Lani Wu is a researcher/software design engineer in the research division of Microsoft Corporation in Redmond, Washington. She is a member of a group of software developers and part of a small research team of mathematicians. The mission of the group is to help facilitate the exchange of ideas and technology between the research division and different product groups around Microsoft. Since joining Microsoft, she has worked on software development in the areas of image based video compression and data mining and has contributed to projects using technology in areas including natural language, handwritting and speech recognition and the physical modeling of audio.
"I have two sides to my job," Lani notes. "One is as a researcher and the other is as a software design engineer (SDE). As a researcher, I work on abstract problems and prototype my ideas into code. The other side, as an SDE, I am in charge of the group's code base and making sure teammates are following our group's coding guidelines. In scientific programming, demonstration of ideas is essentially the only focus. While in our team development environment with building products as our final goal, we have a totally different set of criterion."
Lani has a Ph.D. and an M.A. in mathematics from University of California, San Diego and a B.A. in mathematics from the National Taiwan University. After graduating from UCSD, she and her husband, Steven Atshuler, who also has a Ph.D. in mathematics from UCSD, started to look for jobs together. She took a position as an instructor at Princeton University, and he took a postdoc at the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications at the University of Minnesota, positions that kept them apart for a year. Then they both took research positions for a year at the Centre for Mathematics and its Applications at the Australian National University. The next year Lani returned Princeton University and Steve went to the Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS)at Princeton, but it was becoming clear to them that finding academic positions together was becomming increasingly difficult.
In 1993, a friend of Steve from a start up company he worked in while at UCSD was working at Microsoft, and he invited Lani and Steve out during the summer as visiting researchers. They returned to Princeton University together in the Fall but when Microsoft courted them, they left in the middle of the year and returned to Redmond.
Lani had no training in software engineering when she came to Microsoft. "At the time when I came to Microsoft, Microsoft hired people on the basis of their intelligence and their ability to learn quickly. I didn't have any computer programming, engineering, management, or business background; it is not hard to imagine that my transition was very difficult. When I first came here, I learned to program by taking lots of courses, learning on my own and asking for help. The hardest part was to know how to phrase the questions that people at Microsoft could understand and answer."
Her advice to students is "to take different classes and keep an open mind. Try to keep an eye on the trend of new technology. Don't think that you're in a university environment and networking is not important. When I was in academia, the jobs I obtained often had their origins from having talked to someone--even just for a couple of seconds--to introducing myself and describe my work. If my husband didn't have a contact at Microsoft, we probably would never have come here."
Steve and Lani were on leave from Microsoft during the Fall of 1997 and spent a semester at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) in Berkeley.
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