What I studied at the iSchool: I studied a variety of subjects. One of the iSchool's strengths is the wide range of courses in diverse fields students can choose from. In particular I learned about the following areas: information management, project management, product development, and technology management.
What I do now: I have been employed as a full-time program Manager at Microsoft for the past four years. I work in the MSN division of the company. In particular I work on internationalization of MSN services and software. This includes globalizing, localizing and deploying the
services across countries/regions world-wide. These include services such as MSN Search and Microsoft Passport.
The knowledge I gained at the iSchool has time and again been very relevant to my day to day job.
An interesting stop along my career path: A couple of years ago I got the opportunity to work on MSN Search. We built a complete web search engine from the ground up. It was exciting working on v1 product of high complexity, high visibility, and in a very happening problem space (search engines). Search engines solve the problem of managing vasts amount of complex heterogeneous information available on the Internet. The 202 course taught us a good amount about information retrieval which is very relevant to building search engines.
Information issue that interests me today: Advertising on the Web. Putting relevant advertisements beside content on the web (be it on search results or any website) has
become a multi-billion dollar industry. Still, it accounts for a very small percent of total ad spending in the US (including TV, print, etc.). Internet Advertising has tremendous opportunity for growth. I am keen to see how today's key Internet players (MSN, Yahoo, Google) capitalize on this opportunity, and even more, take advertising to a whole new level. This space presents a great deal of challenging information related
issues around privacy, click-through fraud, personalization, providing relevant advertisements, etc.
A Web site I recommend: http://www.live.com/ — this is Microsoft's next-generation personalized home page. It gives users great flexibility in creating a custom page with custom content from news sources, RSS feeds, weather, stocks, etc.
How I stay connected to the iSchool: I primarily stay connected by being on the alumni distribution lists. Once in a while, I visit the school website to read the news.
iSchool memory: There are so many fond memories. The exquisite antique South Hall overlooking the beautiful Berkeley tower, the parties at Frederik's,
attending the numerous interesting courses. The fondest is the graduation ceremony at the base of the tower.
Something few people know about me: Believe it or not, my hobby is composing music. Currently I have a Roland Fantom Music Workstation (basically a synthesizer keyboard). I am still an amateur, but maybe some day I will be good enough to be a professional. I wait for the day when technology will have advanced enough to let anyone create quality compositions as easily as creating a Powerpoint presentation.
