Entries tagged 'social'
Tales from the MNC: Bing team makes search less lonely
By Zoe Goldring
Are you all hip to the stories being told on the Microsoft News Center (MNC)? This is a great place to check out the latest official information from our company. Typically the articles posted here are fairly company-centric, but earlier this week there was a story talking about Bing's social search team on our Silicon Valley Campus. The reason I thought this was particularly interesting was rather then just talking about the product, they talked to the engineers behind the technology and got to know them a little bit. With all of the amazing things that come out of our company it's sometimes easy to forget that it all starts with incredible people. It's nice to get a chance to find out what it's like to work on a specific team or to know who's who. And I think you all are starting to get to know that I love to tell stories about the people behind the products!You can read the whole piece here, but here are a few excerpts I liked the most:
MNC: How do you feel about working at Bing, and about the search engine’s place in the market?
Yiu: Outside Microsoft, in the Silicon Valley, people talk about Microsoft as “The Terminator” – it just keeps coming back and coming back and coming back. We have a sense of commitment to success that’s not as common in other companies. It takes guts. We’re not number one but we have commitment – and crazy good engineers.
Harrington: We’re still building our system and it’s really awesome. It feels like a startup – it’s an exciting place to be.
MNC: How did you find your way to search?
Suchter: I was kind of bummed out when I graduated and was looking for jobs. I thought, “Man, I missed out on all of the interesting things in computing.” I wasn’t doing stuff in the 60s when the fundamentals of computer hardware were invented, and I missed out on the 70s when they figured out core operating systems, and in the 80s they invented databases and everyone figured out how to build stuff with that really exciting building block, and then in the 90s as the Internet happened, I thought, “Huh. All the interesting problems are all done.” I didn’t realize how much I lucked out finding search. I see it as the defining field for the next many years that is changing the way people can interact with computers.Harrington: I was really attracted to Web search because it represents a frontier in software engineering that is just now being explored. Having cool engineering problems to solve using computers is my dream.
MNC: Do you ever wish you had a super power?
Yiu: Super empathy. I just finished reading this book called, “Getting More.” It’s about getting more not just for myself but for other people. One of the main ways to get more is to put yourself in someone else’s shoes.
Harrington: I was going to say something like flying, but man – now I have to think of something smarter.
I can't help but get a plug in for some of the hot jobs in this location! We are hiring for our offices in Silicon Valley. Check out a few of the job postings below to get a taste of the positions that are available. You can also create your own search by entering in Mountain View, CA in the location search field on our career site to pull up all jobs at this site.
From academic hermit to NERD
How's it going getting settled into NERD, aka Microsoft's New England Research & Development center?
I haven't done enough nesting yet, but so far, so good. mostly, it's a crash course in setting up computers, balancing meetings, figuring out hierarchies, learning the intranet … a radical change from the last six months of never leaving my couch just writing, writing, writing. Right: you're not only transitioning into a new job and new city -- but also out of dissertation mode. How's that going?
Yup. New city, new job, far far far far far more human interaction. I mean, in the last six months of my dissertation, I really didn't see anyone but my partner. I was a COMPLETE hermit. Mandatory isolation is required training to be an academic.That said, I'm loving the people at NERD, so it’s a welcome re-intro into civilization. I mean, they’re just as geeky as I am! So, give me a glimpse into the range of researchers on your team.
Well, we have 7 full-timers including physicists, a mathematician, a cryptographer, a game theorist, and a theoretical computer scientist — or at least I think that's what they are. They label me a sociologist which always makes me giggle, so i can't imagine how badly I'm doing labeling them. Meet the Mom & Pop of Microsoft Research New England
The Geeks in Question: Jennifer Chayes & Christian Borgs The job titles: Managing Director and Deputy Managing Director of Microsoft Research, respectively. Also: spouses.
You guys are heading to Foo Camp later today, right? I hear that all attendees had to answer a few questions for their bios, including "Which Star Wars character are you?"
Jennifer: I said Luke Skywalker, because I'm always seeking.
Christian: And I said, "I'm D2R2!"
Jennifer: …It's R2D2! Forgive him, he’s European.
Christian: I don't know Star Wars that well, so I went online to find a test I could take to tell me which character I was most like, and it told me I was Handsome.
Jennifer: You mean Han Solo? I think you should have been Princess Leia.
