Microsoft External Research

Enabling Breakthrough Research, Fueling Innovation, Building the Future of Technology

Backgrounder

Computing plays a critical role in advancing research — be it in the general sciences, engineering, medicine or computer science. The benefits are undeniable.

Microsoft Research believes that collaboration between the public and private sectors, combined with the power of computing, can help researchers as they work to solve the most urgent challenges in medicine, environmental science, engineering, education and many other fields. That worldwide collaborative research is driven by Microsoft External Research, an arm of the larger Microsoft Research organization, and is designed to complement and augment the work pursued by Microsoft Corp.’s more than 800 researchers.

In partnership with distinguished scientists, researchers, academics and educators, Microsoft External Research is building technologies and services that have the potential to strengthen and accelerate advances in important areas of research. The work is aimed at addressing problems in global health, food and water supplies, natural disasters, and climate research. The goal: to provide scientists, engineers and researchers with technology solutions that enable more time on discovery and less time on data handling and systems management.

Microsoft External Research has a history of supporting groundbreaking research and being an innovation catalyst throughout the world. It has been a part of a number of highly successful, cutting-edge collaborative projects over the years. In fact, in fiscal year 2008, Microsoft External Research supported approximately 400 research projects worldwide. Collaborative research has resulted in projects that run the gamut from the seamless exploration of the universe with the new WorldWide Telescope to the ongoing pursuit of an HIV/AIDS vaccine, among other projects.

Additional research projects include using mass spectrometry in an effort to help save patients, the use of intelligent systems for assisted cognition, building the next generation of computational tools that will enhance the ability of those in the life sciences to understand complex biological systems and help combat diseases, and the use of technology to help enrich the teaching of computer science. Meanwhile, the creation of an open, extensible online platform is facilitating the exchange and sharing of ideas within the research community in Asia.

Microsoft External Research supports long-term initiatives to enhance teaching and learning through the creative use of technologies such as robotics, Tablet PCs, collaborative technologies and gaming development in the curriculum to illustrate core concepts and principles of computer science. The team promotes research in these areas and more, working with prominent faculty members to develop curricula — much of it freely available to the worldwide academic community — designed to make computing education more compelling and relevant.

Partnering to Support Groundbreaking Research

Microsoft External Research is focused on accelerating research and discovery in four areas of research: Health and Well-Being; Earth, Energy and Environment; Education and Scholarly Communications; and Computer Science.

Underpinning Microsoft External Research’s four concentration areas is its commitment to support those fields with the development of advanced technologies and services. Scientists need tools and services to perform complex data processing tasks, and to interoperate in a global IT infrastructure. At the core of engineering and research development is close collaboration across the Microsoft Research global labs located in Redmond, Wash.; Bangalore, India; Beijing, China; Cambridge, England; Cambridge, Mass.; and Silicon Valley, Calif., as well as collaboration with Microsoft’s product teams.

An overarching tenet of the Microsoft External Research engagement model is tailoring programs to address geographically specific research goals. Microsoft External Research works to identify regional trends and challenges in technology and to establish deep relations with academic and governmental research communities worldwide to help build capacity, visibility, and quality of academic research.

One tangible result is the Latin American and Caribbean Collaborative ICT Research Federation. It is designed to stimulate Latin American academic collaborative research in information and communication technologies as an enabler of economic and social development. Microsoft Research provides universities in the region with a collaborative environment to promote cross-country research and education solutions.

Additional efforts include the creation of international joint research institutes and global academic summits. Workshops and symposiums across the globe bring together the leaders of academic and scientific communities, enabling ongoing dialogue and direct collaboration with Microsoft researchers.

To cultivate the next generation of computer science leaders and to recognize the brightest minds in computing research fields, Microsoft Research offers sponsorships and internships to Ph.D. students and early-career faculty from all around the world.

Microsoft External Research has four areas of focus:

• Health and Well-Being
  Researchers in this research area explore computing technology that can empower people to make better choices about their health, thereby saving lives. With support from Microsoft External Research, researchers are investigating the computational challenges of genomewide studies, the use of intelligent systems for assisted cognition, and technologies needed to help predict and prevent adverse drug responses in underserved communities around the world.
  
  Microsoft External Research is applying cutting-edge database technology, Web services, high-performance computing, bioinformatics, Microsoft .NET and other technologies to areas such as early cancer detection. In addition, biomedical researchers are using these technologies in an attempt to discover the right set of genetic components for an HIV/AIDS vaccine.
  
