Kamal Jain, Ph.D.

Principal Researcher

Theory Group

Microsoft

kamalj@microsoft.com

 

Dr. Kamal Jain is known, both in the wider research community and within Microsoft, for his creative, simple and elegant ideas. He joined Microsoft Research in 2000 as a Postdoc Researcher in Cryptography group. Currently he is a Principal Researcher in the Theory group. He is also a founding member of ACE (Algorithms, Computation and Ecommerce group), a special interest subgroup of Theory.

 

Kamal earned his doctorate in Algorithms, Combinatorics and Optimization in 2000 from Georgia Tech. Earlier he earned his undergraduate degree from IIT (Indian Institute of Technology), Delhi in 1996. During his studies, research and now at Microsoft he has won several awards of excellence. At IIT he won an award for designing a RISC based computer; at Georgia Tech he won awards for the best teaching assistantship, research assistantship and dissertation. In his research career he won the Machtey award and the INFORMS Optimization Prize.

 

Kamal has served on program committees of various conferences, including STOC, FOCS, PODC, and EC. He also organized the Informs 2006 sessions on Network optimization. He is an Associate Editor of Operations Research, a founding PC member of WINE (Workshop on Internet and Network Economics). He also served as a panelist on a discussion on Ad-Auction in EC conference, a panelist on Search in Softint Conference; and a tutor in EC to teach how to compute market equilibria.

 

Kamal has published more than 80 technical papers and patents. His interests are spread in several areas. He has published in semantics theory, coding theory, cryptography, combinatorics, networking, information theory, game theory and algorithms. He has published papers in leading journals, including Combinatorica, Journal of ACM, and IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. Some of his papers have become regular chapters in books on Combinatorics and Algorithms. He has been a co-inventor on a number of patents, including some on contemporary areas related to ad display and ranking, dynamic ads in live games, ecommerce, wi-fi music sharing, peer-to-peer networking, water-marking, global and universal Turing tape, and ink-signature etc. His list of co-inventors includes many technical leaders, including William Gates, Raymond Ozzie, Gary Flake, and László Lovász.