Microsoft Research is the research division of
MicrosoftMicrosoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
created in 1991 for developing various
computer scienceComputer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...
ideas and integrating them into Microsoft products. It currently employs
Turing AwardThe Turing Award, in full The ACM A.M. Turing Award, is an annual award given by the Association for Computing Machinery to "an individual selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community. The contributions should be of lasting and major technical importance to the...
winners C.A.R. Hoare,
Butler LampsonButler W. Lampson is a renowned computer scientist.After graduating from the Lawrenceville School , Lampson received his Bachelor's degree in Physics from Harvard University in 1964, and his Ph.D...
, and
Charles P. ThackerCharles P. Thacker is an American pioneer computer designer.-Biography:Thacker was born in Pasadena, California on February 26, 1943.He received his B.S...
,
Fields MedalThe Fields Medal, officially known as International Medal for Outstanding Discoveries in Mathematics, is a prize awarded to two, three, or four mathematicians not over 40 years of age at each International Congress of the International Mathematical Union , a meeting that takes place every four...
winner
Michael FreedmanMichael Hartley Freedman is a mathematician at Microsoft Station Q, a research group at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 1986, he was awarded a Fields Medal for his work on the Poincaré conjecture. Freedman and Robion Kirby showed that an exotic R4 manifold exists.Freedman was born...
, MacArthur Fellow
Jim BlinnJames F. Blinn is a computer scientist who first became widely known for his work as a computer graphics expert at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory , particularly his work on the pre-encounter animations for the Voyager project, his work on the Carl Sagan Cosmos documentary series and the research...
,
Dijkstra PrizeThe Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing is given for outstanding papers on the principles of distributed computing, whose significance and impact on the theory and/or practice of distributed computing has been evident for at least a decade...
winner
Leslie LamportLeslie Lamport is an American computer scientist. A graduate of the Bronx High School of Science, he received a B.S. in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1960, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in mathematics from Brandeis University, respectively in 1963 and 1972...
and many other highly recognized experts in computer science, physics, and mathematics, including
Turing AwardThe Turing Award, in full The ACM A.M. Turing Award, is an annual award given by the Association for Computing Machinery to "an individual selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community. The contributions should be of lasting and major technical importance to the...
winner Jim Gray up until his highly publicized disappearance while sailing.
Research areas
Microsoft research is categorized into the following broad areas:
- Algorithms and theory
- Hardware development
- Human–computer interaction
Human–computer Interaction is the study, planning, and design of the interaction between people and computers. It is often regarded as the intersection of computer science, behavioral sciences, design and several other fields of study...
- Machine learning
Machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence, is a scientific discipline concerned with the design and development of algorithms that allow computers to evolve behaviors based on empirical data, such as from sensor data or databases...
, adaptation, and intelligence
- Multimedia and graphics
- Search, retrieval, and knowledge management
Knowledge management comprises a range of strategies and practices used in an organization to identify, create, represent, distribute, and enable adoption of insights and experiences...
- Security and cryptography
Cryptography is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of third parties...
- Social computing
Social computing is a general term for an area of computer science that is concerned with the intersection of social behavior and computational systems. It has become an important concept for use in business. It is used in two ways as detailed below....
- Software development
Software Engineering is the application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation, and maintenance of software, and the study of these approaches; that is, the application of engineering to software...
- Systems, architectures, mobility, and networking
- Computational and Systems Biology
One of the stated goals of Microsoft Research is to "support long-term computer science research that is not bound by product cycles." MSR sponsors the
Microsoft Research Fellowship for graduate students and the
New Faculty Fellowship for new faculty members.
Laboratories
There are laboratories around the world in
AachenAachen has historically been a spa town in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. Aachen was a favoured residence of Charlemagne, and the place of coronation of the Kings of Germany. Geographically, Aachen is the westernmost town of Germany, located along its borders with Belgium and the Netherlands, ...
