Nicole Hamilton

Timeline

1. 1970s

   Stanford degrees and IBM chips

   She earns a BS and an MS in electrical engineering at Stanford in 1973. She starts her career in gate-level chip design at IBM in the 1970s, building a reliable serial communications chip, a display processor and other hardware devices.

2. 1987–1992

   Founding Hamilton Laboratories

   She earns an MBA at Boston University in 1987. In September 1987, she quits her job, sets up shop in her living room near Boston and founds Hamilton Laboratories, where she writes Hamilton C shell, a recreation of the UNIX C shell and utilities. In December 1988, the shell ships as the first multithreaded third-party application on a PC, and in July 1992 it becomes the very first third-party application to ship on Windows NT.

3. 2003–2005

   Writing the Bing ranker

   In 2003, she joins MSN Search at Microsoft as the ninth developer on the team building the algorithmic search engine now called Bing. She writes the query language, a parser and compiler, and the dynamic ranker, and by the first release in January 2005 her code makes up about 10% of the whole.

4. 2005

   The RankNet paper

   She coauthors "Learning to Rank Using Gradient Descent" with Chris Burges, Tal Shaked, Erin Renshaw, Ari Lazier, Matt Deeds and Greg Hullender, in a paper from ICML 2005. The paper proposes a simple probabilistic cost function and introduces RankNet, a neural network that models the ranking function, with test results on toy data and on data from a commercial internet search engine.

5. 2013–2017

   Lecturer at UW Bothell

   In June 2013, she starts teaching at the University of Washington Bothell as a Capstone adviser to electrical engineering seniors. She goes on to teach digital design and Verilog, entrepreneurship, and circuits and transistors, and advises perhaps a dozen Capstone teams, until she leaves for Michigan in 2017.

6. 2015

   ICML Test of Time Award

   ICML 2015 gives its Test of Time Award, a ten-year award, to "Learning to Rank Using Gradient Descent" from ICML 2005, which she coauthored with six others.

7. 2017–2026

   Lecturer at Michigan

   In September 2017, she starts a three-year appointment as a lecturer in the University of Michigan's Computer Science and Engineering department. Teams of six in her search engine class, taught as EECS 398, 440 and 498, each build a cloud-based distributed internet search engine from scratch in C++. She returns to teach the class in 2025 and 2026, and her appointment ends in September 2026.

8. As of October 2026

   Hamilton C shell for UTF-8

   She is updating Hamilton C shell to UTF-8, which brings high-resolution color emojis and foreign-language characters to the command line and to filenames. In June 2026, Hamilton Laboratories reports that a port to Linux will follow the update.