PETER LEE is the corporate vice president of Microsoft Research. He is responsible for Microsoft Research New Experiences and Technologies, or MSR NExT, an organization of world-class researchers, engineers, and designers devoted to creating potentially disruptive technologies for Microsoft and the world.
Lee oversees Microsoft Research Asia, Microsoft Research Technologies, FUSE Labs, and Microsoft Research Special Projects, along with several incubation project teams.
Prior to joining Microsoft, Lee has held key positions in both government and academia. His most recent position was at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), where he founded and directed a major technology office that supported research in computing and related areas in the social and physical sciences. One of the highlights of his work at DARPA was the DARPA Network Challenge, which mobilized millions of people worldwide in a hunt for red weather balloons — a unique experiment in social media and open innovation that fundamentally altered the thinking throughout the Department of Defense on the power of social networks.
Before DARPA, Lee served as head of Carnegie Mellon University's nationally top-ranked computer science department. He also served as the university's vice provost for research. At CMU, he carried out research in software reliability, program analysis, security, and language design. He is well-known for his co-development of proof-carrying code techniques for enhanced software security, and has tackled problems as diverse as programming for large-scale modular robotics systems and shape analysis for C programs.
Lee is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and serves the research community at the national level, including policy contributions to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and membership on both the National Research Council’s Computer Science and Telecommunications Board and the Advisory Council of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate of the National Science Foundation. He was the former chair of the Computing Research Association and has testified before both the US House Science and Technology Committee and the US Senate Commerce Committee.