Dr. Harry Shum, Corporate Vice President, Bing R&D
I�ve been working in search at Microsoft for the last seven years and there has never been a more fascinating or challenging time to be in the search space. Today, search spans the entire spectrum of computer science from distributed systems and machine learning to natural language understanding and user experience design. The graph theory we learned in graduate school 20 years ago with a few dozen nodes and edges needs to be extended to cope with the web graph of billions of documents. There�s more web data created in a single day than in the entirety of 1999. Moreover, the types of data crawled by search engines are evolving in astonishing ways. What started as indexing simple web documents has blossomed into a dizzying array of data types � from rich multimedia content to real-time streams to social conversations, just to name a few.