Dr. Jack Breese,
Former Director at Microsoft Research (PROGRAM CO-CHAIR)
Jack Breese advises on university and corporate R&D management, especially as it concerns technology transfer, commercialization, and management of intellectual property. Prior to that he was a director for Microsoft Research in Redmond, Wash., where he oversees work on intelligent systems including speech recognition, natural language processing and conversational user interfaces. Previously, Breese was a founding member of the Decision Theory and Adaptive Systems research group at Microsoft Corp., which develops basic technologies and tools for user modeling, intelligent diagnostics, adaptive systems and datamining. His other contributions at Microsoft include development of the Office Assistant in Microsoft® Office and troubleshooters deployed by Microsoft Technical Support on the Web and in Windows® operating system-based products.
Breese received a doctorate from the department of engineering-economic systems at Stanford University in 1987 and joined Microsoft Research in March 1993. Before joining Microsoft, he was a research scientist at the Rockwell Science Center Palo Alto Lab and a founder of Knowledge Industries Inc.