Richard Rashid

Richard (Rick) F. Rashid is a VP in Microsoft. He oversaw Microsoft Research's worldwide operations until 2012. Previously, he was the director of Microsoft Research. He joined Microsoft Research in 1991, and was promoted to vice president in 1994. In 2000, he became senior vice president. He has authored a number of patents in areas such as data compression, networking, and operating systems, and was a major developer of Microsoft's interactive TV system.

Rashid graduated from Stanford University in 1974 with degrees in mathematics and comparative literature. He then received a Master of Science and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Rochester, finishing in 1980. While at Rochester, he and Gene Ball wrote what is probably one of the earliest networked multiplayer computer games, Alto Trek, for Xerox Alto computers.

In 1979, he became a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. While a faculty member, he performed research and published numerous papers and articles on topics such as networking, operating systems, artificial intelligence, and programming languages for distributed computing applications. His most notable work was on the Mach kernel.

Microsoft Research

Microsoft Research is the research division of Microsoft. It was formed in 1991, with the intent to advance state of the art computing and solve difficult world problems through technological innovation in collaboration with academic, government, and industry researchers. The Microsoft Research team employs more than 1,000 computer scientists, physicists, engineers, and mathematicians, including Turing Award winners, Fields Medal winners, MacArthur Fellows, and Dijkstra Prize winners.

Microsoft Research is co-led by corporate vice presidents: Peter Lee (formerly the a director of a major technology office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and head of the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University), and Jeannette Wing (formerly a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University and assistant director of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate at the NSF). Lee is responsible for leading Microsoft Research New Experiences and Technologies (NExT); Wing is responsible for the organization’s core research labs.

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation /ˈmaɪkrəˌsɒft, -roʊ-, -ˌsɔːft/ (commonly referred to as Microsoft) is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Redmond, Washington, that develops, manufactures, licenses, supports and sells computer software, consumer electronics and personal computers and services. Its best known software products are the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, Microsoft Office office suite, and Internet Explorer and Edge web browsers. Its flagship hardware products are the Xbox game consoles and the Microsoft Surface tablet lineup. It is the world's largest software maker by revenue, and one of the world's most valuable companies.

Microsoft was founded by Paul Allen and Bill Gates on April 4, 1975, to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for Altair 8800. It rose to dominate the personal computer operating system market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s, followed by Microsoft Windows. The company's 1986 initial public offering, and subsequent rise in its share price, created three billionaires and an estimated 12,000 millionaires among Microsoft employees. Since the 1990s, it has increasingly diversified from the operating system market and has made a number of corporate acquisitions. In May 2011, Microsoft acquired Skype Technologies for $8.5 billion in its largest acquisition to date.

Speech recognition

Speech recognition (SR) is the inter-disciplinary sub-field of computational linguistics which incorporates knowledge and research in the linguistics, computer science, and electrical engineering fields to develop methodologies and technologies that enables the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers and computerized devices such as those categorized as Smart Technologies and robotics. It is also known as "automatic speech recognition" (ASR), "computer speech recognition", or just "speech to text" (STT).

Some SR systems use "training" (also called "enrollment") where an individual speaker reads text or isolated vocabulary into the system. The system analyzes the person's specific voice and uses it to fine-tune the recognition of that person's speech, resulting in increased accuracy. Systems that do not use training are called "speaker independent" systems. Systems that use training are called "speaker dependent".

Speech recognition applications include voice user interfaces such as voice dialing (e.g. "Call home"), call routing (e.g. "I would like to make a collect call"), domotic appliance control, search (e.g. find a podcast where particular words were spoken), simple data entry (e.g., entering a credit card number), preparation of structured documents (e.g. a radiology report), speech-to-text processing (e.g., word processors or emails), and aircraft (usually termed Direct Voice Input).

Research

Research comprises "creative work undertaken on a systematic basis in order to increase the stock of knowledge, including knowledge of humans, culture and society, and the use of this stock of knowledge to devise new applications." It is used to establish or confirm facts, reaffirm the results of previous work, solve new or existing problems, support theorems, or develop new theories. A research project may also be an expansion on past work in the field. To test the validity of instruments, procedures, or experiments, research may replicate elements of prior projects, or the project as a whole. The primary purposes of basic research (as opposed to applied research) are documentation, discovery, interpretation, or the research and development (R&D) of methods and systems for the advancement of human knowledge. Approaches to research depend on epistemologies, which vary considerably both within and between humanities and sciences. There are several forms of research: scientific, humanities, artistic, economic, social, business, marketing, practitioner research, etc.