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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…
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Amazon’s echo
Amazon’s Echo looks promising. I’ve been a huge proponent of a ubiqutous, always-listening, ambient presence personal assistant experiences. There are many articles on the web speculating on the reasons Amazon is doing this.* Whether it’s about making it easier to order things from Amazon, to collect speech data, to take over home automation, etc. it doesn’t…
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Cortana is my sleepless personal assistant – how she deals with the Greek media 🙂
Over the last few days, there has been a bit of media noise in Greece around my name. Two articles were published about my path from Petinos (the little village where I grew up), my graduate studies and research career in the UK, and my current role at Microsoft. I had no idea about the…
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Cortana and Third-Party Services – Foursquare Today… More to Come in the Future
Have you watched the movie “Her”? I think many aspects of the OS’s design in the movie will eventually find their way in personal assistants. Some already are here… “ I do believe that, in the not-so-distant future, personal assistant experiences such as Cortana will be the primary human-computer interface for consuming information and interacting…
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Hackdays on schema.org and Quotes on a Facebook wall
We just completed a 2-day schema.org-related hackathon at the Facebook headquarters. So much fun! It’s so cool seeing companies such as Microsoft, Google, Yandex, and Facebook* come together to code, experiment, and brainstorm on structured data/actions on the Web. Everyone cares about what’s best for the Web. We built prototypes and discussed interesting statistics about the state…
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Reactive Computing at the Heart of Cortana
In my QCon talk last year I talked, amongst many other things, about the need to react to the world’s information streams in near-realtime. The Bing Platform that powers Cortana and the Windows Phone OS were designed and implemented to support that vision. At the very core of each Windows Phone 8.1 device is a…
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My Cortana Interests on Bing.com
Isn’t this beautiful? I am not talking about the photo, which is gorgeous. I am referring to my Cortana interests (weather, stocks, news) that appear at the bottom of the bing.com homepage. We know what the user cares about so we surface it to their screen. Of course users have to be logged in with…