Graphical Chat Spaces Smith, M., and Farnham, S, and Drucker, S.M. In Proceedings of CHI 2000, The Hague, Netherlands March 2000.
• Visualizations of Collaborative Information for End-Users Rebecca Xiong, Marc A. Smith, and Drucker, S.M. Internal Report, 1999.
• The Effect of Communication Modality on Cooperation in Online Environments, Carlos Jensen, Shelly D. Farnham, Drucker, S.M. and Peter Kollock, , Microsoft TR99-75
• The Commons: A Toolkit for the Quantitative Analysis of Factors in the Success or Failure of Electronic Societies . Joshua Berman, Drucker, S.M., and Peter Kollock, Internal Report, 1999.
• The Commons: A Toolkit for the Quantitative Analysis of Trust and Cooperation in Online Environments Drucker, S.M., Joshua Berman, Peter Kollock, , Internal Report, 1999.
• Moving from MOOs to Multi-user Applications, Drucker, S.M., Internal Report, 1999.
• Chat as a Streaming Media Data Type, David Vronay, and Marc Smith, Steven M. Drucker, Proc. of UIST 1999.
• The Architecture of a Distributed Virtual Worlds System, Vellon, M. K. Marple,, D. Mitchell and S.M. Drucker, 4th Conference on Object-Oriented Technologies and Systems (COOTS) 1998.
• Intelligent Camera Control for Graphical Environments Drucker, S.M, PhD Thesis, MIT Media Lab. 1994.
• CamDroid: A System for Intelligent Camera Control. Drucker, S.M and Zeltzer, D. SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics, 1995.
• Intelligent Camera Control in a Virtual Environment Drucker, S.M. and Zeltzer, D Graphics Interface '94.
• CINEMA: A System for Procedural Camera Movements. Drucker, S.M. and Galyean, T.A., and Zeltzer, D. SIGGRAPH Symposium on 3D Interaction. Cambridge, MA. 1992.
• A Virtual Environment System for Mission Planning. Drucker, S.M. and Zeltzer, D. Proc. 1992 IMAGE VI Conference. Phoenix, AZ. 1992.
• Fast Radiosity:A Data Parallel Approach Drucker, S.M and Schroeder, P.. 3rd Workshop on Photorealistic Rendering, Bristol, U.K. 1992.
• Data Parallel Raytracing Schroeder, P. and Drucker, S.M., Graphics Interface '92. Vancouver, B.C. 1992.
• Radiosity: An Illuminating Perspective. Drucker, S.M, General Exam Summation. MIT Media Laboratory. 92.
• Task Level Learning on a Complex Task", Drucker, S.M, Master's Thesis, MIT AI Lab, 1989.
• Task Level Learning on a Juggling Task Aboaf, E, Drucker, S.M. and Atkeson, C.G.IEEE Robotics Conference. Scottsdale, AZ. 1989.
• "Texture from Touch", Drucker, S.M. in Natural Computation, Ed. Whitman Richards. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988.
• Connections in Context: the Intermedia Systems Yankelovich, N, Haan, B.J. and Drucker, S.M. International Conference on Systems Sciences, Vol. 2 pp. 715-724, January: 1988.
• INTERMEDIA: The Concept and Construction of a Seamless Environment Yankelovich, N, Haan, B.J., Meyrowitz, N. and Drucker, S.M., IEEE Computer, January: 1988.
• Quantification of Precision Grasp Capabilities. Drucker, S.M. and Hollerbach, J.M., in Humans. Society of Neurosciences Abstracts. New Orleans, LA. 1987.
• Performance Analysis of a Tactile Sensor. Siegel, D.M., Drucker, S.M.and Garabieta.,. IEEE Robotics Conference. 1987

Issued Patents

• 2006-11-14 Selectable projector and imaging modes of display table A display table contains a projector that can either project an image onto a display surface of the display table or onto an external surface that is separate from the display table. A user can change the path of the light from the projector from the display surface to the external surface,...
• 2006-10-10 Relationship view The present invention provides a unique method and user interface that facilitates accessing and browsing objects in which a user begins with a center object (e.g., one or a few focal objects) displayed on a screen and related objects are populated on the screen as well. The related objects can...
