By Zoe Goldring

Another beautiful fall day is breaking in Redmond and with that comes the latest dispatch from one of our teams. This week, Harish Jayanti of the Bing Geospatial Platform team wanted to tell you more about his new team and what they are working on. Now, I am not going to be shy on my lack of knowledge of this area –this post contains a lot of engineering terms that went over my head at first. But here’s the thing about reading what Harish has to say; he exudes excitement. Excitement for the engineering problems that he tackles on a daily basis. Excitement for a problem space that he and his team gets to dig into every day. And mostly excitement for the people he spends his time with. So read along and find out what this part of the Microhood has to offer. And then decide if you want to be part of that excitement for yourself!

Cheers,
Zoe

My name is Harish Jayanti and I am a development manager on the Bing Platforms team. I have been in Microsoft since 1997, building large-scale web services for Encarta.com, Virtual Earth/Bing Maps, and now Bing Platforms.

WHAT WE DO

The team that I manage is the Bing Geospatial Platform team. My team builds rich location and spatial services that can be used by the end-to-end Online Services Division (OSD)stack and enables relevance and engagement improvements for all location based scenarios in OSD. With the skyrocketing increase of search traffic from location-aware devices, adding powerful geospatial capabilities to the Bing Platform and making location a first-class citizen across the end-to-end Bing stack has become a top priority.

Working in the geospatial and location-based services space is very exciting as it is a fast moving area with many interesting engineering and algorithmic challenges. Some of the problems that our engineers are currently tackling include building a robust geospatial graph containing all the entities that we know of in the physical world, deeply integrating the geospatial graph with the web graph, and building a large-scale extremely low-latency spatial search service. Writing algorithms that (a) create semantic and spatial relationships across hundreds of millions of entities and (b) query the entities and relationships with rich spatial and relational filters in a few milliseconds, requires deep knowledge in several areas of computer science. So every day at work is very intellectually rewarding for all of us.

OUR TEAM

We are a newly formed team with a few hand-picked rock star engineers from various parts of Bing. We have a startup culture with minimal process and management overhead. We ship updates to our production services every two weeks, using Scrum as the development process. We code primarily in C# and C++ to deliver components and web services to our customers throughout Microsoft.  Everyone writes production code and is responsible for end-to-end quality including test coverage and live site duties. As we are a platform team with SLA commitments for production services, we have a high bar for engineering fundamentals and strive to drive quality upstream as much as possible. We also focus on continuous improvement of our engineering processes with the goal of enhancing our quality and agility. Some of the key values we emphasize on our team include passion for technical growth, strong engineering fundamentals, individual accountability and responsibility, team work and mentoring, and drive for results.

Now that you have an idea of what my team works on, I want to tell you more about the people on the team. We have a lot of fun working closely with each other, helping each other grow, and enjoying shared success. We are relatively flexible with our work schedules and let everyone manage their day-to-day work on their own and track progress on a weekly basis. We work in City Center Plaza in downtown Bellevue, so in addition to enjoying the great views, we usually go out for lunch or drinks on a regular basis to the nearby restaurants. We also take time for regular team outings – recent events include a cooking class at Kaspar’s, a Day of Caring event at The Just Garden Project in Seattle, a picnic at Chism Park, river rafting in Wenatchee river, and a hike at Tiger Mountain in Issaquah.

WE ARE HIRING!

Working on an exciting and challenging charter with a great team has been a lot of fun for all of us! We are looking for more world-class talent to join us and help us shape the future of Bing and advance the area of search. If you are interested, please contact us at bingjobs@microsoft.com or visit: http://bit.ly/binggeospatialjobs to view my engineering job openings.

By Zoe Goldring

Here at JobsBlog one of our goals is to pull back the cover on jobs at Microsoft and give you a no-holds-barred look into the lives of ‘Softies. We’re also always trying to get more first person accounts of different jobs and teams at Microsoft. It’s like getting to know all the people in our neighborhood; nay our Microhood! This week we are very lucky to have Ed Harris tell us about his job as the development manager on Bing Cosmos. What I like most about Ed’s story is that he wrote it himself. This isn’t my personal view of his job or team and gives you a really good overview of what it’s like to be part of this group. Not to mention there’s beer. Yeah, you can almost always get me reading if there’s beer involved.

Cheers! Zoe

 
I’m Ed Harris, a development manager on the Bing team. I’ve been at Bing since 2004, and worked on a lot of different teams – on the front-end/consumer-facing bits, deep in the platform space, and now in our infrastructure team.

Our team’s mission is to provide the stable foundation for Bing and other online applications to run. Want to install an operating system and deploy a build on 50,000 machines with a couple of keystrokes? That’s us. Need a place to store a petabyte or two of business-critical data? That’s us too. Want to analyze every page of the web? We’ve got what you need. 

