Dr. Susan Dumais knows you have things to do, and if you need help finding stuff to get them done (and you probably do) then her long and illustrious career in search technologies has been worth it. Situated firmly in Louis Pasteur’s quadrant of the research grid (the square where you answer “yes” to both the quest for fundamental understanding and use-based applications) the Microsoft Technical Fellow, and Deputy Lab Director of MSR AI, has made finding information the focus of her career, and has probably made your life a little more productive in the process.

Today, Dr. Dumais tells us how the landscape of information retrieval has evolved over the past twenty years; reminds us that queries don’t fall from the sky but are grounded in the context of real people, real events and real time; talks about her current interest in non-web-based search (or how I can easily put my hands on my own digital belongings) and reveals what apples and Michael Jordan have in common with search research.

https://www.microsoft.com/research