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Microsoft Hires Jeannette Wing To Head Microsoft Research

By TechTaffy Desk

[Techtaffy Newsdesk]

Dr. Jeannette Wing will join Microsoft Research as vice president, head of Microsoft Research International, reporting to Chief Research Officer Rick Rashid. Wing is a leading figure in computer science research, particularly in formal methods, security and privacy. She has held key positions in both academia and government, most recently at Carnegie Mellon University and the National Science Foundation (NSF).

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 Dr. Maurice Herlihy, the notion of linearizability, a correctness condition for concurrent objects; and with Dr. 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.

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