Our team is called Cosmos. Cosmos is the cloud storage and computing environment that Microsoft’s online properties use for data storage, analytics, and “Big Data” computation. Every day, we load or generate petabytes of new data – that’s one million gigabytes per day! In the online business data is the most precious commodity of all – whether it’s our relevance experiments, our copies of the web, or a thousand other data sets that get curated - all of it is mission critical. 

All of that is great, but the thing I enjoy most about being in the infrastructure team is the diversity of what we get to work on. To build an efficient storage engine, you need brilliant system programmers who can make the disks do amazing and unnatural things. On top of that, you have to layer data integrity – at the scale we operate we have random bits flip from zero to one or vice-versa on a regular basis. So besides being fast, the storage layer needs to constantly scrub itself. We also have folks who are world-class compression experts. To be cost effective we need to squeeze the most data possible onto the disks, but not spend too much CPU doing it. Up further in the stack is our execution and computation team. They are able to take a user query, optimize it, and schedule it to run on tens of thousands of PCs. You can write a three line query in our language (called SCOPE), that actually turns into a map/reduce job across twenty thousand servers.

With that diversity of problem solving comes an incredible group of people. Our problem-space is on the cutting edge of cloud computing, and has attracted a group of rock-star engineers. It’s an infectiously collaborative environment, and not a day goes by when I don’t have the opportunity to learn a new technique or algorithm.

Though we take our responsibilities very seriously as the custodians of Bing and Microsoft’s data assets - we also have a lot of fun! We take time for team events like hiking or flash-mob Frisbee as a way to get to know each other and celebrate our hard work. On a daily basis, it’s fairly common to see team members cutting loose after work – the floor reverberates on a regular basis from aggressive Kinect volleyball and dance central contests. Aside from these happenings, we also built our very own infrastructure keg fridge this year.

It’s called the InfraKegerator and we now have three different kinds of beer and home-made root beer on tap. And because we are all geeks, we intend to fully integrate our InfraKegerator into our datacenter automation this fall. We want biometric access control so other teams don’t steal our beer, alerts to fire when the kegs run low, 24/7 temperature monitoring, and minable data on which microbrews are most popular. It’s just one of the ways that we tie together work and personal interests to create a truly amazing workplace.

Working in this kind of environment – with a great set of hard problems to solve, a world-class group of coworkers, and a team that knows how to cut loose – this is what I love most about being at Bing. 

 Bing's Cosmos team is hiring software development engineers! Click here to view a list of openings with this team and find your place at Microsoft. 

The technical passion that is embedded in the DNA of Microsoft often extends outside the bounds of our workday taking us to events and conferences where we share ideas, learn new things, and rub shoulders with great technologists in specific fields. It’s only natural that we’d want to get out of the office and even Redmond to put our passion to test.

One such event attended recently by ‘Softies from our Online Services Division was the annual ACM SIGKDD conference. This is the premier international happening for practitioners and researchers in the field of data mining. This is the story of the people who attended from Microsoft - submitted by employees who were there!

Bing, MSN, Global Foundation Services and Microsoft Advertising make up our Online Services Division. Data is at heart of these groups. A staggering amount of data that is then reviewed, analyzed, tweaked and used to develop a killer search experience and mind-blowing products and services that help our customers reach their full potential. And that’s where our data mining experts come into the story. The folks from Bing Data Mining and Microsoft Ads Platform are some of the best minds in the industry when it comes to this field and they were ready to soak up the San Diego sun! And the view from the hotel wasn’t so bad either.

Our booth was dedicated to having fun.We had our Kinect all set up and ready for action, but we also had a drawing this year for an Xbox/Kinect bundle and gift certificate to our retail store. Congrats to Ricky Ho and Jing Dai who won the raffle this year! We had a great time talking with everyone who came by and look forward to staying in touch until next year.

Cruising the harbor. Aside from the traditional keynote speakers, workshops, competitions and paper presentations, we wanted to get outside the conference space this year. So we decided to host a party aboard the California Princess. This gave us the opportunity to talk with peers in a more casual setting all while enjoying the incredible San Diego skyline. We had a blast! 

 

 It’s not just about discovering new patterns in data. It’s also about making connections. This year was unique because we hosted an event especially for all the women in data mining. A first of its kind networking event celebrating women in this field. Esin Saka, Applied Researcher in Microsoft Ads, kicked off our event by discussing her first year at Microsoft. We were all treated to some tasty dessert bites while drilling down on a trivia challenge. It was a great way to connect this group in particular. And it was so much fun a LinkedIn group formed to create an active community of women in data mining and machine learning, which will promote career awareness, mentorship opportunities, and facilitate an exchange of ideas in research and development. No worries if you didn’t attend the event or conference this group is open to all women in data mining and machine learning.

That’s our story from this year’s KDD conference. Thanks to everyone who made this a great experience. Hope to see you next year!

