Steven Bathiche: Virginia Tech Alumnus and Inventor of the Microsoft Surface

My name is Steven Bathiche, and I'm a Technical Fellow at Microsoft. I manage the Applied Sciences group that supports the Windows and Devices division. There we are a multisciplinary team of researchers and engineers across the gamut from hardware software and AI. So I've been in the company for 25 years before then, I did three internships in my internship days. The one of the things I'm most proud of is developing the first gaming controller that used inertial sensing, and it became the Side Winder Freestyle Pro. And then one of the kind of the milestone projects I worked on was called Play Table. And it was an interactive table that used computer vision to sense was on top. Play Table became Surface Table. Surface Table became Surface. So I was one of the first 12 people that basically designed and, you know, invented kind of the Surface category for Microsoft. And that's very kind of motivating that you're having this sort of impact onto the computing world and also people to use these devices to help them do what they need to do. The thing I'm most excited about is in artificial intelligence and having computers do things for you. AI is going to change how we interact or is changing how we interact with the computers. Now we can just talk to our computers and ask them what we want. Everyone's going to have their own personal assistant and agent. We call them Copilots at Microsoft, and they're going to understand what you want, understand what you mean, and help you do what you need to do. It's amazing to see how rapidly and quickly institutions like this are in regards to where things are going to be. So in a lot of ways, interacting with Virginia Tech and the students and the people is really also about helping you understand what the future is going to look like, and I think that's inspiring. One of my mentors was Dr. Dessy. He was a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Chemistry. One of the things that he really instilled and it's the same advice I give to anyone is to study a broad number of fields to be curious about multiple subjects and find the opportunities in between them. And oftentimes that's where innovation lies.