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Natural Language Researcher assumes technical assistant post

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Bill Gates announced last month that Joshua Goodman would be his new technical assistant. Joshua writes:

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!

-- Mari Broman Olsen (Developer)

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