Pioneers of Digital by Mel Carson

Author:Mel Carson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kogan Page Publishers

14

Qi Lu

Yahoo!, Microsoft and Bing

Digital discipline

Software engineer and internet visionary whose illustrious career has spanned time at IBM Research and Yahoo! before he joined Microsoft to build out their online services and take on Google with the ‘decision engine’ Bing.

Humble beginnings

For many young men growing up in the 1970s United States, becoming an astronaut might have been the dream profession. Not so in China.

The Cultural Revolution had meant jobs were assigned to post-education workers. What Qi Lu, the former Yahoo! leader of 3,000 software engineers, originally dreamt of doing was landing a prestigious role in shipbuilding. Being part of a company that built vessels that sailed the world was, in China, seen as a glorified occupation. But for the man now regarded as the inspiration behind the search engine Bing, the path to career fulfilment did not lie on the ocean waves.

Qi Lu (pronounced Chee Loo) weighed only 50 kg when he left school and to get into one of the two universities that trained China’s engineers there was an entrance exam. Students had to be a certain height and weight even to qualify. After this he sought to study chemistry or physics, only to suffer another setback because his eyesight wasn’t up to par, as he was near-sighted and colour blind. Lu’s childhood hadn’t exactly been easy: he was sent to live in a village with his grandfather because his parents couldn’t afford to take care of him, although he chooses to remember his difficult upbringing as a character-forming lesson in perseverance.

All that was left for Lu to pursue with any appetite was mathematics or computer science. His parents asked around to find out what jobs the government might assign for those disciplines, and learnt that studying maths meant their son would probably end up teaching in a middle school. They felt, however, that computer science was the preferable option as it could lead to a placement at a radio factory. Not quite the kudos-grabbing destiny shipbuilding would have provided, but a progressive choice nonetheless.

Thankfully Lu never actually set foot in a radio factory. He gained a Master’s degree from Fundan University in Shanghai and, after a chance meeting with visiting Carnegie Mellon Professor Edmund Clarke, was asked to apply to study for a PhD in the United States. Clarke had the $45 application fee waived when he learnt it would take more than four months of Lu’s entire teaching salary to come up with the money, and watched his protégé easily earn his doctorate and slip into a role at IBM’s Almaden Research Center in 1996.

While at Carnegie Mellon, Lu’s dissertation concentrated on the task of building an international framework on top of mock computer operating systems, but like many like minds in the early 1990s, he was distracted by the groundswell of excitement in the software community about the huge potential that the early world wide web was demonstrating. Fascinated by James Gosling’s work inventing the programming language Java, which was designed to seamlessly run programs across

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.