Matt Ruhlen ’96 Directs $50,000 to Financial Aid at Wesleyan
June 18, 2008
Photo by Michelle Dube.
Matt Ruhlen ’96 has directed a $50,000 gift to financial aid at Wesleyan University. His gift is made possible by an award he received in recognition of his work at Microsoft and is in addition to his ongoing annual support of the Wesleyan Fund.
Matt worked on the Watson Technologies Team at Microsoft, which received the 2008 Microsoft Technical Recognition Award and financial recognition for its development of the error-reporting feature that is now standard in many Microsoft products, including Windows operating systems and Office applications. Matt is directing $50,000 from Microsoft's charitable fund to Wesleyan.
“Watson is by far the most energizing and significant work I've done at Microsoft,” observed Matt, “I was lucky enough to work with a couple of very passionate and dedicated individuals, who had the same kind of creative, excited spark I associate with my fellow students from my time at Wesleyan. At Wes, you can take that spark for granted, but it’s by no means omnipresent in the real world.”
Prior to the Watson project, a communication breakdown had emerged between software developers and the consumers who used their software. Programmers felt they sent the software they developed out into the world without knowing how the software was used or how it behaved on users' computers. Users were increasingly frustrated by bugs and computer crashes that they were ill-equipped to report in more than anecdotal form.
Enter Watson—you know it as the window that appears after a system failure and asks you if you would like to report the crash to Microsoft. Watson is the utility built into Microsoft products that is capable of quantifying and describing some 200 different event types, a setup client, and corporate error reporting that collects crashes in-house before sending them to Microsoft. Suddenly users didn’t have to try to explain their computer’s malfunction to distant support technicians on the phone or online. Their computers automatically reported system errors in language the programmers could use to improve subsequent software. “Watson is helping us improve product quality for everyone using Microsoft products,” explains Matt.
Matt received his B.A. with double concentrations in Computer Science and the College of Social Studies, then went on to earn an M.A. in Computer Science, also at Wesleyan.
