User:J JMesserly/about

JMesserly. Married, six children (- Years old). Retired manager (software) and researcher at Microsoft Corporation. Cohold with Microsoft a handful of patents related to computational linguistics.


 * Location: Christchurch, New Zealand.


 * Bio: Retired technology guy with a lot of time on his hands that is largely taken up by his 6 children. Awarded several patents some of which were employed in major (multi million customer) products. Managed some projects as lead developer- was resposible for some shrinked wrapped products.  Was responsible for technical evaluation of a few companies being acquired - 9 figure price tags.  Promoted technologies in his company: internet search and hypermedia browsers.  This was largely unsuccessful and he departed the company for personal reasons (starting a family).
 * The first patent was for a low cost braille printer affordable by any school district. In the 80's these printers cost upwards of 20K.  Using his own funds, he reverse engineered, rewrote the control firmware, and modified the mechanism for a mass market printer so that a printer could be mass produced for $500.  He met with a local entrepreneur- Larry Israel (CEO Visualtek, later Vtek of Santa Monica, CA) who recognized the business opportunity, and successfully productized and marketed it in the US and Europe paving the way for a new generation of low cost braille printers used by school districts today.  This technology is obsolete today.
 * Later patents involve computational linguistics- some of these are embodied in software used today by hundreds of millions of users world wide. Microsoft "Word"s summarization feature (see Word toolbar Tools, "Autosummarize" contained most of the world's 400 million copies of Word) was created by Mr. Messerly using a statistical algorithm that he realized could be easily implemented on a personal computer. This core technology had important improvements from the Natural language research group- using technology with deep understanding of structure- an area that Messerly has no expertise in.  Every time the algorithm does something wise is probably due to the NL' group's software.  Every time it does something boneheaded, it is probably the statistical portion that he was responsible for.


 * Education: Seattle University (Jesuit), Evergreen State College. Fields of interest: 19th Century German Literature, Rendering Visual Art.
 * Religion: Christian, church every Sunday (Anglican), dinner prayers, the whole bit including Sermon on the Mount type social gospel, social justice worship and irenic approach to controversial issues. Resonate mostly with the Christian left and theologically sympathize with Paul Tillich and the intuitions of Owen Barfield expressed in his book Saving the Appearances.
 * Professional Career: Went to work as a consultant, later Development engineer and later manager in CDROM (later Multimedia) division in the late 90's before anyone knew who Microsoft was- there were a total of 5 small buildings out in the woods in Redmond. Strongly advocated SGML encoding of semantics in Encyclopedia material both inside and outside the company.  Shipped a hypermedia browser (network capable but it was used only for CDROMs), same tool used by Bookshelf, Encarta and hundreds of third party CDRom products.  Unfortunately, MS saw browsers as having insignificant product potential until Netscape demonstrated their strategic importance.  Later went into the Research division focusing on computational linguistics.  Strongly advocated Internet Search technology, building or buying (preliminary work to acquire Altavista or Excite but it wasn't until years later until Google convinced MS of it's importance.  So there is a history there of failing to get management to appreciate the strategic technologies.  That's my coulda-woulda-shoulda, but my memories are very positive.  It was a great time.  There were some victories and it was an honor to participate and compete in the endeavor with some of the finest individuals I have had the privilege to meet.

The author is a firm believer in working with industry to break through engineering hurdles to achieve social goals.