,
BangaloreBengaluru , formerly called Bengaluru is the capital of the Indian state of Karnataka. Bangalore is nicknamed the Garden City and was once called a pensioner's paradise. Located on the Deccan Plateau in the south-eastern part of Karnataka, Bangalore is India's third most populous city and...
,
BeijingBeijing , also known as Peking , is the capital of the People's Republic of China and one of the most populous cities in the world, with a population of 19,612,368 as of 2010. The city is the country's political, cultural, and educational center, and home to the headquarters for most of China's...
,
Cambridge (United Kingdom)The city of Cambridge is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia about north of London. Cambridge is at the heart of the high-technology centre known as Silicon Fen – a play on Silicon Valley and the fens surrounding the...
,
CairoCairo , is the capital of Egypt and the largest city in the Arab world and Africa, and the 16th largest metropolitan area in the world. Nicknamed "The City of a Thousand Minarets" for its preponderance of Islamic architecture, Cairo has long been a centre of the region's political and cultural life...
,
Cambridge (Massachusetts)Cambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, an important center of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Cambridge is home to two of the world's most prominent...
,
Mountain View-Downtown:Mountain View has a pedestrian-friendly downtown centered on Castro Street. The downtown area consists of the seven blocks of Castro Street from the Downtown Mountain View Station transit center in the north to the intersection with El Camino Real in the south...
,
RedmondRedmond is a city in King County, Washington, United States, located east of Seattle. The population was 54,144 at the 2010 census,up from 45,256 in 2000....
, and
San FranciscoSan Francisco , officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the financial, cultural, and transportation center of the San Francisco Bay Area, a region of 7.15 million people which includes San Jose and Oakland...
.
- Microsoft Research Redmond was founded on the Microsoft Redmond campus in 1991 working in buildings 112 and 113 and has now moved to their own facility in building 99. It currently has about 350 researchers and is headed by Peter Lee.
- Microsoft Research Cambridge was founded in 1997 by Roger Needham
Roger Michael Needham, CBE, FRS, FREng was a British computer scientist.-Early life:He attended Doncaster Grammar School for Boys in Doncaster ....
and now numbers over 100 employees. It maintains close ties to the University of CambridgeThe University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...
.
- Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) was founded in Beijing
Beijing , also known as Peking , is the capital of the People's Republic of China and one of the most populous cities in the world, with a population of 19,612,368 as of 2010. The city is the country's political, cultural, and educational center, and home to the headquarters for most of China's...
in November 1998. Advanced Technology CenterATC was founded in 2003. Now, its the largest department of Microsoft China's research and development group. It is initialized as a group of Microsoft Research Asia and then became an independent R&D group of Microsoft. The goal of ATC is to attract software talents in China and develop products...
was initially a group of MSRA until it became an independent R&D group of Microsoft.
- Microsoft Research Silicon Valley, located in Mountain View, California
-Downtown:Mountain View has a pedestrian-friendly downtown centered on Castro Street. The downtown area consists of the seven blocks of Castro Street from the Downtown Mountain View Station transit center in the north to the intersection with El Camino Real in the south...
, was founded in August 2001. In January 2006, the Silicon Valley lab merged with Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center (BARC) in San Francisco.
- Microsoft Israel Innovation Labs (ILabs), building on its original R&D operation in Israel which was founded in 1991 and tapping into Israel's thriving high-tech community, Microsoft inaugurated in April 2006 the Israel Research & Development Center. The Israel R&D Center is situated in two main locations - in Herzliya
Herzliya is a city in the central coast of Israel, at the western part of the Tel Aviv District. It has a population of 87,000 residents. Named after Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, Herzliya covers an area of 26 km²...
, heartland of Israel's high tech industry, and in Matam, HaifaMatam , located at the southern entrance to Haifa, is the largest and oldest dedicated hi-tech parks in Israel...
, home to many graduates of the Technion, Israel's leading technology university.