Where can you find out more about the event and the groups feature in this story? We’ve posted more pictures from the event on our Facebook page. Make sure to tag a picture if you see yourself!

You can like us on our Facebook page or follow us on Twitter.

WE ARE HIRING! If you want to find out more about a career in data mining at Microsoft, current openings can be found on our Talent Network. We look forward to hearing from you!

The ‘Softie in question: Leon Wong

Title: Principal Development Manager, Online Services Division (Bing)

Leon Wong is a man in demand. Throughout his career, he has performed at the top of his field: first at Microsoft, then at Google and now back at Microsoft again. His co-workers - and even his VP - regard Leon as a true rockstar engineer capable of feats unattainable by mere mortals.

But why would such a talent leave a company for a competitor only to return to the original company again? And what does Leon’s story teach us about what the two companies have to offer? 

Leon is now back at Microsoft, but he still enjoys a positive relationship with Google and his former colleagues. As such, he is uniquely suited to give us a balanced perspective into working at the two companies.

We sat down with Leon at his office at the Bing headquarters in Bellevue, Washington, to get the inside scoop.

Leon, could you start by telling us where you went to school and how you started your career in technology?
I’m originally from Toronto. My father is a physics professor and he always wanted me to go to the best: to MIT and I did. I received my BS and MS in Artificial Intelligence there started a PhD too, but left to work for a professor’s “decision support” company called Ascent Technology. Eventually, I took a second stab at a PhD at Stanford, but left to join the ‘90s dot com boom with some MIT classmates.

“Leaving school to join in on the ‘90s dot com boom” is often the beginning of a tragic story. But, we have a feeling that things went better for you.
We created a company called Flash Communications. It was arguably the first instant messaging service specifically for enterprise clients. We were bought by Microsoft and I came out to Redmond as part of the Exchange Group.

Did you always work for Exchange?
I held a variety of roles: I was a development lead then manager for Real-Time Communications which encompassed IM, audio, video, etc. I was later a Research Software Engineer in the Speech Technology Group in Microsoft Research and then worked on Version 1.0 of MSN Search back before it was Bing. Those were the days when it was still just a little group that fit around a single table.

When and why did you make the decision to go to Google?
I went to Google as part of the AdSense Group in 2006. At the time, Google had an impressive lead in technology for building online services. I was also interested in its culture of innovation and its reputation for having a great work environment.  

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'Softie in Question: Ji-Rong Wen

Job title: Senior Researcher - Web Data Management Grop - Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA)

Ji-Rong: please tell us about your academic background prior to coming to MSRA?
I received my Ph.D. from the Institute of Computing Technology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1999.

Why did you choose MSRA over academia?
At the time when I received my Ph.D., MSRA was widely recognized as the best place to do CS research in China. I love research, but ever since my childhood, I’ve always loved to build tangible things that actually work too. So, there’s no place better for this balance than MSRA. I’m lucky that I got in.

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As mobile shopping gets more popular, we want to help you to find and shop products on your smart phone with even less effort. The new Bing for Mobile app includes a Shopping section where you can find products, see ratings, and read reviews. Search with your camera, your voice or your keyboard to find brand-name products and compare prices. Not sure what to get for her birthday? No problem, we provide you with a list of product categories of the most popular items. 

Here is how it works:

· On the home page of Bing, click Shopping to launch the feature. 

· Tap through to a category of products, or search for a specific product using your voice or the keyboard. 

· For more information about a product that is right in front of you, use the camera feature to scan the barcode of the product. 

· You can then sort results by relevance, user rating, expert rating, or price.

· Click through for product details and a link to the merchant website.

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Coming off the heels of the launch of the new Bing Entertainment feature, we're excited to kick off a music-themed summer with an East and West coast concert series, chances to win tickets to private shows and a Lady Gaga fan search contest.

First let's talk Gaga. In honor of the 40th Anniversary of  America's Top 40, we're teaming up with Stubhub and Ryan Seacrest to launch the Lady Gaga Superfan Search. To enter, upload your best Lady Gaga Superfan photo showing your most fierce Lady Gaga fashion.  The winner will receive the ultimate Lady Gaga prize package – round-trip travel and tickets to one of her shows either in Miami, New York, Las Vegas, or Lollapallooza in Chicago. Go to Bing.com/gaga to learn more details and get inspiration from Bing Visual Search and Bing Video; sample Lady Gaga music; read the latest news on Bing Music; and check out what the social sphere is saying about Lady Gaga.

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July 30th is officially the last day for Bing Cashback. 

It has been a great ride. Shopping remains one of the most significant things we do online and getting cash back for shopping is always a nice bonus. The whole Cashback program has shown us the ease of use when it comes to Bing Shopping and all of the trustworthy and respected sites that are official merchants on Bing Shopping. 

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