Ryen W. White

About Ryen W. White

I am a Vice President of Applied Science at Microsoft. I lead the applied science organization for OneDrive and SharePoint (ODSP), part of the Experiences and Devices division. Our portfolio spans AI evaluation, synthetic data, document understanding, generative experiences, knowledge retrieval, and RL & model customization—advancing the future of content and collaboration. In my last role, I was Partner Research Director, Deputy Lab Director, and GM at Microsoft Research. I led research groups and engineering teams focused on areas such as multi-agent systems (AutoGen), world and human action models for gameplay ideation (WHAM, recently featured in Nature), noise suppression and spatial audio in Teams, and differential privacy for synthetic data generation (Private Evolution). My research interests are centered around search and AI assistance. I led applied science in Microsoft Cortana and served as chief scientist at Microsoft Health, where I fostered a culture of scientific excellence and delivered AI innovations. I am proud to be a Fellow of the ACM and the British Computer Society, and a member of both the ACM SIGIR and ACM SIGCHI Academies. I have received over 20 technical awards for my research, including 3 best paper awards and 2 test of time awards at SIGIR, the top search conference. My research has been integrated into many Microsoft products, including Bing, Xbox, Skype, Dynamics, Office, Windows, Copilot, Azure, and SharePoint. Learn more at ryenwhite.com.

Experience

1. Visiting Professor

   University of Strathclyde

   Jan 2026 — Present

   Visiting Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences.

Education

• University of Glasgow

  Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Computer Science

  2001 — 2004

Skills

• R
• Scalability
• Software Engineering
• Mapreduce
• Image Processing
• Information Extraction
• Text Classification
• Information Retrieval
• Pattern Recognition
• Artificial Intelligence
• Recommender Systems
• Distributed Systems
• Computer Vision
• Natural Language Processing
• Neural Networks
• Computational Linguistics
• Big Data
• Python
• Latex
• Algorithms
• Lucene
• Speech Recognition
• Semantic Web
• Hadoop
• Search
• Text Mining