Dr. Flake is a Technical Fellow at Microsoft, where he focuses on Internet products and technologies including search, advertising, content, portals, community, and application development.  In this capacity, he helps define and evolve Microsoft’s product vision, technical architecture, and business strategy for online services.  He is also the founder and director of Live Labs, a “skunk works” team that bridges research and development, and is widely recognized for inventing new best practices for catalyzing and managing innovation.

Prior to joining Microsoft, Dr. Flake founded Yahoo! Research Labs, ran Yahoo!’s corporate R&D activities and company-wide innovation effort, and was Overture’s Chief Science Officer.  Before joining Overture, he was a research scientist at NEC Research Institute and the leader of its Web data-mining program.  He has numerous publications spanning over 20 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.

Dr. Flake earned his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Maryland and has served on numerous academic conference and workshop organization committees.  He also wrote the award-winning book, The Computational Beauty of Nature, which is used in college courses worldwide.