Ryen White is General Manager and Deputy Lab Director of Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA, USA. His research takes a user- and task-centric view on AI, focused on search and assistance, primarily in Web settings. Ryen led applied science for the Microsoft Cortana digital assistant, and he was chief scientist at Microsoft Health, establishing a science culture and infusing AI in both products. Technology derived from his and his team’s research has shipped and significantly improved key business metrics in many other Microsoft products, including Bing (e.g., using search context to improve result relevance), Windows, Office, and Azure. Ryen is a Fellow of the ACM and of the British Computer Society. He has published over 300 articles on search and related areas, including significant work on mining and modeling search activity at scale. In 2017, Ryen was named “Center of the SIGIR Universe” (most central author in the co-authorship graph) in the 40 years of ACM SIGIR. He has received over 20 awards for his technical contributions, including three SIGIR best paper awards and two SIGIR test of time awards. Ryen has received the Karen Spärck Jones Award (2014), the Tony Kent Strix Award (2022), and was inducted into the SIGIR Academy (2023), all for outstanding contributions to information retrieval. He is editor-in-chief of ACM Transactions on the Web, he chairs the award committee for the Seoul Test of Time Award at The Web Conference, and he was program chair for The Web Conference 2019. Please see ryenwhite.com for more information.
