My name is Wei Chu. I am an Applied Researcher on Bing’s contextual relevance team. The mission of this team is to bring personalization in the user search experience. My commitment is to improve Bing search results by introducing significant signals relevant to personalized search relevance. I am doing applied research on learning from large-scale data. The most challenging step is to identify and formulate individual problems which could be solved by machine learning techniques. I joined Microsoft in May of 2011 thanks to one of my friends that works in Microsoft Research. He referred me to several teams within the Online Services Division. I was fascinated by the great opportunities at Microsoft and finally ended up with Bing’s contextual relevance team to continue my passion on personalization.  

Before I joined Microsoft this May, I worked at the Center for Computational Learning Systems at Columbia University as an associate research scientist for two years. Then, I moved to the Audience Science group at Yahoo! Labs working on personalized content optimization for web-based interactive services. I received both of my degrees in control engineering from a college in  Harbin, China, and obtained a Ph.D. degree from the National University of Singapore. I did three-years post-doc training on statistical machine learning at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, at University College London.

Microsoft is an amazing place to work, especially for those who are experts in the field of machine learning. There are plenty of challenges for machine learning researchers. You have access to massive and fresh data collected in web applications, and have the opportunity to collaborate with MS Research, product engineering, and various groups across Microsoft. In addition, Microsoft is open about what we are doing in the machine learning space, and there is no prohibition in publishing your new findings as a researcher. It is a privilege to work with so many brilliant, well known colleagues on productions that have millions of users. Microsoft makes it very easy to stay involved in the broader machine learning community by offering the opportunity to attend major conferences and events, where you can share your research, network with others, and learn about the major trends in the machine learning space.

Want a job like mine? Check out our machine learning job opportunities: http://bit.ly/vpGsnm