Willi Richert has a PhD in machine learning/robotics, where he has used reinforcement learning, hidden Markov models, and Bayesian networks to let heterogeneous robots learn by imitation. Now at Microsoft, he is involved in various machine learning areas, such as deep learning, active learning, or statistical machine translation. Willi started as a child with BASIC on his Commodore 128. Later, he discovered Turbo Pascal, then Java, then C++—only to finally arrive at his true love: Python.