Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference (PDC) is the company's showcase for new technology for the software developer community. This year, Microsoft is launching a series of talks by its technical leaders, including Microsoft technical fellows and distinguished engineers. Microsoft has dubbed this series the "Big Brains" series, borrowed from another series involving these technical luminaries. Microsoft officials said these are the innovators who develop and drive technical strategies for Microsoft and the industry. The company is inviting attendees at PDC to "participate in a perfect storm of brilliance, insight, experience and vision as we bring together Microsoft's Technical Fellows for the Technical Leaders series of sessions at PDC09." This slide show presents eight of Microsoft's technical leaders and what they will be talking about at PDC in Los Angeles Nov. 17-19.
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Eight 'Big Brains' to Watch at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference
by Darryl K. Taft
Mark Russinovich
Mark Russinovich is a technical fellow, Microsoft’s highest technical position, in the Windows Core Operating System Division. He is a member of the core team that provides architectural direction and oversight across Windows, with a focus on security and virtualization. Mark is currently working on the technical direction and architectural plan for future versions of Windows.
Gary Flake is a technical fellow at Microsoft, where he is responsible for bridging Microsoft Research and MSN, and for setting the technology vision and future direction of the MSN portal, Web search, desktop search and commercial search efforts. He is also the founder and director of Live Labs, which represents Microsoft's greatest investment in applied research focused on Internet technologies. Before joining Microsoft, Flake founded Yahoo Research Labs, ran Yahoo’s corporate R&D activities and companywide innovation effort, and was Overture's chief science officer.
Patrick Dussud is currently the lead architect for the .NET Common Language Runtime, the chief architect for the .NET Framework and a member of the Window Core Architecture team. He has been at Microsoft since 1994, mostly focusing on language run-time architectures: VBA, VBscript, Jscript, MS Java and .NET CLR. He has also designed a lot of garbage collectors.
Butler Lampson is a technical fellow at Microsoft and an adjunct professor of computer science and electrical engineering at MIT. Currently, he is in Microsoft Research, working on security, privacy and fault tolerance, and offering suggestions in systems, networking and other areas. He also worked on anti-piracy, security, fault tolerance and user interfaces. He is one of the designers of Palladium, and spent two years as an architect in the Tablet PC group. Before coming to Microsoft, he was on the faculty at the University of California Berkeley, the Computer Science Laboratory at Xerox PARC, and at Digital’s Systems Research Center.
Burton Smith is a Microsoft technical fellow. A proven computer industry leader, he will focus on working with existing groups within Microsoft to help expand the company’s efforts in parallel and high-performance computing. He reports directly to Craig Mundie, chief technical officer and senior vice president for Advanced Strategies and Policy. Smith is recognized as an international leader in high-performance computer architecture and programming languages for parallel computers. Before joining Microsoft, he worked at Cray (formerly Tera Computer) as chief scientist and a member of the board of directors from its inception in 1988 to the present.
David Campbell is a Microsoft technical fellow working in the Data Storage Platform division, where he is responsible for driving technical strategy and architecture of Microsoft SQL Server and other storage products. He also helps drive architectural alignment across Microsoft’s Server and Tools division. Campbell’s current projects and interests include extreme scale data processing and programmatic data services. Campbell also works in the Business Platform Division (BPD), where he is managing BPD’s cloud services: Microsoft SQL Azure and .NET Services.
Yousef Khalidi is a distinguished engineer for the Windows Azure team. Windows Azure is a platform for developing, deploying, managing and hosting cloud-based Web services. Khalidi is responsible for several aspects of the platform, centered on the goal of building a low-cost, automated, large-scale computing system, using commodity hardware, with efficiently managed shared resources. Before Windows Azure, Khalidi led an advanced development team in Windows that tackled a number of related operating system areas, including application model, resource management and isolation. He also served as a member of the Windows Core Architecture group.
Don Box is a distinguished engineer at Microsoft working on declarative languages and tools to simplify developing applications and services. In that role, Don is involved in creating languages, frameworks and end-to-end experiences to help people translate their intentions and desires for software into a machine readable and executable form. Box joined Microsoft in 2002 as an architect of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), where he worked on software to enable programs to safely and securely interoperate with one another.
Windows Azure is a public cloud platform for building, hosting and scaling applications. Try Windows Azure free for 90 days and get 20GB outbound and unlimited inbound data transfer.
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Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference (PDC) is the company's showcase for new technology for the software developer community. This year, Microsoft is launching a series of talks by its technical leaders, including Microsoft technical fellows and distinguished engineers. Microsoft has dubbed this series the "Big Brains" series, borrowed from another series involving these technical luminaries. Microsoft officials said these are the innovators who develop and drive technical strategies for Microsoft and the industry. The company is inviting attendees at PDC to "participate in a perfect storm of brilliance, insight, experience and vision as we bring together Microsoft's Technical Fellows for the Technical Leaders series of sessions at PDC09." This slide show presents eight of Microsoft's technical leaders and what they will be talking about at PDC in Los Angeles Nov. 17-19.