When: Wednesday, April 19, 1:00 p.m.- 2:30 p.m.

Where: 3305 Newell-Simon Hall

RICHARD RASHID, Senior Vice President, Research
Microsoft Corporation

Special Industrial Presentation

Abstract:
Nearly 15 years ago what was then a small software company called Microsoft made a big bet on the future by starting a basic research group in Computer Science. It made this bet at a time when most companies in the world were cutting back or eliminating their research organizations. That initial investment had a profound impact on Microsoft and the industry and created a new model for industrial research. In this new era of internet services, mobility and data centric computing, Microsoft is once again betting big on the future by increasing it's investment in basic research and Microsoft Research is entering a new era of unprecedented growth. In my talk I will look at the creation and growth of Microsoft Research, the impact it has had on Microsoft and the computer science community and the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.

RICK RASHID is a Senior Vice President of the Microsoft Corporation and heads Microsoft Research, one of the world's largest basic research organizations in Computer Science which he founded in 1991. Before joining Microsoft he was a professor at Carnegie Mellon University for 12 years. Rick is best known for the development at Carnegie Mellon of the Mach operating system which is being used today as the base kernel for Apple's MacOS X and formed the basis for several commercial UNIX implementations. It was also the inspiration for the internal effort at Microsoft which led to Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. In addition to his work in operating systems, Rick has published papers in a number of other areas of computer science including computer vision, programming languages, network protocols and data compression. He is also known for his work in computer games including the development along with Eugene Ball of one of the first network computer games, Altotrek, in 1977 and the Microsoft massive multiplayer space game Allegiance which was released in 2000. Rick was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2003.

Q&A will follow the talk.

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