- Microsoft Research India was established in January 2005 in Bangalore
Bengaluru , formerly called Bengaluru is the capital of the Indian state of Karnataka. Bangalore is nicknamed the Garden City and was once called a pensioner's paradise. Located on the Deccan Plateau in the south-eastern part of Karnataka, Bangalore is India's third most populous city and...
and headed by Dr. P. Anandan.
- Cairo Microsoft Innovation Center (CMIC) was founded in 2006 by Tarek Elabbady and currently headed by Hussein Salama.
- Microsoft Research New England was established in 2008 in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, an important center of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Cambridge is home to two of the world's most prominent...
, adjacent to the MIT campus.
Collaborations
Microsoft Research also collaborates with and jointly operate research centers at the
Barcelona Supercomputing CenterBarcelona Supercomputing Center , also known by the acronym BSC, is a public research center located in Barcelona, Spain. It hosts MareNostrum, Europe's 25th most powerful supercomputer as of November 2009....
,
Brown UniversityBrown University is a private, Ivy League university located in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. Founded in 1764 prior to American independence from the British Empire as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations early in the reign of King George III ,...
,
Carnegie Mellon UniversityCarnegie Mellon University is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States....
, INRIA,
Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyThe Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
, and the
University of TrentoThe University of Trento is an Italian university located in the cities of Trento and Rovereto. It has been able to achieve considerable results in didactics, research and international relations, as shown by Censis University Guide and by the Italian Ministry of...
. There are also nine jointly-operated labs in China and Hong Kong.
Microsoft Research also supports research centers at many other universities.
Research projects
- Microsoft Live Labs
Microsoft Live Labs was a partnership between MSN and Microsoft Research that focused on applied research for Internet products and services at Microsoft. Live Labs was headed by Dr...
- Microsoft Virtual Labs
Microsoft Virtual Labs is a Microsoft web site that provides the ability to test server products and applications such as Windows Server 2008 without having to install anything....
(for Window Server family research)
- Allegiance (computer game)
Allegiance is a multiplayer online game providing a mix of real-time strategy and player piloted space combat gameplay. Initially developed by Microsoft Research, the game was later released under a shared source license in 2004 and is now maintained and developed by volunteers.The story in which...
- Audio Watermarking
- Bartok compiler
Bartok is an optimizing compiler and managed runtime system for Common Intermediate Language , being developed by Microsoft Research. It aims to be efficient enough to be usable for writing operating systems...
- Color Barcodes, to enhance capacity of barcode
A barcode is an optical machine-readable representation of data, which shows data about the object to which it attaches. Originally barcodes represented data by varying the widths and spacings of parallel lines, and may be referred to as linear or 1 dimensional . Later they evolved into rectangles,...
s
- Community Bar, context sensitive content plugin
- Data visualization library
- Digital Green, a farmer-generated, video-based social network service
A social networking service is an online service, platform, or site that focuses on building and reflecting of social networks or social relations among people, who, for example, share interests and/or activities. A social network service consists of a representation of each user , his/her social...
for agricultural extensionAgricultural extension was once known as the application of scientific research and new knowledge to agricultural practices through farmer education...
in rural India
- ESL Assistant, a proofing tool for ESL
ESL is a common abbreviation for English as a Second Language, see English language learning and teaching.ESL may also refer to:-Companies:...
English learners
- GLEE graph
In computer science, a graph is an abstract data structure that is meant to implement the graph and hypergraph concepts from mathematics.A graph data structure consists of a finite set of ordered pairs, called edges or arcs, of certain entities called nodes or vertices...
layout engine
- Gyro, which matured as .NET 2.0
The .NET Framework is a software framework that runs primarily on Microsoft Windows. It includes a large library and supports several programming languages which allows language interoperability...
genericsIn a broad definition, generic programming is a style of computer programming in which algorithms are written in terms of to-be-specified-later types that are then instantiated when needed for specific types provided as parameters...