  Mobile devices and sensor applications support preventive medicine. Carnegie Mellon University has received support from Microsoft External Research to develop a speech-based telephone information system using a Microsoft Speech Server 2007 beta to provide crucial medical information to low-literacy users in underserved communities. It is being tested in rural Pakistan.
• Earth, Energy and Environment
  Research in this area is aimed at improving our understanding of the world around us. As the sciences become more data-intensive, computational technologies are helping to transform scientific research. Tools for gathering, mining, analyzing and visualizing data are especially important — often yielding dramatic gains in productivity. By providing researchers and scientists with the tools they need to accelerate discoveries, Microsoft External Research helps address challenges facing fields such as energy efficiency and conservation, weather study and prediction, air pollution and quality, climate change, and hydrology.
  
  Work being done with Johns Hopkins University’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences uses wireless sensor networks to modernize soil ecology, providing detailed measurements that were previously impossible to achieve.
  
  Microsoft External Research is working with the global community, countering carbon emissions, providing a SharePoint site to help researchers access shared synthesis data. In addition, the company has created a program called Trident as a tool for scientific workflows in oceanographic research.
  
  Moreover, the Microsoft-Queensland University of Technology Centre for eResearch, located in Brisbane, Australia, is exploring urban planning, water management and climate change by leveraging Microsoft External Research tools to help enable their research.
• Education and Scholarly Communications
  The academic community uses technology daily to conduct research and to educate students around the world. Authoring, analyzing, publishing, discovering and preserving data are key components of academic work, and computing technology plays a fundamental role at each step. Microsoft External Research takes seriously the need to provide this community with the highest-quality computing technologies, and is developing the tools and software solutions to address the entire research life cycle. Microsoft External Research’s new research output repository, uses Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE), SWORD and other community protocols to provide a platform for building services and tools for creating papers, videos and other output repositories atop Microsoft technologies. The e-Journal Publishing Service is available to simplify self-publishing of workshop and conference proceedings and small journals. It has been initially designed with a focus on biology and medicine. In partnership with the British Library, the Research Information Center is designed to simplify informational searches and management of papers, references and other research objects.
  
  Working closely with educational researchers, Microsoft External Research is also strengthening education in computer science and engineering. The Microsoft Center for Research on Pen-Centric Computing at Brown University is focused on new ways of combining the pen and the computer, not only to improve the educational process, but to impact our working methods and our culture. In addition, the Center for Collaborative Technologies at the University of Washington is advancing the collaboration technology for the ConferenceXP platform with the goal of establishing it as a widely used collaborative tool for distance learning and research support. The Institute for Personal Robots in Education at the Georgia Institute of Technology focuses on using easy-to-use robotics technology to revitalize the undergraduate computer science curriculum — specifically for introductory courses where the greatest rate of student attrition occurs.
  
  Microsoft External Research and academics also are exploring ways to use courses inspired by computer games to attract and retain a new generation of computer scientists. Six academic researchers shared funding and had access to game-related resources available from Microsoft, XNA, Microsoft Game Studios and “Flight Simulator X” through the Gaming in Computer Science RFP. Other programs include an annual Microsoft Academic Days Conference on Game Development in Computer Science Education, jointly sponsored by Electronic Arts Inc.
• Computer Science
  Computer science research explores new models for information and interactions, examining the ways people use technology in their daily lives. It explores groundbreaking research that is high-impact and disruptive, focusing on the pursuit of the hottest new computing technologies and advancing the state of the art in computer and computational sciences.
  
  As part of this work, Microsoft External Research partnered with Intel Corporation to launch two Universal Parallel Computing Research Centers — at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign — aimed at accelerating developments in mainstream parallel computing for consumers and businesses. As part of Microsoft External Research’s Beyond Search initiative, 20 academic researchers are able to leverage real-world search and ad data sets, a software development kit, and funding to explore the needs of users and ways of making the Web more meaningful.
  
  There is a broad diversity among worldwide academics, and Microsoft External Research is privileged to work with many of them. Moreover, Microsoft External Research hopes the resulting research will help inspire and motivate the next generation of computer scientists.
  
  Computing, education and science have an ever-increasing need for integrated information technologies to collect, process and analyze complex data. The next wave of discovery and innovation will be based on powerful computation, data mining, knowledge management, and new, exciting data-sharing technologies.

Microsoft External Research takes pride in being part of the future of innovation. This arm of Microsoft Research will continue to partner actively on leading-edge research to help with the world’s most severe problems, continually exploring the possibilities for the future of computing.

For more information about Microsoft External Research collaborations, visit http://research.microsoft.com/default.aspx and http://www.microsoft.com/science.