Gary William Flake

Who is Gary William Flake?

Gary William Flake is a VP/Engineering at Salesforce.com, formerly the President and CEO of Clipboard, an ex-Technical Fellow at Microsoft, and author of the book, The Computational Beauty of Nature, which is used in college courses worldwide. He has numerous publications spanning over 15 years which have focused on machine learning, data mining, and self-organization. His other research interests include Web measurements, efficient algorithms, models of adaptation inspired by nature, and time series forecasting.

Flake received his bachelor's degree in 1989 from Clemson University, and his PhD in 1993 from the University of Maryland, College Park.

He became a research scientist at NEC Research Institute in 2000 and the leader of its Web data-mining program.

Dr. Flake became Overture's Chief Science Officer in 2002, and after Yahoo merged with Overture, ran Yahoo! Research Labs, its corporate research and development activities, and company-wide innovation effort, eventually becoming a vice-president.

He joined Microsoft in 2005. He was responsible for bridging Microsoft Research and MSN by founding Microsoft Live Labs, and for setting the technology vision and future direction of the MSN portal, web search, desktop search and commercial search efforts. He announced his resignation from Microsoft on Twitter on October 8, 2010, as consequence of Microsoft shutting down Live Labs and transitioning its remaining people into Microsoft Bing.