Microsoft battles HIV!
Carl and Richard talk to Jonathan Carlson, Bob Davidson, David Heckerman, and Carl Kadie from Microsoft Research about their efforts to find vaccines for HIV using Microsoft technologies.
Guests:
David Heckerman
David Heckerman is Senior Director of the eScience Group at Microsoft Research. Since 1992, he has been a Senior Researcher at Microsoft, where he has created applications including the first machine-learning spam filter, data-mining tools in SQL Server and Commerce Server, handwriting recognition in the Tablet PC, text mining software in Sharepoint Portal Server, troubleshooters in Windows, and the Answer Wizard in Office. His technical work has concentrated on methods for learning probabilistic graphical models from data. General applications of his work include computational biology, data mining, intelligent systems, and causal discovery. He received his Ph.D. (1990) and M.D. (1992) from Stanford University and is a AAAI Fellow.
Carl Kadie
Carl Kadie is a Principal Research Software Design Engineer in eScience at Microsoft Research. His passion is creating innovative machine learning (ML) systems. For the past four years, he has created new ML and statistics tools for biology, including HIV design. Before that, he helped create the ML-based spam filters used by Outlook, Hotmail, and Exchange. His interests also include collaborative filtering, probabilistic reasoning, and Internet policy. He has a Ph.D. in machine learning from the University of Illinois. Carl loves programming languages. With C#, he finally has a language he loves more than LISP.
Bob Davidson
Bob Davidson joined the eScience Group within Microsoft Research as an Architect in 2009. The eScience group researches ways that information technology can help solve scientific problems by developing new data analysis and visualization algorithms, by organizing data in new ways, by automating many of the tasks, and by building tools that streamline scientific workflows.
Bob began his career at Microsoft in 1988 as a software design engineer in the Applications Division. There he lead a small team working on internal compilers, libraries, and tools used within the Apps Division to ship several versions of Word and Excel on both Windows and Mac Operating Systems. Next, Bob joined a young Microsoft Research to help form and lead the Advanced Development Tools group where once more his team created a suite of tools used by Microsoft developers to improve the performance and efficiency of their code. Bringing his passion for developer tools and high performance code, Bob joined Visual C++ in 1999 where he served as Compiler Lead, Development Manager, and Product Unit Manager until his return to the eScience group in Microsoft Research.
Jonathan Carlson
Jonathan Carlson is a researcher in the eScience group at Microsoft Research. His current research focus is on modeling and understanding how HIV adapts to the immune system. His broader interests center on the application of machine learning and statistics to molecular biology, evolution and genetics. Jonathan received his Ph.D. in spring of 2009 from the University of Washington in Computer Science and Engineering and Computational Molecular Biology under the guidance of David Heckerman and Larry Ruzzo.