Eight Big Brains to Watch at Microsofts Professional Developers Conference

by Darryl K. Taft

Mark Russinovich is a technical fellow, Microsofts 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.PDC sessions where Russinovich will be speaking include: Windows 7 Developer Boot Camp; Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Kernel Changes; and Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Kernel Changes (Continued from 1:30 Session)

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 Yahoos corporate R&D activities and companywide innovation effort, and was Overture’s chief science officer. PDC sessions where Flake will be speaking include: A New Approach to Exploring Information on the Web

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. PDC sessions where Dussud will be speaking include: Future of Garbage Collection

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 Digitals Systems Research Center. PDC sessions where Lampson will be speaking include: Microsoft Perspectives on the Future of Programming and Embodiment: The Third Great Wave of Computing Applications

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 companys 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.PDC sessions where Smith will be speaking include: Microsoft Perspectives on the Future of Programming and The State of Parallel Programming

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 Microsofts Server and Tools division. Campbells 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 BPDs cloud services: Microsoft SQL Azure and .NET Services.PDC sessions where Campbell will be speaking include: Petabytes for Peanuts! Making Sense out of “Ambient” Data

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.PDC sessions where Khalidi is speaking include: Bridging the Gap from On-Premises to the Cloud

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.PDC sessions where Box will be speaking include: Microsoft Project Code Name “M”: The Data and Modeling Language; Microsoft Perspectives on the Future of Programming; and Data Programming and Modeling for the Microsoft .NET Developer