Lessons from a life in engineering

This week, I had the honor of speaking at the Royal Academy of Engineering in London. I thought I would share some of my thoughts and remarks here as well…

The request for the talk was to share my proudest engineering achievements. I found this to be quite a difficult question. Not because I couldn’t think of anything I was proud of, but that it’s hard for me to talk about my personal achievements. 

Because I don’t feel like any of these accomplishments are mine alone. I achieved them because of great mentors like my Ph.D advisor Professor Raj Reddy at Carnegie Mellon and the extraordinary teams around the world that I have worked with over the years.

I think achieving anything truly great is never the work of one person. There is a Chinese proverb: A single tree does not make a forest; a single string cannot make music.

So perhaps what I’m most proud of is how I have made even some small personal contribution to the field of computer science, from research to product. 

During my PhD at Carnegie Mellon, the field of 3D computer vision or building 3D models from 2D images was in its infancy. I managed to create the first accurate and photorealistic model of Wean Hall, Carnegie Mellon’s computer science building, from sequences of 2D images and using light-stripe range finders. And today, image-based modeling and rendering has huge demand from computer graphics, virtual reality, and other applications.

Over the years, I co-authored many papers in computer vision and graphics—Plenoptic Sampling, Lazy Sampling, Poisson Matting, to name a few. These papers will survive me and, if I’m lucky, help shape a mind or two. Through these, I accidentally discovered the secret to writing papers that couldn’t be rejected by SIGGRAPH, the ACM’s premiere computer graphics conference. The title had to be two words and end with “-ing”! This worked again and again…they never figured me out!

I eventually moved out of research, because I wanted to use my research knowledge in the real world, in a way that could benefit everyone, not just academia.

Later on, I had the opportunity to lead an engineering and product team in Microsoft, working on what was then a tiny business called Bing, the search engine.

Many times, people asked, “If there’s already such a good search engine out there, then why bother?” I tell them, just try and compare in a country where Bing is not present and competing, and then come back and use it in the US or UK. 

Healthy competition always brings the best out of companies and benefits consumers—which here makes the quality so much higher for users of both search engines. We’re raising the bar for everyone, whether you are using Bing or not.

But it’s not just about the quality or the experience—we also have a great responsibility to the world to process information fairly, accurately, and without bias.

Companies that control search engines and social networks are accountable to society to provide experiences that are unbiased and present diverse perspectives. With Bing, we led—and are leading—the way. So, what I am most proud of during this period of my career is that we have been building Bing for the sake of humanity.

This time spent building products was extremely rewarding, but I have always retained my deep love for research. I feel very fortunate to have had the unique experience of spending half of my career in research and half in the product world.

Two years ago, we celebrated the 10th anniversary of Microsoft Research India in Bangalore; last year, we celebrated the 20th anniversary of Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK; and this year, we happen to be celebrating the 20th anniversary of Microsoft Research Asia, where I spent almost 9 years of my life.

Since 1991, Microsoft Research has shaped an unbelievable amount of individual talent and collective innovation across the world. We’ve trained over 10,000 research interns, published more than 22,000 papers and secured over 4,000 worldwide patents, with thousands more pending. The impact that Microsoft Research has had towards furthering the field of computer science has been greater than I ever could have imagined, and I’m so proud to be a part of this great organization.

Looking back, what I feel most proud of is not just the papers I wrote, the products I helped create, or the great research environment we have built, but their impact on the next generation of engineers and students, and on everyone across the world who can benefit from technology.

This talk also gave me a chance to pause and reflect on a few lessons I’ve learned over my career, which I think apply well beyond the field of engineering. Always be curious and willing to learn different things, don’t be afraid to build something new, and most importantly—have fun! I really believe that if you pursue your goals with this in mind, the achievements and successes will follow in turn.