“I believe the world is ready for autonomous systems,” says Gurdeep Singh Pall, a Corporate Vice President at Microsoft. Pall will be joining the impressive lineup of speakers at COSM 2021 this November.

Pall has been with Microsoft since 1990 – a long and fruitful thirty-one years in which he rose from a software design engineer to the Corporate VP for the Information Platform and Experience team. In that time, he has worked on several noteworthy projects, including Windows NT 3.1, Windows XP, Skype for Business (now Teams), and many others.

Pall was born in Chandigarh, India. In later adolescence, he considered following in his Brigadier father’s footsteps by joining the Indian army. “There was something inside me that kept telling me that this was not what I was meant for,” he told Khushwant Singh at The Global Sikh Trail in an exclusive interview. Instead, he pursued computer engineering at Birla Institute of Technology where he graduated with his undergraduate degree.

After the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1984, a traumatic incident on a train in which fellow passengers protected Pall from being murdered by rioters inspired Pall to seek a life outside of India. So, he made his way to the United States and continued his education at the University of Oregon. He graduated with his master’s in computer science and immediately joined the Microsoft team in 1990.

This professional path has led him into the world of artificial intelligence and speech recognition, where he has flourished. Here’s an overview of his work since from the COSM website:

Pall was part of the Windows NT development team, working on the first version of Windows NT 3.1 in 1993 as a software design engineer, all the way through Windows XP in 2001 as general manager of Windows Networking. During his work on Windows, he led design and implementation of core networking technologies such as PPP, TCP/IP, UPnP, VPNs, routing and Wi-Fi, and parts of the operating system. Pall co-authored the first VPN protocol in the industry – Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol (PPTP) – which received the prestigious Innovation of the Year award from PC Magazine in 1996. He also authored several documents and standards in the networking area in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standards body in the mid-1990s.

Writes Singh:

His core assignment is to develop AI to levels where it can help business functions like predicting of macro-economic indicators, virtual support agents, robotics, and Machine Reading and Comprehension (imagine computers reading instruction manuals and technical documents). Gurdeep’s new job involves working with world’s leading Mathematicians, Computer Scientists, Economists, Designers, and Ethicists, in addition to of course Software Engineers. The intellectual intoxication and immense societal implications of this work are what makes him spring out of bed each morning.

Khushwant Sing, “The Futurist Technologist” at The Global Sikh Trail

Pall’s wealth of experience and knowledge is sure to add depth to the November 10-12 gathering in Bellevue, Washington. Register for COSM 2021 today to reserve your spot. Pall will be addressing the topic “Blockchain & the New COSM Architecture.”

In the meantime, here is a sneak peek into Pall’s insight into autonomous systems in a Microsoft-produced video from earlier this year: