Bill Crow

Bill Crow is a Group Manager at Microsoft Live Labs, responsible for the team that designs, develops and deploys Seadragon, a high performance multi-resolution progressive image rendering technology. Seadragon powers the “Deep Zoom” feature in Microsoft Silverlight, provides the rendering capabilities for Photosynth, and is the foundation for additional future Microsoft products.

Previously, Bill was responsible for the overall design and development of HD Photo, a new digital photo file format that is currently being standardized by the International JPEG committee as JPEG XR. Bill has been at Microsoft for nine years, and has also managed development for digital television projects and Windows digital photo technology.

Bill’s 36+ year career includes a diverse background in digital imaging, software architecture, and motion picture production. He has worked as a professional photographer, cinematographer and film producer, and was director of technology at Sierra On-line. Bill was the chief architect for object oriented software technology at Hewlett-Packard, and he also managed image related research at HP Labs.

While at Sierra, Bill managed the development of the 32-bit version of the Sierra Creative Interpreter (SCI) game engine, and its ports to Windows, Mac and other platforms. This game engine is the foundation for scores of Sierra’s most popular adventure and education titles. Bill also pioneered the development of full motion video game technology, and personally developed much of the core production and post production technology. He designed, built and managed Sierra’s full motion video production studio and was responsible for overall video production and post production for “Phantasmagoria”, “Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within” and “Police Quest: S.W.A.T.”

Bill has authored eight patents and eleven published patent applications for various inventions in software architecture, imaging and other related fields. He is a member of INCITS L3.2 (the US JPEG standards committee.) Bill graduated from the University of Vermont in 1974 with a Bachelor of Sciences degree in Mathematics. In addition to still actively working as a photographer and cinematographer, Bill enjoys rural life with his wife on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula and is an avid private pilot.