Categories: MicrosoftPersonalScholarly CommunicationsZentity

RIP my friend – Lee Dirks

People started posting their condolences on Lee’s Facebook timeline so I guess it’s ok to post this note now.

Earlier this morning I received the sad news that my good friend and colleague at Microsoft, Lee Dirks, and his wife, Judy, were killed in a tragic accident in Peru. Their two daughters were in Seattle. Even now, I cannot process the news.

Lee was an amazing amazing guy. Larger than life.

We worked together in MSR, under Tony Hey, for almost three years but continued to be in touch (drink and play poker) even after that. I’d like to believe that Lee, Alex, and I produced some great work together. We had lots of fun collaborating and traveling around, working with communities in domains such as Scholarly Communication, Digital Libraries, Computer Science, Repositories, you name it. Lee and Alex introduced me to the wonderful world of Library/Information Science and great people around the world. Most importantly, I’d like to believe that we really connected… I would do anything for these guys.

Lee was one of those guys that was friends with everyone. HUGE smile! Always there for you!

My thoughts are with his family, friends, and colleagues.

We lost a really good guy today 🙁

Update

Here are some photos of/with Lee from the things we did together:

Sasquatch Festival with Mary and Shelton

Poker at my place

The Scholarly Communications trio (at an OCLC event🙂

Our Zentity project is announced to the world.

On the road to talk about Zentity (and eat and drink 🙂

Savas Parastatidis

Savas Parastatidis works at Amazon as a Sr. Principal Engineer in Alexa AI'. Previously, he worked at Microsoft where he co-founded Cortana and led the effort as the team's architect. While at Microsoft, Savas also worked on distributed data storage and high-performance data processing technologies. He was involved in various e-Science projects while at Microsoft Research where he also investigated technologies related to knowledge representation & reasoning. Savas also worked on language understanding technologies at Facebook. Prior to joining Microsoft, Savas was a Principal Research Associate at Newcastle University where he undertook research in the areas of distributed, service-oriented computing and e-Science. He was also the Chief Software Architect at the North-East Regional e-Science Centre where he oversaw the architecture and the application of Web Services technologies for a number of large research projects. Savas worked as a Senior Software Engineer for Hewlett Packard where he co-lead the R&D effort for the industry's Web Service transactions service and protocol. You can find out more about Savas at https://savas.me/about