Entries tagged with machine learning - Channel 9

Expert to Expert: Harry Shum - General Purpose Search, Decision Engines and Bing

Charles — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 03:44:00 GMT

Harry Shum is the VP of Engineering for Bing, Microsoft's latest search engine offering (well, it's more than a search engine - it's a so-called Decision Engine, but what does that mean, precisely?). Harry has a long history in the world of complex algorithm design and implementation. Before joining the Bing team (at Bill Gates' request), Harry was a reseacher in MSR specializing in computer vision, which is an algorithm instensive discipline rife with machine learning principles, statistics and in some sense artificial "intelligence" in terms of autonomous pattern recognition capability. At any rate, Harry is a developer and scientist through and through. We're very fortunate to have him running our search engineering efforts. General purpose search is an incredibly fascinating area with a great deal of potential, challenges and opportunities.

Erik Meijer, programming language designer, knight of the lamda calculus and Expert to Expert host, sits down with Harry to learn, at a high level (though deep in context), how Bing works, what, exactly, a decision engine is, what really happens when you Bing something and various topics related to the computation behind both general purpose search and accurately interpreting user intention. Of course, being an E2E, we take the conversation in many directions and Harry was a real sport. Thank you, Harry!

If you want to know the past, present and a little bit of the future of Bing technology, well, tune in and meet Harry Shum; a computer scientist, software developer and vice president.

Enjoy!

Xin Wang: Science Fiction, Artificial Intelligence and Search

Charles — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 20:39:00 GMT

Meet Xin Wang, SciFi fan and an expert in artificial intelligence (she has a Ph.D in it!). Today she works on Markov decision problems and how to use approximate optimization problems that can be traced all the way back to Sir Issac Newton to solve combinatorial optimization problems. Xin has worked as an SDE at Microsoft for more than 4 years; when she first started she worked on a very cool project for ink parsing on the Tablet PC. Watch the video to find out more about this very interesting software developer!

Dan Reed: On the ManyCore Future and Parallelism in the Sky

Charles — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 19:42:12 GMT

Dan Reed is Microsoft's Director of Scalable/Multi-Core Systems Research and head of the recently formed Universal Parallel Computing Research Centers (UPCRC): one at the University of California at Berkeley (UC-Berkeley) and a second at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Since we've been here) but part of the same wide-angle general purpose solution to the complex (and arguably fractal) general problem that spans microblips in DRAM to massive data centers.

Certainly the computation Cloud of the future must not only be scalable and highly performant, but also adaptive and homeostatic in how it reacts to frequent perturbation.

What are some of the challenges on the server side with respect to concurrent processing and massive scalability? Clustered server computing environments have traditionally been very good at parallel computation (compared to the general purpose client) so what's Dan and Microsoft working on to ensure our Cloud scales to ManyCore? Is machine learning being incorporated into clustered computing software adaptation and evolution?

Dan has a very interesting biography:

"Previously, I was the founding director of the Renaissiance Computing Institute (RENCI) at the University of North Carolina, the Chancellor's Eminent Professor, and Senior Advisor for Strategy and Innovation. Before that, I was head of the Department of Computer Science, Edward William and Jane Marr Gutgsell Professor, and Director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois.
I am also a member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) and chair of the Computing Research Association (CRA)"

Dan was the head of CS at Illinois during the birth of the web browser Mosaic which changed the way people interact with the Internet forever... We talk about where the web is today (including browsers) versus what Mosaic enabled when it arrived.

Enjoy. This is another great discussion with a supercomputing stalwart whose main focus these days is on ensuring we are prepared for the highly parallel future of general purpose computation in the sky.

Low res file here.

Windows Vista Diagnostics: Moving closer to a self-healing OS

Charles — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 16:39:00 GMT

Sometimes problems occur (system or application level exceptions happen, applications might crash, hard disks fail) in complicated systems like modern personal computers.

In Vista, the system is capable of understanding a wide variety of problems as they occur and, in many cases, fix them without disrupting the user. In certain cases, the system is unable to automatically repair a given problem so Vista will inform the user of actions to take to solve the problem.

Even for hardware critical failures like a hard disk crash, Vista will help the user understand the problem and guide them through a set of steps to get to a working solution (in the case of hard disk failure, obviously the solution is back your data up! Vista will actually run you through a helpful backup "wizard" in this case, but you'll need to get some hardware to store your data...).

Meet Melur Raghuraman, Development Manager, Matthew Kerner, Lead PM, and Jeff Meng, Development Lead. These are some of the people responsible for making Vista our most reliable OS to date. They are members of the Windows Reliability team.

You will meet more of the Reliabiliy People as Vista Week continues here on Channel 9.

MSR Cambridge Tour: Machine Learning Group, Computer Vision and F#

Charles — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 17:32:02 GMT

While in Cambridge recently to you've seen him before).

There's a lot of incredible work going on in MSR Cambridge. Come along and meet some the people working on next generation computing technologies.