Tracy Monteith is a member of the Eastern Band Cherokee tribe. Tracy is member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee. Professionally he is a Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft where he leads Native American’s at Microsoft. He has been working in the software industry for more than two decades in a wide range of roles and industries including transportation, pharmaceutical, banking, and education.
His most recent work in language preservation includes the Cherokee language as part of the Windows and Office ecosystems, prototyping ancient language translations using machine learning, and conducting hackathons for IoT devices and cloud services. He lives on a farm in the pacific northwest with his wife, two boys, a pack of coyotes, a herd of deer, two dogs, nine horses, one pony, one cat, and 254,931 honey bees.
Ross Smith really enjoys getting a paycheck to “play” with software for 25 years now, over 20 at Microsoft. In September, 2014, he was nominated and accepted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts. He is one of the authors of “The Practical Guide to Defect Prevention” and holds six patents. 42projects has aspired to promote cultural change, “bring buzz and laughter to the hallways”. He is a member of the leadership council for the Anita Borg Institute. He was also part of the organizing committee for TEDxSeattle, and has recently been working closely with iUrbanTeen.org and Spreeha.
In addition to his passion for creative techniques to improve the quality of the experience of using software, he’s explored organizational trust, enterprise gamification, management innovation, diversity and the future of education through games and with the Skype in the Classroom program. In December 2011, he was invited to the White House for a discussion on women in STEM. He was the keynote speaker for the American Road and Transportation Builder’s Transovation event in Fall 2014. The work of his teams have been mentioned in Forbes, The Economist, the Wall Street Journal, PSFK, the American Journal of Play, Harvard Business Review, and the London School of Business. He is a blogger for the Society for Human Resource Management's SHRM Blog and regularly posts on management innovation. He is most excited by the current work on Skype Translator.
