Abstract
Some say Pleasure, Engagement, and Meaning are the three components of happiness. Research minds want to pursue them all. They want the freedom to choose to work on topics that they can have the most fun with. They want to take risks by constantly challenging themselves intellectually with full engagement or even obsession. They want to make a big difference in the world by impacting the lives of millions or even billions of people. In this talk, I will share the stories of some very happy researchers at Microsoft Bldg. 99 and how we strive to create an environment to maximize research happiness.
Biography
Yi-Min Wang is currently Deputy Managing Director of Microsoft Research-Redmond, co-managing 300+ researchers and engineers across a wide range of EE and CS disciplines. Prior to that, he was Director of ISRC (Internet Services Research Center) where he led a team focusing on developing web-scale data technologies and contributing significantly to the quality of Microsoft’s search engine.
Yi-Min was elected to IEEE Fellow for his contributions in the areas of dependable computing and web security. In 2005, he invented Strider HoneyMonkey – the first automated system to patrol the Web and hunt for malicious websites that exploit zero-day vulnerabilities. The HoneyMonkey technology has become the de facto standard for both the security industry and the search engine industry. In 2007, he invented Strider Search Ranger – the first search-spam detection system based on dynamic crawling and traffic analysis. The work was featured on New York Times and has had an industry-wide impact on wiping out search-spam.
Yi-Min received a bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering from National Taiwan University in 1986, a Master’s degree in electrical engineering (with a thesis on spectral estimation) in 1990, and a doctorate in computer engineering (with a thesis on fault tolerance) from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1993.
