Alexander Gounares
Technology Assistant of Bill Gates

Alexander Gounares has been the Technology Assistant to Bill Gates, Microsoft ' s Chairman and Chief Software Architect since 2003. In this role, Alex is responsible for helping formulate and drive the technical strategy for the company. Alex has been involved with many initiatives across the company, from search to workflow to new Internet services such as Virtual Earth to a number of as yet announced products.

Alex joined Microsoft in 1993 as a software developer and has worked on a variety of projects in a number of roles, including developer, development manager, architect, and acting general manager.  Before he was the technical assistant, Alex worked on the Microsoft Tablet PC operating system as a development manager, architect, and acting General Manager.  In this role, Alex was responsible for leading the creation of Microsoft's Tablet PC Platform, including the digital ink and digital pen technologies.  He also ran the handwriting recognition research team, leading the productization of Microsoft's research into this field and helping set the long term research agenda for advanced handwriting recognition and digital ink analysis .

Before joining the Tablet PC group, Alex spent several years as a development manager creating next generation Office technologies.  Earlier in his career at Microsoft , Alex was a developer in the COM, RichEdit, and Java teams.  While working on these technologies, he shipped with Windows NT 3.5, NT 3.51, Office 97, and Internet Explorer 4.0.

Prior to Microsoft, Alex worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory and several small companies, including a small startup he launched.  He holds a Bachelor of Science and Engineering in Computer Science, cum laude, from Princeton University .

Computing Trends 2005

Alexander Gounares, Technology Assistant to Bill Gates, Microsoft
A number of hardware and software trends will have significant impact on the computer industry, from multi-core processors to increasing broadband penetration to gigantic Internet databases such as Microsoft Virtual Earth.  This talk will survey both the trends themselves as well as the possible implications of these trends.