If you can get past the spam filters, you can reach me by via email at michaelb @ qbrundage . com.
Among other things, I'm a dad, husband, friend, software developer, amateur marimbist, recreational mathematician, gamer, and budding author. Addison-Wesley recently published my first solo book, XQuery: The XML Query Language!
I'm currently a Software Design Engineer for the Xbox System Software team at Microsoft. I can't say much about what I work on until the next version of the Xbox ships, but the team is great and we're working hard to build the best console gaming experience ever. As an avid gamer myself, I'm really excited about what we (and all our partners who are developing Xbox games) are creating!
Before that, I was the Technical Lead for XML Query Processing in Microsoft's WebData team (part of the SQL Server organization). WebData makes many of Microsoft's data access and XML technologies. I personally implemented XPath over Annotated Schemas for Microsoft's SQL Server 2000 database and SQLXML releases. I also created Microsoft's first prototypes of the XQuery language (over in-memory XML and SQL Server), and was influential in Microsoft's initial XQuery efforts. I invented Microsoft's Common Query Runtime (CQR), some semblance of which will ship as the System.Xml.Query namespace in the .NET Framework, and will be used by many of Microsoft's products (including future versions of Visual Studio, Windows, SQL Server, and Office). As part of that work, I invented an XML query algebra and XML query optimizer.
Before Microsoft, I worked at Caltech/JPL working on a wide range of research projects for Caltech and NASA:
- I implemented part of AstroVR, one of the earliest and most widely-cited collaborative environments. We did some of that work together with the PARC/Xerox team that founded Placeware (which was later acquired by Microsoft and became Microsoft Live Meeting).
- I implemented RT, the world's fastest desktop radiative transfer simulator. RT has been used to search for extrasolar planets and is still in use today.
- I was the lead engineer in charge of software for NASA's Interferometry Science Center (ISC). The ISC processes data from most of NASA's optical interferometry projects; ones I worked on include the Keck Interferometer in Hawaii, the Palomar Testbed Interferometer in California, and the Space Interferometer Mission (now expected to launch in 2009).
- Along the way, I got to help out with other random IPAC projects like 2MASS and the Spitzer Space Telescope (which has a local variable named after me - thanks Gaby!)