Gavin Jancke
General Manager - Engineering, Research Manager
About
As General Manager Engineering and a Research Manager for Microsoft Research, Gavin Jancke built over the last 15 years and currently runs the Central Engineering Group within the organization.
The 30+ person multi-disciplinary Advanced Development team develops software & hardware technologies and components based on Microsoft Research innovations, from technical transfer to the main Microsoft product groups, large scale prototyping and deployment, to internal lab engineering needs. Since the team was created over 450 engineering projects have been fulfilled. Technology transfers that have been integrated into product span from Windows, Office, XBox, Azure, Bing Platform. His team also provided engineering infrastructure for Skype Translator.
He also managed and led the engineering effort for the Kinect for Windows SDK Beta and accepted the Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Award in 2011.
He is still an active engineer, recently releasing Microsoft Plumbago a new pen based application reimagining digital note-taking featuring handwriting beautification technology.
Previously he developed a new color barcode format that has a high density storage capability. This evolved into a new Microsoft product & business called Microsoft Tag that he architected, led & managed the development and rollout of the product launching at the Consumer Electronic Show in 2009.
He has over 9 US patents awarded, half dozen applications still pending and has published papers in various academic conferences.
Microsoft Research Podcast
Engineering research to life with Gavin Jancke
Episode 110 | March 11, 2020 - If you want an inside look at how a research idea goes from project to prototype to product, you should hang out with Gavin Jancke for a while. He’s the General Manager of Engineering for MSR Redmond where he created – and runs – the Central Engineering Group. Over the past two decades, he’s overseen more than seven hundred software and hardware engineering projects, from internal MSR innovations to Microsoft product group partnerships. On the podcast, Gavin takes us on a guided tour of the research engineering landscape and the engineering pipeline, recounting some of Central Engineering’s greatest hits. He also explains how the lab determines which projects get engineering resources, and reveals how one of his own projects ended up in the Museum of Modern Art.