Microsoft distinguished engineer Blaise Agüera y Arcas is joining Google. Agüera y Arcas originally joined Microsoft in 2006 after the software giant acquired his Seadragon startup. He was a key software architect that helped develop and build Microsoft’s Bing Maps service and its image-stitching Photosynth software. The New York Times reports that Agüera y Arcas will work on machine learning at Google, something Microsoft’s research teams have been focusing on heavily recently.

Agüera y Arcas describes the decision to leave Microsoft as “the hardest decision of my life” in a blog post confirming his departure. Microsoft’s “lead­er­ship has been con­sis­tently good to me over these past eight years, and it has been a…

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