Sunday, April 26, 2009

Leaving Microsoft

With the dissolution of much of Live Labs, I have decided to resign from Microsoft. I will be leaving at the end of April.

Working at Microsoft on search and advertising turned out to be a lot of fun. High impact, useful, and interesting problems are everywhere.

For example, during my time there, I had a chance to work a bit on advertising relevance (for work with similar motivation, see [1] in Section 6.2 and [2]), search relevance (closest public example of something vaguely similar might be [1]), improving the quality of human judgments (vaguely similar to the ideas published in [1] and [2]), looking at new evaluation methods for search (motivated by [1]), ubiquitous online experimentation (same goals as ExP), personalized web search (like Findory and motivated by [1] and [2]), personalized advertising (see [1]), and large scale data analyses (see [1]).

And, as fun as the problems were the people. I had a chance to talk with so many at Microsoft, from celebrated researchers to the hard-working talent pounding on the code. It was very enjoyable to work on such a breadth of problems and with so many different people. I did much, learned much, and I will miss it.

As for next steps, I will be taking some time before settling into anything new. I still hold the same passion for taming information overload, for personalizing the data streams of the Web to make them relevant, helpful, and useful. Whoever manages to change the nature of content display on the Web from a search problem to a recommender problem will reap tremendous rewards. I hope to play my part in that shift.

21 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good luck with your future endeavors. I have thoroughly enjoyed your posts (yours and some other blogs have probably delayed my dissertation a bit :)).

Cheers

Dave Quick said...

Sorry to hear you're leaving. I've only bumped into you a couple of times but I always read you internal blog. Good luck - keep doing good things and I hope to run into you again. -Dave

Michael B. said...

Hi Greg,
Good luck with whatever you decide to do next!

dbenyamin at gmail said...

Well we all hope you continue blogging! Not only do you bring to light relevant innovations from confrences like CIKM, but you add your own personal insights as well. Your post about your father is especially heartfelt, and as one who's father is a geophysicist, I know what it is like to grow up in a world of wonder.

In regards to your comment about how recommendation systems can change the face of display, I am working with a startup that is tackling such a problem. If you are interested, I'd love to introduce the opportunity to you.

Looking forward to speaking and good luck!

Daniel Tunkelang said...

Wow. I'm glad I got to meet you at HCIR last year, and I hope our paths cross again soon. Good luck finding your next challenge!

Fenng said...

Greg,

Good luck with your future...

Thanks a lot for your blog articles.

SinoBlog said...

Good luck with whatever you decide to do next!!

Unknown said...

Congratulations, Greg, and good luck. Stay in touch!

Dave

Kevin Duh said...

Best wishes and have fun with whatever you do next, Greg! Hopefully we'll bump into each other sometime again in the near future. :)

jon Elsas said...

Greg -- good luck with your endeavors. It was great meeting you last sumer. Hope our paths will cross again soon.

Syed Rizvi said...

truth be told, i was fascinated with the Live Labs group and dreamed of working there one day. And that was mostly because of you. I am an avid reader of your blog and will continue to be so. I wish you all the best for all of your future endeavors.

Rajiv said...

Good Luck on your next endeavor. Hope the blog won't run dry.

Gary said...

Hi, Greg,

Good Luck with your future research.
I am your blog reader in China. Your blog enlight me very much and we are making some pratice on personalized information service. Hope I can continue meet with you on your blog.

Gary

Unknown said...

Good luck. Looking forward to seeing what you produce next.

@AAinslie

DSarathy said...

Good Luck Greg!

Tony Gentile said...

Greg, been a while since we last talked (mostly since I went dark upon joining Healthline). Sorry to hear that you're leaving MSFT... but mostly for them. ;-) Would love to catch up when time allows.

My best as always,
Tony --

jeremy said...

When you joined Live Labs, you wrote that you were cutting down posting to Geeking With Greg, because you were going to dedicate your efforts to an internal MS blog. Now that you're back out the other side, can we the readers look forward to an increase here in insightful post volume? :-)

Unknown said...

Good luck Greg.

Your comment "Whoever manages to change the nature of content display on the Web from a search problem to a recommender problem will reap tremendous rewards." is intriguing. Could you expand or point to previous posts or links? Thanks ...

Dinesh

CJ said...

How exciting!

If you are at a loose end, I have a thesis on natural language generation that needs finishing and some code that needs writing. I can't pay you but I'll let you borrow my surfboard :)

Good luck Greg, and I hope you continue to write.

cj

Anonymous said...

jeez, I'm been vaguely following the rss here for at least 9 months and never realised you worked for MS!! I think that's a sign of someone who knows stuff rather than a fanboy, keep up the good work. Canonical are recruiting :)

Abhishek Gupta said...

I love your stuff man. I worked at LinkedIn in the Reommendation Engine team and have been following your blog for a while now. I hope you stil continue to write!!