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Are you using a digital personal assistant?
One of the design principles we established early with Cortana was the fact that a personal digital assistant is much more than just speech and conversational understanding, more than questions & answers, more than command & control of a device. By creating a deep understanding of the human over a time can result in highly personalized…
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Sharing my thanks… PCs for my primary school
Few years ago, the 3rd graders (at the time) from my primary school in Petinos (my village) reached out to me for a conversation/interview over Skype. I started following their progress and even visited them at the school on occassions. When I was in primary school, we didn’t have any computers. I didn’t get exposed…
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Wearable devices and natural user interfaces
As an advertisement, I find the video below really bad. However, the portrayed product features are an example of the transition towards more advanced and standalone wearable technology. Device form factors get smaller and can host software that is capable of addressing many of our communication, entertainment, and information consumption/publishing needs. Watches and other wearables, or even implants, are getting smaller,…
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Playing with move semantics in C++ – Part 2
(Playing with move semantics in C++ – Part 1) In this second part, we take a look at what happens when an object stores a reference to another one, effectively not controlling its lifetime. An rvalue reference is required as an argument in order to convey the “I am taking control of the object’s lifetime”…
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Playing with move semantics in C++ – Part 1
(Kjell Schubert contributed to these posts with ideas, discussion, feedback, and corrections). I did a lot of C++ programming back in the 90s when the language didn’t have universal references, move semantics, lambdas, shared_ptrs, or any of the cool features that have been introduced since then. I moved to C# since it first became available…
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We need all disciplines
The “revenge of the nerds” short economist post links to a report about the “return of investment” for college degrees There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that education is important and that it should be easily accessible to everyone. My concern about the economist’s tone in the post is that it promotes, perhaps unintentionally,…
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Leadership insights from a NASA flight director
Earlier today, I attended a talk by Gene Kranz (NASA flight director during the Gemini and Apollo programs). I seriously enjoyed his insights into leadership, teamwork, org structure, determination, focus, and TRUST amongst teammates. It was interesting to hear about how information flowed to the mission’s leaders and how decisions were made. Every aspect of…
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Hey Facebook
Few weeks ago I said farewell to Microsoft. Today, while at the beautiful island of Grenada where Mary and I have been relaxing for the last week, I decided that it was time to write few words about my next chapter. Well, I will be joining Facebook at their headquarters in Menlo Park, CA. My…
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Farewell Microsoft
It’s been a wonderful 9 year-long stretch at Microsoft. I’ve had the honor of working with incredibly smart people. I learnt a lot. From Newcastle To Seattle I was a researcher at the University of Newcastle, working for Paul Watson (@paulwatsonncl). I will never forget the day that I received an email from Don Box (@donbox) telling…
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Net neutrality
I am so happy the White House is finally taking a stance! More than any other invention of our time, the Internet has unlocked possibilities we could just barely imagine a generation ago. And here’s a big reason we’ve seen such incredible growth and innovation: Most Internet providers have treated Internet traffic equally. That’s a…