Received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Caltech in the Caltech Computer Graphics group in 1989; studied both computer graphics and neural networks. Received his M.S. at Caltech in 1985, in the Physics of Computation group. Before coming to Microsoft in 1997, Platt was Director of Research at a small company called Synaptics that makes touchpads and Chinese handwriting recognition products. At Synaptics, he worked on neural network architectures & hardware, neural networks to recognize objects, and handwriting recognition. Senior Researcher in the Knowledge Tools Group at Microsoft Research.  Technical Achievement Awards 2005: (Academy Certificates) - For their pioneering work in physically-based computer-generated techniques used to simulate realistic cloth in motion pictures. (w. Demetri Terzopoulos) 1 Sci-Tech Award