Could the title of distinguished scientist be the best job at Microsoft? For Stevie Bathiche, it's a job he says "is tailored for my skills and who I am".
He is one of just 20 people at the technology behemoth holding the designation, and yes, that is a real job title. His role is no less unique.
The 41-year-old mop-haired whizz-kid, who is of Palestinian-Lebanese origin and holds 95 patents to date, created the Mothmobile – a hybrid robot that uses an insect as its control system – while still in graduate school.
After three separate internships at Microsoft – during which he created language software that went into Word’s grammar check, the Sidewinder 3D Pro gamepad and a smart remote – he has been working there for the past 17 years.
And it was this experience he recently shared with university students at Dubai’s Higher College of Technology (HCT). During the talk, he encouraged students to pursue careers that rely heavily on research, design and out-of-the-box thinking. And he should know all about that.
He is the co-inventor of the Microsoft Surface, now a range of hybrid tablets, laptops and desktops that are giving Apple a run for its money in the hardware game. Originally, Mr Bathiche’s Surface idea was for a 30-inch tabletop computer back in 2003.
Every student, he says, should do an internship to “really hone in on who they want to be and what they want to study”. He turned down a full-time job at Microsoft to go back to grad school after a degree in electrical engineering. He even turned down Nasa, whose internship he thought might be too “defined”.
“I’m a very creative soul and I like to find my own way and invent my own way,” he says during our interview at the Microsoft offices in Dubai’s Internet City. “I like undefined. I don’t like walls.”
A lot of his career has been spent trying to break down the fourth wall; Mr Bathiche wants to make the computer “break out of the screen and perceive the audience”.
He's been working on 3D technology and virtual "mixed" reality recently to do that. He shows me a video of a Microsoft employee interacting with a 3D hologram of his daughter in the next room, then reducing it down to a miniature version, just like Princess Leia in Star Wars.
“Mixing the physical world and digital world has been our motif for some time,” he says, “blurring the physical and the virtual. That’s a lot of where 3D is going – mixed reality.”
And although he won’t put a timeline on when we can expect the fourth wall to be shattered, he says it’s “not out of reach”. “It’s in our future and it’s relevant to start thinking about it,” he adds.
After his postgraduate degree in bioengineering, Mr Bathiche was “ready to go back into workforce” and landed the job he has turned into a two-decade career. He manages a team of 50 in the Applied Sciences Group, an interdisciplinary team working “at the fringe”, crossing the line between research and product development.
Mr Bathiche’s group is behind many of Microsoft’s hardware products and experiences – from pen and touch input to depth and biometric sensing, virtual and augmented displays and human-machine interactions.
He sits in on hardware meetings run on Thursdays by his boss, Panos Panay, the corporate vice president of devices, to “get exposed to all problems”. “Then I go challenge my team,” he says.
He picks his staff carefully – “folks who are highly driven and have an entrepreneurial spirit, as they wear multiple hats”. They invent but also have to persuade people to turn their ideas into actual products, he says.
So how do you convince people that these futuristic ideas can become a reality of tomorrow?
“The key thing is, we build the prototype, we make it work. First we have to convince ourselves,” says Mr Bathiche.
His career, he says has come “full circle” with pen computing – the Surface Pen is becoming a key part of the hardware suite. He shows off a programme he’s been working on: Ink Beautification, which can “clean up” your handwriting (an early version is already part of Windows 10).
Creativity and creators, from architects to comic book writers, have become a real focus for Microsoft recently. The pen, after all, says Mr Bathiche, is a 1,000-year-old device that helps you make sense of what you hear.
The inventor grew up in Sweden and Saudi Arabia before settling in the American state of Virginia. He stays close to his Arabic roots: he and his Jordanian wife holiday in the Middle East every year and he says US-raised daughters, ages five and two, speak Arabic better than he does.
A fascinating mix of science boffin and businessman, Mr Bathische says his boss thinks he’s “a little bit mad, but in a good way.” While he understands technology well, he can also relate to people.
If you can’t work with anyone, he says, that’s an impediment – even if you’re “extremely brilliant”, because you can’t do things by yourself.
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