Technical Assistant

I just read about the next technical assistant of Bill Gates, Joshua Goodman, from the Natural Language Blog. He was another classmate of mine at Harvard University majoring in computer science. We knew each other especially because the computer science department was so small, ~25 students out of 1600 per class.

I joined Microsoft as a Researcher in MSR in 1998. During that time, I’ve worked on speech recognition, stopping spam, and email among other topics. I helped start the MSN Safety Team that still builds spam filters for Microsoft’s email products, and I spent two years on loan to that team, getting some product experience. Early in my career, I worked as a developer at Dragon Systems, a long gone speech recognition company: some of my code has survived 12 years, two acquisitions and a bankruptcy. I interned at Microsoft in 1989 as a PM on the Excel team, and in 1991 as a developer on the iFax project (an intelligent fax machine – this would have been huge if it were not for the internet.) Until I joined Microsoft, I spent most of my life in the Boston area, including time at Harvard earning a Bachelors, Masters and Ph.D., all in computer science. I’m married with three young boys who enjoy playgrounds, lakes and pools.

The job of technical assistant was created basically to assist Bill Gates in responding to the large volume of requests for technical feedback and guidance that he receives from across the company. Pretty cool to have someone who knows about natural language work in that role!

Funny. It seems that all three of us, Joshua Goodman, Alex Gounares (the previous technical assistant, whom I was also on a first-name basis), and myself have all had some involvement in natural language.

Comments

[loon]

wow you sure try out a lot of different job, i am still looking for right one. Currently working for a hosting company called webhostforasp.net and hope will be better.

[esther m. abad]

How lovely to know the job of being a Technical Assistant. So inspiring!