Rick Rashid
Sr. Vice President, Microsoft Corp;
Member of US National Academy of Engineering

Dr. Richard Rashid was named vice president of research for Microsoft in July 1994. Today he heads the Microsoft Research Group. Before joining Microsoft in September of 1991, Dr. Rashid held the position of Professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University . He received his master of science (1977) and Ph.D. (1980) degrees in computer science from the University of Rochester . He had previously graduated with Honors in mathematics from Stanford University (1974). After becoming a CMU faculty member in September 1979, he directed the design and implementation of several influential network operating systems, and published dozens of papers in the areas of computer vision, operating systems, programming languages for distributed processing, network protocols, and communications security. Dr. Rashid is credited with co-development of one of the earliest networked computer games, Alto Trek, during the mid-1970s. Dr. Rashid was the director of the CMU Mach Operating System Project. The Mach kernel is in use worldwide by companies such as NeXT, organizations such as the Open Software Foundation, and corporate and University research laboratories. Dr. Rashid is a past member of the DARPA UNIX Steering Committee and CSNet Executive Committee. He is also a former chairman of the ACM System Awards Committee. Dr. Rashid's research interests have been in the areas of Artificial Intelligence, operating systems, networking and multiprocessors. He has participated in the design and implementation of the University of Rochester RIG operating system (1975-79), the Rochester Virtual Terminal Management System (1976-79), the CMU Distributed Sensor Network Testbed (1980-1983), and CMU's SPICE distributed personal computing environment which included the Accent network operating system (1981-1985). He has published papers in the areas of computer vision, operating system, programming languages for distributed processing, network protocols and communication security.

Betting on the Future

14 years ago 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 data centric computing, Microsoft is once again betting big on the future by increasing it's investment in 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 in a "data centric" world.