• 2006-10-03 Media frame object visualization system The present invention provides a unique system and method for facilitating browsing, sorting, clustering, and filtering any number of media objects grouped together in a quick and easy manner. In particular, the invention involves annotating the media objects, which have been clustered, sorted,...
• 2006-09-19 Shared and private object stores for a networked computer application... A store of interfaced software objects are distributed between a server computer and multiple client computers to support an object oriented application communication environment that provides communication between multiple software applications. The application communication environment may...
• 2006-08-29 Transportable identifier and system and method to facilitate access to... A system and method are disclosed which enable a user to locate target data from a temporal broadcast of data. The system includes a transportable identifier that represents the target data. The identifier further includes metadata that provides sufficient information about the broadcast of the...
• 2006-07-04 View dependent tiled textures An array of view-dependent sprited tiles provide different views of an image texture (e.g., structure, color, shading, illumination, transparency, as well as other image attributes). The different views of the image texture correspond to different viewing angles at which a user would see the...
• 006-06-20 Presentation system with distributed object oriented multi-user domain and... A database of objects is distributed between a server computer and multiple client computers as an object oriented virtual world environment (VWE) with multimedia presentation features. A primary database is maintained on the server and includes at least one entry for each object disposed within...
• 2006-02-28 High density visualizations for threaded information High-density computer display visualization formats provide improved visualization of large amounts of threaded information. These visualization formats are suitable for a wide variety of threaded information environments including newsgroups, threaded Web discussions, chats, e-mail inboxes,...
• 2006-02-14 System and method to provide a spectator experience for networked gaming A spectator experience corresponding to an occurrence of one or more games or events is generated based on each associated occurrence. The occurrence of a game or event varies in response to contributions and/or interactions of one or more participants of the game or event. The spectator...
• 2004-12-07 Social dilemma software for evaluating online interactive societies Social dilemma virtual world environment (VWE) software facilitates creation and usage of social dilemma tests or exercises for measuring and analyzing online interactive societies. An online interactive society arises whenever two or more people interact through a computer-based...
• 2004-06-08 System and method for content retrieval A content retrieval system is provided. The system includes a communications signal analyzing system for receiving a communications signal and decoding the signal to generate key search terms associated with the communications signal. A search engine system performs a content based search using...
• 2003-07-15 Visualizations for collaborative information An interactive collaborative information visualization system provides improved visualizations of relationships or connections in collaborative information relating to network interaction media such as email and email lists, conferencing systems and bulletin boards, chats, multi-user dungeons...
• 2002-02-19 Virtual environment bystander updating in client server architecture A virtual world environment (VWE) employing a client-server architecture to organize data defining the VWE and objects contained therein in a system of distributed databases. An object in the VWE is one of four basic types including: an artifact, an avatar, a portal, and a room. A world database...
• 2001-04-03 Dynamic inheritance of software object services Object services like methods or properties are provided to or inherited by objects dynamically during run-time. In one method of providing dynamic inheritance, hierarchical relationships are defined between multiple objects such that each object references or is referenced by another object. A...
• 2001-01-09 Software object security mechanism A software object security mechanism addresses system security risks that arise due to interactions between software objects. Conditions are imposed on the accessing of targets by accessing object instances according to attributes of the accessing object and the target object that is being...
• 2000-12-26 Distributed object oriented multi-user domain with multimedia presentations Updating of local object databases at client computers, dynamic inheritance, and event notification methods cooperate to provide a persistent object oriented multi-user domain capable of supporting multimedia presentation features for large numbers of users over conventional networks like the...
• 2000-04-11 Dynamic event mechanism for objects with associational relationships A dynamic or latebound event mechanism provides event mechanism operation according to associational relationships among objects. In addition, objects may be responsive to event notification methods that are not initially within the original object definition, thereby allowing the event...
• 1998-04-07 Compression of graphic data normals Geometric data for a three-dimensional surface are compressed in regard to the data representing the continuity between triangles in a mesh that represents the three-dimensional surface. The geometric data include information defining the