Steven Altschuler is an architect in the research division of the Microsoft Corporation, located in Redmond Washington. Working in conjunction with a group of software developers, he has built a research team of three Ph.D. mathematicians and one statistics graduate student. 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.

"As manager of the group," Steve explains, "it is my job to make sure from an architectural viewpoint that what we're working on is theoretically sound and fits into the scheme of what Microsoft wants. Building a group of mathematicians with a product focus at Microsoft was extremely difficult because there was no precedent and the culture here was not precisely right. So, I work as a liaison between the fast-paced company and what they want, and this group of people who are basically a Think Tank"

"My group's task is to make computers less stupid. Notice I didn't say 'smart,' because I'm not sure computers will ever be smart. But actually computers are incredibly stupid right now. They're really painful to use. One of the things I like least about my job at Microsoft is actually using the computer. I know that's somewhat ironic."

"Computers tend to be deaf and dumb and they don't know what you're thinking when you throw the mouse at the screen. They don't understand you're angry, they just think there's a hardware problem. So our group's task is to try and understand deeply what a user is thinking and how to let the computer react to that. One thing we do is we look at a lot of data from the Web because there are so many different types of people, and so many different types of activities. The Web is a really great place to get data."

Steve has a Ph.D. and an M.S. in mathematics from University of California, San Diego and a B.S. in mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania. As a graduate student he was in a neural network startup company, which gave him a chance to talk to people outside of mathematics. After graduating, he and his wife, Lani Wu, who also has a Ph.D. in Mathematics from UCSD, started to look for jobs together. He took a postdoc at the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications at the University of Minnesota and she took a position as an instructor at Princeton University, 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 they returned together to Princeton, but it was becoming clear to them that finding a suitable position together in academia was potentially going to be a great effort.

By 1994, some of the people who were in the neural network start-up company were now at Microsoft, and they invited Steve and Lani out during the summer as summer researchers. "Being at Microsoft was an interesting experience and we liked it a lot," Steve recalls. "When we went back to Princeton, Microsoft sent us flowers and popcorn and candy. We thought, no school has ever done that for us before. So we just left in the middle of the year and came to Microsoft."

"I started by learning how to program, what the "good" problems are to work on, how to work on a team, and how to be managed. Now I help manage a group of research/developers who are working on problems that are valuable to Microsoft. Some of the areas of mathematics I have found most useful since being her are probability, stochastic analysis, and number theory. Other useful areas have been signal processing, compression (video, audio, text), data bases, data structures and algorithms, and the ability to program in C."

Steve and Lani spent the Fall of 1997 on leave from Microsoft at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI), in Berkeley. Steve notes that "going to MSRI was a precedent setting event at Microsoft. There are not many people who have actually requested to do Mathematics outside the company. I think that as the company grows larger and more people come here from academia, it will become an important issue that people can go and communicate with the outside world."

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