Alumni

Alum part of Windows Vista launch

Mujtaba Khambatti
Ph.D., Computer Science
Class of 2003

Job Title:
Sr. Program Manager Lead

Company:
Microsoft

On one particular “Sign-off Friday,” as a manager in the Microsoft Windows team called it, every quality aspect, including reliability, was being evaluated by the Windows Vista release manager to answer that all-important question: Is it ready to ship? In November 2006, all the key stakeholders in Windows, including several senior managers and executives, had their eyes peeled for the sign-off results. So when CSE graduate Mujtaba Khambatti sent out a positive reliability report by e-mail he could hear the cheer from some of his e-mail recipients in offices nearby. It was a significant milestone for Microsoft and an exhilarating time for Khambatti, who says he walked around afterwards with a little bounce in his step. He had just completed one of the most important projects of his career at Microsoft, a system to assess the reliability readiness of the product and identify ways that negative reliability could be converted into good or excellent reliability.

“He’s always starting something or the other,” Khambatti’s doctoral advisor, Partha Dasgupta said of his one-time student, referring to his involvement as chair or founding chair of numerous student organizations including the Fulton Graduate Students Association. Along with the technical grounding he received during his research and coursework, Khambatti thinks some of that self-starter spirit followed him to Seattle and his job at Microsoft.

“When I reflect on my graduate experience, ASU’s potential for extracurricular learning was the key factor in getting me to where I am today,” Khambatti said. The advice he has for current students is,  “Be relentless in the pursuit of knowledge: take every opportunity and learn from it, attend conferences and enhance your professional network, participate in student organizations, value your class projects and take them a step or two further by writing research papers out of them.” He reminds graduate and undergraduate students that “developing a large, diverse network” is vital to establishing a career.

Khambatti is a Sr. Program Manager Lead in the Windows Core OS Division at Microsoft Corporation. His team is sponsoring a CSE capstone project with 5 undergraduate computer science students in 2008-09. He is also a frequent visitor to ASU as a Microsoft representative for SCI job fairs. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from ASU in 2003 and his master's degree in 2000. Prior to this, he attended the University of Pune in India.