John Langford's transition from Yahoo! Labs to Microsoft Research NY

Is described in his blog post.

I especially liked the following paragraph:

Machine Learning turns out to be a very hot technology. Every company and government in the world is drowning in data, and Machine Learning is the prime tool for actually using it to do interesting things. More generally, the demand for high quality seasoned machine learning researchers across startups, mature companies, government labs, and academia has been astonishing, and I expect the outcome to reflect that.

To be honest we were not worried about you John staying unemployed for long..

What about Vowpal Wabbit? Amongst other things, VW is the ultrascale learning algorithm, not the kind of thing that you would want to put aside lightly. I negotiated to continue the project and succeeded. This surprised me greatly—Microsoft has made serious commitments to supporting open source in various ways and that commitment is what sealed the deal for me. In return, I would like to see Microsoft always at or beyond the cutting edge in machine learning technology.