We recently asked Duncan a series of questions to find out more about the past, present, and future, and his thoughts on life. Here’s what he had to say.

Kishore Papineni grew up in a “small” town in India. With a population of over a half a million people, it seemed like his childhood in Guntur positioned him for a career in engineering. “That’s what the top of the class did – either engineering or medicine,” he says.

Vanja Josifovski will proudly tell you there are plenty of computer geeks in his native country of Macedonia. “Half my high school class used the Commodore 64 and the other half had the Sinclair ZX Spectrum” he jokes. “It’s how we defined each other.”

“I have a strange optimism about technology,” says Yahoo! Research scientist Bo Pang. “I don’t think technology will overtake us. But I wouldn’t have predicted the Web as it is today 10 years ago.”

Before joining Yahoo!, Lance Riedel helped develop search engine technologies for other companies. But, by his own admission, he was “a little on the outside, hooking everything together, but never actually building a search engine from scratch.”

Keerthi Selvaraj was a professor at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore when a colleague first sparked his interest in machine learning. "My focus was large scale optimization and my friend informed me that machine learning offered ample scope for optimization," Keerthi says.

Hugo Zaragoza was 17 when he left his hometown of Barcelona, Spain. It would be another 16 years before he returned for good.

Like many young kids, Brian Cooper got a personal computer for his eighth birthday. The difference, of course, is that back in 1983 most people had never heard of a PC. “I’m pretty sure I was the first kid on the block with one,” says the 32-year-old Cooper.

This year, only fifteen Yahoo!s out of over ten thousand employees were honored as Yahoo! Superstars. Michael Schwarz of Yahoo! Research was one of them. “Yahoo! is an ideal place to do rigorous microeconomic theory and turn it into practical applications,” he says.

A psychologist by training, Churchill has devoted her career to studying people—especially how they adopt and adapt technologies into their everyday lives.