[emb] jobs in biologically inspired systems

[Thomas Ray]

Microsoft is looking to hire peolple working with
biologically inspired systems.  See below.

Tom Ray

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Date: Fri, 07 Feb 2003 11:43:59 -0800
From: Tandy Trower <tandyt at exchange.microsoft.com>
Subject: hello
To: tray at ou.edu

I would like to introduce myself and see if it would make sense for us
to have some further discussion.

I work as a senior manager in the advanced strategies group of
Microsoft's Chief Technology Officer (Craig Mundie). My focus is on next
generation user interface design and I am part of a team incubating new
technologies for future products. This is somewhat different than
Microsoft's Research Group which also does investigations in the future
in that our efforts are somewhat more near term and more specifically
product focused.

My current explorations are in the area of applying "biologically
inspired" techniques to the next generation/paradigm shift of technology
which we believe will evolve toward parallel distributed processing and
we have incubations ongoing toward this goal. I believe that such an
architecture when combined with these biologically inspired techniques
(such as neural nets, genetic algorithms, particle swarm intelligence,
etc.) offer the potential of creating the infrastructure for a user
interface that processes information more similar to the way we do and
thereby potentially enabling more natural and more adaptive
human-computer interfaces.

We are adding to our team here so I am also looking for potential
prospects and wondered if you have some good grad students looking for
great positions. If so, I would be interested in corresponding with
them.

Thanks,

Tandy Trower
General Manager, Advanced UI Strategies
Microsoft

Subject: RE: hello
Date: Fri, 7 Feb 2003 12:18:09 -0800
From: "Tandy Trower" <tandyt at exchange.microsoft.com>
To: "Thomas Ray" <tray at nhn.ou.edu>

Thanks for the reply.

Yes, for now I am looking to hire some fulltime staff. Ideally I am
looking for candidates with a good mix of Windows and C++ programming
experience and experience with various "biologically inspired"
algorithms and technologies. As noted my particular focus is to see if
we can lay a foundation for future user interfaces. GUI was a major
paradigm shift, due in part because it leveraged visual metaphors,
thereby providing a veneer of a common ground/model of communication
between users and computers (i.e., folders, desktop, etc.). However,
this was only "skin-deep". My goal is to determine what we can do to
advance things further; imagine that computer really did process
information more similar to us. My premise that this would facilitate
more "natural" human-computer interaction.