Gary William Flake (born 1966 or 1967) was most recently the CTO of Search at

Salesforce.com Salesforce, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides customer relationship management (CRM) software and applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, an ...

, which bought and shuttered Clipboard, Inc., of which he was the founder and CEO.

Background

Flake received his

bachelor's degree A bachelor's degree (from Middle Latin ''baccalaureus'') or baccalaureate (from Modern Latin ''baccalaureatus'') is an undergraduate academic degree awarded by colleges and universities upon completion of a course of study lasting three to six ...

in 1989 from

Clemson University Clemson University () is a public land-grant research university in Clemson, South Carolina. Founded in 1889, Clemson is the second-largest university in the student population in South Carolina. For the fall 2019 semester, the university enro ...

. Then he went on to receive his

PhD PHD or PhD may refer to: * Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), an academic qualification Entertainment * '' PhD: Phantasy Degree'', a Korean comic series * ''Piled Higher and Deeper'', a web comic * Ph.D. (band), a 1980s British group ** Ph.D. (Ph.D. albu ...

from the

University of Maryland, College Park The University of Maryland, College Park (University of Maryland, UMD, or simply Maryland) is a public land-grant research university in College Park, Maryland. Founded in 1856, UMD is the flagship institution of the University System of Mary ...

in 1993 in computer science, which is part of the

University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences The College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences (CMNS) at the University of Maryland, College Park, is home to ten academic departments and a dozen interdisciplinary research centers and institutes. CMNS is one of 13 schools and colleg ...

. Author of the book, '' The Computational Beauty of Nature'' (

MIT Press The MIT Press is a university press affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts (United States). It was established in 1962. History The MIT Press traces its origins back to 1926 when MIT publish ...

1998), Flake created a number of publications focused on machine-learning, data-mining, and

self-organization Self-organization, also called spontaneous order in the social sciences, is a process where some form of overall order arises from local interactions between parts of an initially disordered system. The process can be spontaneous when suffi ...

. His other research interests have included Web measurements, efficient algorithms, models of adaptation inspired by nature, and time-series forecasting. In 2000, Flake became a research scientist at

NEC is a Japanese multinational corporation, multinational information technology and electronics corporation, headquartered in Minato, Tokyo. The company was known as the Nippon Electric Company, Limited, before rebranding in 1983 as NEC. It prov ...

Research Institute and the leader of its Web data-mining program. In 2002, he became

Overture Overture (from French ''ouverture'', "opening") in music was originally the instrumental introduction to a ballet, opera, or oratorio in the 17th century. During the early Romantic era, composers such as Beethoven and Mendelssohn composed overt ...

's Chief Science Officer. After

Yahoo Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo! Inc. (2017–present), Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds ma ...

merged with Overture, he ran

Yahoo! Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Man ...

Research Labs, corporate research-and-development activities, and company-wide innovation efforts, and eventually became a vice-president. After joining

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

in 2005, he bridged Microsoft Research and

MSN MSN (meaning Microsoft Network) is a web portal and related collection of Internet services and apps for Windows and mobile devices, provided by Microsoft and launched on August 24, 1995, alongside the release of Windows 95. The Microsoft Net ...

, by founding

Microsoft Live Labs Microsoft Live Labs was a partnership between MSN and Microsoft Research that focused on applied research for Internet products and services at Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing ...

and setting the technology vision and future direction of the MSN portal, web-search, desktop-search, and commercial-search efforts. A Microsoft Technical Fellow, he announced via

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

on October 8, 2010 his resignation from Microsoft as a consequence of its shutting down

Live Labs Microsoft Live Labs was a partnership between MSN and Microsoft Research that focused on applied research for Internet products and services at Microsoft. Live Labs was headed by Dr. Gary William Flake, who prior to joining Microsoft was a princip ...

and transitioning its remaining people into

Microsoft Bing Microsoft Bing (commonly known as Bing) is a web search engine owned and operated by Microsoft. The service has its origins in Microsoft's previous search engines: MSN Search, Windows Live Search and later Live Search. Bing provides a variety ...

. Following Microsoft, Flake founded Clipboard in 2011, where he was CEO. Salesforce acquired Clipboard in 2013, and Flake joined as the CTO for Search. Flake left Salesforce in 2016. Flake has served on numerous academic conference and workshop organization committees and is a member of the editorial board for the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional member ...

's Transactions on

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

Technologies.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Flake, Gary William 1960s births Living people 21st-century American businesspeople Microsoft employees