Updated: September 24, 2009

As information technology becomes a core ingredient influencing all aspects of our life - health, education, communications, entertainment, energy, environment - appropriate government policy can be a strong catalyst for encouraging innovation and ensuring that new technologies and solutions are deployed to address key societal needs. As corporate vice president of Technology Policy and Strategy at Microsoft Corporation, Anoop Gupta guides Microsoft's engagement with governments and institutions around the world regarding Microsoft's vision of upcoming technology innovations and the combination of policies and regulations that might maximize their benefits for citizens. In this capacity, Gupta reports to and works closely with Craig Mundie, Microsoft's Chief Research and Strategy Officer.

From 2007-2009, Gupta served as the corporate vice president of the Unlimited Potential Group and Education Products. He lead the company's efforts in new business models and technologies to help close the digital divide and help bring social and economic opportunity. He was also responsible for leading Microsoft's education efforts across the company and bringing to market education solutions in both developed and emerging markets.

Prior to that, he served for four years as corporate vice president of Microsoft's Unified Communications Group, leading the company's client-server-service efforts to provide business communications solutions (e-mail, IM, VoIP-telephony, unified messaging, audio/video/web conferencing) and platform components. His team was responsible for Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft Office Communications Server, Microsoft Office Live Meeting, Exchange Hosted Services, Microsoft Office Communicator and RoundTable, and other related communications products and services.

Before leading the Unified Communications Group, Gupta was technology assistant to Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman. In that role, Gupta contributed to a host of Microsoft product initiatives. In particular, he helped define the company's strategy for real-time collaboration, which led to the formation of Unified Communications business.

Gupta became Bill Gates' technology assistant after working for four years at Microsoft Research, where he led the Collaboration and Multimedia Group. His team was responsible for development and transfer of many key technologies to product groups, and publication of numerous research papers in top-tier conferences and journals.

Before joining Microsoft in 1997, Gupta was a professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University for 11 years. His research at Stanford spanned computer architecture, operating systems, programming languages, simulation and performance debugging tools, and parallel applications. He also co-led, with John Hennessy, the development of hardware and software for the Stanford DASH multiprocessor, a highly concurrent shared-memory parallel computer that had a large impact on the industry. At Stanford, Gupta also led the Virtual Classroom project, which explored compression and networking issues related to transmission of audio-video over the Internet and its applications in education. In 1995, Gupta used the seeds of the technology developed in that project to form VXtreme Inc., a provider of technologies for streaming audio-visual content over the Web, which Microsoft acquired in 1997.

Gupta has published more than 100 papers in major conferences and journals, including several that have won awards. He has contributed to more than 50 patents. With David Culler and Jaswinder Pal Singh, he co-authored the book "Parallel Computer Architecture: A Hardware-Software Approach" in 1998. He received the National Science Foundation (NSF) Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1990, and he held the Robert N. Noyce Faculty Scholar Chair at Stanford for 1993 and 1994. Before joining Stanford in 1987, Gupta was on the research faculty at Carnegie Mellon University, where he received his Ph.D. in computer science in 1986. He holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, where he graduated receiving the President's Gold Medal in 1980.

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Recent Speeches

Government Leaders Forum Asia 2008 Education Session
May 8, 2008