Peter Key – in the third person … or Third Man
Peter Key went to St John’s College gained a first class BA degree in Mathematics from Oxford University in 1978, an MSc (from UCL) and a PhD from London University in 1979 and 1985, both in Statistics. From 1979 to 1982 he was a Research Assistant in the Statistics and Computer Science department of Royal Holloway College, London University
He used to run in those days! Alongside his studies, he competed for Polytechnic Harriers, OUAC , London University, Achilles. He held the British Universities 400m title, won the London 400m championship and was ranked 20th in the country at 400m. He gained an Oxford Blue in Athletics and a London Purple.
In 1982, Peter joined BT Labs, working in the field of Teletraffic Engineering and Performance Evaluation, where he was involved with the development and introduction of DAR (Dynamic Alternative Routing) into BT’s trunk network. At BT he led a mathematical services group, and in 1992 ventured into ATM to lead a performance group. In 1995 he led a Performance Engineering team and then managed the Network Transport area.
1998 marked a move to Cambridge when Peter joined Microsoft Research’s European Research Centre in Cambridge, U.K., and later led the Systems and Networking area. He was Assistant Lab director in 2005. His personal research focused on Distributed Control, Application Performance, Quality of Service and Stochastic Networks. Application areas included congestion control, multipath routing in wired and wireless networks, home networking, and the economics of networks.
in 2011 he started a new group on Networks, Economics and Algorithms at Microsoft Research, to work at the interface of Computer Science and Economics. The team published work on Search auctions, Crowd Sourcing, Network Games and Bargaining Games. He retired from Microsoft in September 2017, and become an Independent Consultant.
He is a Visiting Fellow at the Statistical Laboratory, Cambridge, and a Fellow of the ACM (FACM), Fellow of the IEEE (FIEEE) , Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (FIET) and Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its applications (FIMA). In 1999 he was Technical co-chair of the 16th International Teletraffic Congress (ITC) , Program co-chair for Sigmetrics 2006 and Program co-chair of CoNEXT 2011.