I work in the Bing Social team which powers Bing’s social search engine. Every day millions of users share ideas, observations, photos and interesting articles on micro-blogging and social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook. Due to the decentralized and instantaneous nature of publishing on such sites, these posts are a very valuable source of “real-time” information on breaking news stories like earthquakes, sporting events, terrorist attacks, etc. At Bing Social, we work on mining these millions of daily posts to surface interesting and useful information for Bing users – trending topics of the day, real-time tweets on events as they happen, viral links being shared,  the people who are at the center of all the online chatter, and much more. The work we do on our team is cutting edge and exciting, and very Silicon Valley. We started out as a small team of less than 10 extremely smart and enthusiastic people, functioning almost like a start-up within Microsoft, and I learnt a tremendous amount in the process. This was especially incredible, since I hadn’t expected to find such an exciting and dynamic work environment in such a big company. Our team has since expanded, but the excitement and enthusiasm remains. Prior to joining Microsoft, I was a graduate student at Stanford University. The thing I’ve most appreciated about my transition to the working world is helping to create something that is used by millions of people.