Last week, I gave my first talk at Microsoft since joining MSR. This talk was part of the annual Tech Fest where researchers from labs around the world come and share their work to the broader Microsoft community. For the most part, it’s like a large science fair. There are booths and demos and posters and swarms of people descending to ask questions of researchers. It was pretty trippy to be thrown into this mix after only being with the company for a month. I had the privilege of “demoing” (a.k.a. waving my hands and trying to explain what I do) to Bill Gates. There was great humor involved because I gave my “demo” immediately following one of my colleagues’ (Henry Cohn’s) brilliant explanation of optimizing the Gale-Berlekamp lightbulb game. (Think: pure math to pure ethnography in under 60 seconds.)

Anyhow, I wrote up the crib of my talk in case anyone outside of Microsoft might find it interesting:

This talk is intentionally not a research talk, but an applied talk. It’s a sampler plate of my work as it applies to developers, policy makers, community managers, product designers, and other folks who work inside companies like Microsoft. Enjoy!!