- Group Shot
Group Shot is a photo combining program developed by Microsoft Research. Its purpose is to solve the problem of individuals in group photographs that might be doing undesirable things such as looking elsewhere, closing their eyes, not smiling, etc. The principle of Group Shot is that multiple group...
- IceCube shared data synchronization engine
- HD View, a viewer that can aid in the display and interaction with very large (Gigapixel) images
- Hotmap, a mashup
In Web development, a mashup is a Web page or application that uses and combines data, presentation or functionality from two or more sources to create new services...
that shows where people have looked at using Virtual Earth
- Image Composite Editor
- Kodu
Kõdu is a village in Käru Parish, Rapla County in western-central Estonia....
- JCluster clustering engine
- MSBNx, Bayesian network
A Bayesian network, Bayes network, belief network or directed acyclic graphical model is a probabilistic graphical model that represents a set of random variables and their conditional dependencies via a directed acyclic graph . For example, a Bayesian network could represent the probabilistic...
toolkit
- MultiMouse, for shared usage of PC
- Penny Black Project
The Penny Black Project is a Microsoft Research project that tries to find effective and practical ways of fighting spam. Because deleting spams consumes a recipient's time, the idea is to make the sender of emails "pay" a certain amount for sending them. The currency or the mode of payment could...
- Scalable Fabric, a Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
task management system
- Search Result Clustering toolbar
In a graphical user interface, on a computer monitor, a toolbar is a GUI widget on which on-screen buttons, icons, menus, or other input or output elements are placed. Toolbars are seen in office suites, graphics editors, and web browsers...
- SecPAL grid
Grid computing is a term referring to the combination of computer resources from multiple administrative domains to reach a common goal. The grid can be thought of as a distributed system with non-interactive workloads that involve a large number of files...
authorization language
- SenseCam
Microsoft's SenseCam is the key image capture tool for the MyLifeBits project, a lifetime storage database. SenseCam was invented by Researcher Lyndsay Williams of Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK in 1999. Early team members were James Srinivasan and Trevor Taylor...
- SenseWeb Project
The concept of the "sensor web" is a type of sensor network that is especially well suited for environmental monitoring.The phrase the "sensor web" is also associated with a sensing system which heavily utilizes the World Wide Web...
- SLAM project
The SLAM project, which was started by Microsoft Research, aimed at verifying some software safety properties using model checking techniques. It is implemented in Ocaml, and has been used to find many bugs in Windows Device Drivers...
- Strider GhostBuster rootkit
A rootkit is software that enables continued privileged access to a computer while actively hiding its presence from administrators by subverting standard operating system functionality or other applications...
detection system
- Strider URL Tracer / Typo-Patrol anti typosquatting
Typosquatting, also called URL hijacking, is a form of cybersquatting, and possibly brandjacking which relies on mistakes such as typographical errors made by Internet users when inputting a website address into a web browser...
system
- TulaFale, language for verifiable description of Web Service
A Web service is a method of communication between two electronic devices over the web.The W3C defines a "Web service" as "a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network". It has an interface described in a machine-processable format...
s
- Virtual Ring Routing driver
- Vault, a safe version of C programming language
- Virtual WiFi, a WiFi
WIFI is a radio station broadcasting a brokered format. Licensed to Florence, New Jersey, USA, the station is currently operated by Florence Broadcasting Partners, LLC.This station was previously owned by Real Life Broadcasting...
adapter virtualizer
- Virtual India
- Web Assistant, a contexual search system
- WWMX, geotagging
Geotagging is the process of adding geographical identification metadata to various media such as a geotagged photograph or video, websites, SMS messages, QR Codes or RSS feeds and is a form of geospatial metadata...
digital imageA digital image is a numeric representation of a two-dimensional image. Depending on whether or not the image resolution is fixed, it may be of vector or raster type...
s
- ZenZui
- Zing model checker
In computer science, model checking refers to the following problem:Given a model of a system, test automatically whether this model meets a given specification....
External links