It’s always good to see the “quantum computing friendly” gain entry to high places:
Tony Hey to join Microsoft as Corporate Vice President
Professor Tony Hey is to join Microsoft Corporation as a corporate vice president to co-ordinate their Technical Computing Initiative. He will work across the company to co-ordinate Microsoft’s efforts to collaborate with the scientific community worldwide.
Currently Director of the UK’s e-Science Programme, Tony Hey has been a member of staff of the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) since 1986, and was Head of School from 1994 to 1999.
He played a critical role in building the School into one of the UK’s leading academic departments, and has retained his Chair in the School throughout his period of secondment to UK e-Science.
‘This is wonderful news,’ said Professor Wendy Hall, Head of ECS, ‘and I am delighted to send our warmest congratulations to Tony on behalf of the School. His energy, vision, and sheer ability to make things happen will be of huge benefit to Microsoft and to future collaboration with researchers worldwide. At Southampton we are very glad that Tony will be retaining his Chair in the School of Electronics and Computer Science, and his strong links with the School and the University.’
Professor Hey is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the British Computer Society, the Institution of Electrical Engineers and a member of the Institution of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. In the New Year Honours List (2005) he received the CBE (Commander of the British Empire) for his services to science.
‘Today computation plays a critical role in advancing research across almost every field of science, yet far too often scientists must build all their own programming infrastructures and research their own algorithms to help advance their research effort,’ said Professor Hey. ‘By collaborating with the scientific community, I am confident that some of Microsoft’s advanced technologies can be used to accelerate their rate of discover.’
He has worked in the field of parallel and distributed computing since the early 1980s and was instrumental in the development of the MPI message-passing standard and in the Genesis Distributed Memory Parallel Benchmark suite. In 1991, he founded the Southampton Parallel Applications Centre (now the IT Innovation Centre), which has played a leading technology transfer role in Europe and the UK in collaborative industrial projects. His personal research interests are concerned with performance engineering for Grid applications but he also retains an interest in experimental explorations of quantum computing and quantum information theory.
For those who don’t remember, Tony Hey was the editor for “Feynman Lectures on Computation” and the companion volume entitled “Feynman and Computation.”
Tony Hey’s Southampton website.
Although Tony Hey seems to be honestly interested in quantum computing (and he first started his career as a particle physicist, so his roots in physics beckon him to quantum computing), it looks like Microsoft is hiring him mainly for his expertise in distributed computing. Let’s face it. Microsoft is not the Bell Labs of yore. MS’s main concern is to duplicate and incrementally improve the products of its competitors–in this case, distributed computing.
By all accounts, Bill Gates doesn’t think very highly about quantum computing. Indeed, by googling “Bill Gates” AND “quantum computing”, I found the following Bill Gates’ quotes:
“In our research group there are things like the mathematical theory group that look way out into the future to things like quantum computing.”
Take the company’s quantum computing group. Most likely, Gates said, this work “won’t result in anything in the next decade–and there’s a reasonable chance that it won’t result in anything at all. Now if it does result in something, it’s mind-blowing, because it’s just a different paradigm for computing.” (source of quote)
The much touted Microsoft Quantum Computing group consists only of one person, Michael Freedman, plus the occasional collaborator. Furthermore, though obviously a brilliant guy, MF is mostly interested in a very narrow subset of quantum computing, topological QC.
Hey, maybe someone who recently started work in the state of Washington should give a QC talk at Microsoft, and explain to Bill Gates that we expect results much sooner than that!