Justin D. Harris

About

Justin D. Harris is on the Copilot Platform team and was formerly on the Turing team (opens in new tab). He built many core components for Microsoft Copilot and continues to maintain them to power the scalable chat framework to enhance search experiences for millions of users of Bing, Edge, Skype, Windows, and more.

Justin D. Harris was one of the initial developers at Maluuba (opens in new tab). In February 2017, Maluuba was acquired by Microsoft (opens in new tab) where Justin continued to work as a software developer working with researchers, mostly on NLU. Justin has developed systems for various fields such as ontological representations, classification, entity tagging, dialog, and implementing neural networks for production systems. Justin has management experience in bringing NLU systems to production for many languages but prefers to work directly in engineering now.

Justin is using his experience in ML and crowdsourcing to implement a framework for ML in smart contracts to collect quality data and provide models that are free to use. Experiments are done on the Ethereum blockchain. Blog post: https://aka.ms/0xDeCA10B-blog1 (opens in new tab). Details: https://github.com/microsoft/0xDeCA10B (opens in new tab). Justin is now interested in applying these incentives in a Federated Learning setting to ensure that while data is kept private, people can also be rewarded and fairly compensated for their contributions.

In his spare time, Justin enjoys skiing, street skiing, biking, surfing, ultimate frisbee, playing video games, staying up to date on machine learning, digital currencies, blockchain projects, economics, and behavioral psychology. He is often accompanied by his dog, Skywalker.

University of Waterloo
BMath double major, Honours Computer Science and Honours Combinatorics & Optimization, 2013