Communications of the ACM
Microsoft Hires Jeannette Wing to Head Microsoft Research International
Jeannette Wing will assume responsibility for Microsoft Research's laboratories in Bangalore, India; Cambridge, England; and Beijing.
Credit: Microsoft Research
Jeannette Wing will join Microsoft Research as vice president, head of Microsoft Research International. Wing is a leading figure in computer science research, particularly in formal methods, security, and privacy. She is an ACM Fellow and a contributor to the BLOG@CACM. Wing has held key positions in both academia and government, most recently at Carnegie Mellon University and the National Science Foundation (NSF).
"Jeannette is a leading light in the computer science research community, providing strong leadership both at Carnegie Mellon and at NSF," says Microsoft's Chief Research Officer Rick Rashid, to whom Wing will report. "I have long been impressed by both her profound commitment to world-class research and her service to the research community, and I look forward to working alongside her. It's a privilege to welcome Jeannette to Microsoft Research."
From 2007 to 2010, Wing served as assistant director of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate at the NSF, where she led the directorate that funds academic computer science research in the United States. In this capacity, she worked with NSF staff to set funding priorities for the academic science and engineering research community, create new programs, and represent the nation's computer science community. Wing has served twice as head of the Department of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University: before her term at NSF and again upon her return to Carnegie Mellon. She was also associate dean for Academic Affairs at Carnegie Mellon for five years, overseeing the educational programs offered by the School of Computer Science.
Wing received her bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her areas of expertise are in the foundations of trustworthy computing, software specification and verification, concurrent and distributed systems, and programming languages and methodology. Her research contributions include the first formal specification language for CLU; programming language support for atomic objects in distributed transactions; with ACM Fellow Maurice Herlihy, the notion of linearizability, a correctness condition for concurrent objects; and with ACM A.M. Turing Award Winner Barbara Liskov, a semantics for behavioral subtyping. Her contributions in security and privacy include work on attack graphs and attack surfaces, work on formalizing privacy policies for automated compliance checking, and work on trust in networks of humans and computers.
Within the computer science community, Wing is well-known for her advocacy of "computational thinking," an approach to problem solving, designing systems, and understanding human behavior that draws upon concepts fundamental to computer science. She sees it as a "universally applicable attitude and skill set that everyone, not just computer scientists, should be eager to learn and use." Wing has also served as the founder and director of the Center for Computational Thinking at Carnegie Mellon.
"Jeannette Wing is a thought leader in computer science. Her advocacy of the computational-thinking paradigm has a significant influence on how computer science sees itself with respect to other disciplines," says Moshe Y. Vardi, the Karen Ostrum George Professor of Computational Engineering and Director of the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology at Rice University, and Editor-in-Chief of Communications of the ACM. "She will be a fantastic addition to Microsoft Research."
Wing is a board member of the Computing Research Association, Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Academic Advisory Board, and General Electric's Academic Software Advisory Panel. She is vice chair of the DARPA Information Science and Technology (ISAT) Board. She has been a member of many other advisory boards, including the Federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development technical advisory group to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, the National Academy of Science's Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, ISAT, and NSF's CISE Advisory Committee. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers.
Wing will be joining Microsoft Research in January 2013, assuming responsibility for Microsoft Research's research laboratories in Bangalore, India; Cambridge, England; and Beijing.
"I'm excited to join Microsoft Research, a world-class research organization in computing and related disciplines, and I appreciate this unique opportunity to lead its international labs," Wing says. "Microsoft Research has already had tremendous impact on the field of computing, on Microsoft's products and services, and on society, with potential yet to be unleashed. I am looking forward to working with the extraordinary talent at Microsoft Research, and I am especially honored to serve the international labs, each with its own character, strengths, and distinct cultures."
Founded in 1991, Microsoft Research is dedicated to conducting both basic and applied research in computer science and software engineering. Over 850 Ph.D. researchers focus on more than 55 areas of computing and openly collaborate with leading academic, government, and industry researchers to advance the state of the art of computing, help fuel the long-term growth of Microsoft and its products, and solve some of the world's toughest problems through technological innovation. Microsoft Research has expanded over the years to seven countries worldwide. Microsoft Research operates in Redmond, Wash.; Cambridge, Mass.; New York City; Mountain View, Calif.; Cambridge, U.K.; Beijing; and Bangalore, India; and conducts research at the Advanced Technology Labs Cairo; Advanced Technology Labs Europe in Aachen, Germany; Advanced Technology Labs Israel; FUSE Labs in Redmond, and Cambridge, U.K.; the eXtreme Computing Group in Redmond; and Station Q in Santa Barbara, Calif.
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