About Stathis Papaefstathiou

Dr. Stathis Papaefstathiou is leading the Microsoft Robotics Team. Throughout his career, Stathis has been passionate about applying cutting edge technologies to practical problems that eventually will mature to products and profitable businesses. He moved to the product side of the organization to develop and release performance management technology that he developed during his time with Microsoft Research. As a Product Unit Manager for Capacity Planning, he led the engineering team that shipped the first release of System Center Capacity Planner. During his tenure at Microsoft, he has held a number of technical and management positions, including leading the architecture for the resource management and scheduling infrastructure of a next generation operating system.

In his current role, he is responsible for defining and implementing Microsoft’s strategy in Robotics. His charter includes the creation of a viable and sustainable business model for Robotics in addition to the development of Robotic technologies and products. His group has released the following products:

• CCR and DSS Toolkit delivers a set of .NET and Compact Framework class libraries and tools that enable developers to better deal with the inherent complexities in creating loosely-coupled concurrent and distributed applications.
• Robotics Developer Studio 2008 (RDS) is a Windows-based environment for the hobbyist, academic, and commercial developers to create robotic applications for a variety of hardware platforms. RDS includes a lightweight REST-style, service-oriented runtime, a set of visual authoring and simulation tools, as well as tutorials and sample code to help get users started.
• Recite is the first search technology for voice. Our sample application makes a busy mobile lifestyle easier by providing an easy method for remembering, searching, and retrieving mental notes and reminders from their Windows Mobile Device using the sound of their voice. Later, when you need the information simply search and retrieve the remembrance using your voice.

Stathis received a PhD degree from the University of Warwick, UK, in 1995. His thesis addressed the development of a framework for performance analysis of parallel/distributed systems.

Stathis holds numerous patents and has published dozens of scientific papers in journals and at international conferences. He is a dedicated enthusiast of science fiction and enjoys flying single engine airplanes.

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Q.  As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?

A. I was born and raised in Greece until I moved to England when I was 25 to start my PhD degree. I went through various phases starting with wanting to be a garbage man when I was five years old. What’s not to like? These guys were driving cool trucks and making lots of noise every morning. I started to realize the downside to this career path when my father suggested that taking out the trash be one of my chores as an opportunity to get exposure to my favorite profession.

My father was a physicist and an educator and he introduced me to science beginning in my early years. He introduced me to my hometown’s science museum and signed me up to join the science club. Because of this, my first serious career consideration was to become a physicist like my dad, or an astronaut. However, everything changed when our family bought its’ first home computer in 1982, a ZX Sinclair 32KB. The next summer while at high school I got an internship at a local computer company that was localizing UNIX to non-English languages. I learned C and I had access to the UNIX codebase. So, to make a long story short, I aspired to be like Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie from AT&T Labs, a computer scientist that will change the world.

Q. When did you first get involved with robotics?

A. I am a relative newcomer to robotics. What got me to robotics? Like all good things, serendipity. I have been at Microsoft for 12 years and I have had the opportunity to work with a number of different technologies and projects. Four years ago, I was working on an incubation project that unfortunately was cancelled. However, one of the technologies we developed had good synergy with robotics, so my team and I joined the Robotics Team. I have been having a blast since then. Robotics is such a treat because it effectively relies on the intersection of multiple disciplines coming together to build an amazing machine. Robotics is one of the few fields of technology that captures the imagination of the masses, but at the same time requires knowledge in the deepest esoteric technologies that are fit only for the Alpha geeks. When things get tough at the office, there is always somebody on the team that gets up and says, “Why are you complaining, we are working with fracking robots!”

Q.  What do you love most about what you do?

A. I love the richness and the complexity of the trade-offs that we have to make. Here at Microsoft we are very passionate about making robotics relevant to everyday life. This means that we need to think not only about the technology, but also about the scenarios, the user experience, and the business side of things. Even in the technology space where there are thousands of engineers and researchers working on hard robotic problems, we always add the extra dimension of consumer relevance. For example, how do you use the limited resources and power of a consumer mobile robot platform to perform complex tasks such as navigation? Can we leverage the computational resources of the cloud? What happens in the part of the home where there is no wireless coverage? These are all very exciting problems and we have some very smart people thinking about them. My job is looking at the big picture and thinking about these trade-offs holistically.

Q. What’s your favorite science fiction book and movie?

A. I am a completely dedicated Trekkie. For example, very recently I bought the Haynes U.S.S. Enterprise Owner’s Workshop Manual. In my opinion the best of the Star Trek movies is “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” with classic lines such as:

Spock: Don’t grieve, Admiral. It is logical. The needs of the many outweigh…
Kirk: ...the needs of the few…

Classic, gets me every time.

But my favorite SciFi movie is “Brazil,” released in 1985 by one of the Monty Python members, Terry Gilliam. The movie is about a technocrat that lives in a futuristic authoritarian society who has to rectify a wrongful arrest that was caused by a technological glitch. In the process he learns more than he wants to about himself and the establishment. But like all good SciFi movies, it is a love story (see Alien vs. Ripley).

My favorite SciFi book series is the “Revelation” space opera series written by Alistair Reynolds. It portrays the enormity of the universe and time in a very unique and intriguing fashion in a complex and fun storyline.

Q.  What’s one thing about you that most people don’t know?

A. There is a reason that people don’t know this one thing.

Editor’s note: Upon meeting Stathis at World Maker Faire in New York, I confided in him that I had been practicing how to pronounce his last name, actually Googling how to pronounce it correctly. He told me that it took his wife two years to learn how to say it. That’s when I knew I liked this guy.