What are you guys working on here at MSR New England?
Jennifer: We're building up a lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, trying to bring together the "hard" sciences -- algorithms, cryptography, that sort of thing -- with the social sciences like psychology and sociology and economics. We want to understand what motivates people to connect to each other and seek out certain things. And we want model it and build algorithms on top of those models.
Christian: We've been working together for over 10 years in Microsoft Research. We have been looking a lot into networks, we have been looking into social networks. We had lunch yesterday with a venture capitalist, and he told me, "Monetizing and social networks are two ideas you should never use in one sentence." And I said, “That's why it's research -- it's totally unclear how you'd do it.” It's not just an algorithmic and a mathematical problem -- it's as much a problem of sociology and psychology.
So you’re looking for "hard scientists" who are curious about social sciences, and social scientists who can grok the hard stuff.
Christian: Typical mathematicians are likely to lock themselves in a room to think. But we want outgoing, curious people who don’t just want to do math, but also want to listen and learn about new ideas for their research.
Jennifer: A sociologist understands that there’s some valuable information flowing over social networks, and wants to make it flow to the right points without overwhelming people. How do you filter out the stuff that you don't want? Those issues can be viewed as problems in algorithms.
As a married couple that works together, is it difficult to avoid bringing your work home?
Jennifer: Our work is constantly evolving. Sometimes we're doing math and details of theorems, and sometimes we're talking to sociologists and sometimes we're talking to economists about political economics. Provided that your work isn't so narrowly defined, of course it's going to spill out into our social life. I'm OK with that.
The first people we hired for the new lab are a couple. She's a cryptographer, and he's a game theorist. I think it's nice when people's passion in what they do doesn't end at 5 o'clock, and doesn't end with a certain subject.
Christian: I would want to talk about the team building I'm doing now with my wife, even if we didn't work together. It’s exciting! When you get into a more centered mode and are working on a theorem, sometimes we'll go to dinner and one of us will say "I had this idea!" and the other one will say, "You know, actually this time is for our marriage — not work."
Jennifer: I think that happens even when people don't work together. You're just not always going to be interested in what your spouse is talking about.
How do you think the flavor of Boston will impact the culture of your new lab?
Christian: In Redmond, research is a big force on its own. The MSR computer science research department is bigger than what you find at the University of Washington. Redmond is really its own little universe. Here, it'll be much more important to be a part of the larger academic community, which will be much bigger than we will be.
Jennifer: We're sitting right next to MIT, right next to the Media Lab. We're right next to CSAIL, the Computer Science Artificial Intelligence Lab. Being so close to all these labs, we're already interacting with them. We do research with people outside Microsoft. We're totally open.
How did the idea to open the Cambridge lab come about?
Christian: Microsoft Research has labs all over -- it started in Redmond of course, but then 10 years ago we added a lab in Cambridge, England. There's a China lab, an India lab, and a lab in Silicon Valley. We said, "It makes no sense that we don't have a labon the east coast. There should be one!" And if it's on the East Coast, it should be in the Boston area, which has over 50 universities and flourishing academic and tech communities.
Jennifer: So, we pitched the idea to start a lab out here, and we got approved in a month! It was so fast! The downside of a big company is that it's hard to know everybody, but the upside is that there are resources so that when there's a cool idea, like starting a research lab in Boston, they'll let you run with those ideas.
As a company, I think Microsoft is beginning to be much more distributed. It used to be that Microsoft really was totally Redmond-centric, but as our business becomes more distributed, we get to be a more distributed company. We need different cultures, and the company realizes that and really supports that.
Being a married couple building a research institution from scratch — do the two of you feel parental?
Jennifer: Oh, absolutely! Me maybe more than him, I don't know if it's biological or what.
Christian: No, no. I just play a different role. You play the mother role, and I play the bad cop father role.
Jennifer: [Laughs] We've even got the next generation now … we have interns and post-docs who were thesis students of our former interns and post-docs. So, we're actually grandparents.
Links for the smarties:
Microsoft + Facebook = Special Love
The web's all a-twitter about the MSFT/Facebook deal that was just announced. I'm mostly curious to see if this means more 'Softies will start using Facebook. The Microsoft Network has 18,000 members, which isn't that many, when you consider I have almost 80,000 coworkers...
