Stefan Weitz is a Senior Director of Search at Microsoft and charged with working with people and organizations across the industry to promote and improve Search technologies. While focused on Microsoft’s product line, he works across the industry to understand searcher behavior, academic developments, and innovations from all over and, in his role as an evangelist for Search, gathers and distills feedback to drive product improvements.
Prior to Search, Stefan led the strategy to develop the next generation MSN portal platform and developed Microsoft’s muni WiFi strategy and implementation, leading the charge to blanket free WiFi access across metropolitan cities. Stefan has been writing code since he was 8 years old and is fluent in both hardware and software architecture, trends, and potentials. A 17-year Microsoft veteran, he has worked in various groups including Windows Server, Windows, Informatics Security, and licensing in roles ranging from development to program management, business development to marketing. Stefan holds a half-dozen patents in various disciplines and is a frequent lecturer to industry and academic groups on the future of information storage, retrieval, and usage.
Stefan is a huge gadget ‘junkie’ and can often be found in electronics shops across the world looking for the elusive perfect piece of tech. Stefan also serves on advisory boards for many startups ranging from biometrics to advertising to virtualization and is an active Angel investor. In his other spare cycles, he is working with national educational reinvention groups to reboot K-12 education in this country and is actively advising startups that are focusing on boosting student achievement through technology and big data. Finally, Stefan is working on a book with the nation’s youngest VC to promote entrepreneurism to the high-school crowd and is advising on how to make available 40 years of archived data from the 92nd Street Y in NYC.
About Search: How the Data Explosion Makes Us Smarter
Search is as old as language. We’ve always needed to find something in the jumble of human creation. The first web was nothing more than passing verbal histories down the generations so others could find and remember how not to get eaten; the first search used the power of written language to build simple indexes in printed books, leading to the Dewey Decimal system and reverse indices in more modern times.
Then digital happened. Besides having profound societal impacts, it also made the act of searching almost impossibly complex for both engines and searchers. Information isn’t just words; it is pictures, videos, thoughts tagged with geocode data, routes, physical world data, and, increasingly, the machines themselves reporting their condition and listening to others’.
Search: How the Data Explosion Makes Us Smarter holds up a mirror to our time to see if search can keep up. Author Stefan Weitz explores the idea of access to help readers understand how we are inventing new ways to search and access data through devices in more places and with more capabilities. We are at the cusp of imbuing our generation with superpowers, but only if we fundamentally rethink what search is, how people can use it, and what we should demand of it.
Search: How The Data Explosion Makes Us Smarter is the first title from GreenHouse Collection. Created by the founders of Insight Labs, the world’s first philanthropic think tank, GreenHouse Collection features books that encourage deeper exploration and inquiry to inform new models for social good.
