Communication and Collaboration
Enabling people to reach each other easily regardless of network or device.

Computational Sciences

Providing computational support to unravel the mysteries of the universe. 

Health and Well-Being
Leading innovation in assisted cognition, bioinformatics, synthetic biology and biomedicine.

Theory
Exploring game theory, pricing algorithms, market equilibriums, statistical database privacy and quantum computing. 

Machine Learning
Building software that automatically learns from data to create more advanced, intelligent computer systems.

Graphics and Multimedia
Addressing the geometric compression challenges of displaying complex models.

Security and Privacy
Focusing on threat analysis, database privacy and creating more secure mobile devices.

Human-Computer Interaction
Advancing the way users interact with computing devices.

Education
Building partnerships with academia to advance computer science and education.

Economics

Addressing the interdependency between computer science and economics.

Information Retrieval and Management
Exploring classification technologies and developing systems that enrich the user experience.

Software Development

Making developers more productive and trustworthy.

Computer Systems and Networking
Improving efficiency in the deployment, operation management and security of distributed applications.

Gaming
Identifying and developing innovative curricula to engage aspiring programmers and software engineers.

Hardware and Devices
Building the hardware that will support the next generation of software.

Social Science
Exploring how people use computers to enhance their daily lives.

Computational Linguistics
Focusing on machine translation, multilingual systems and natural-language processing.

Other Areas of Research
Microsoft Research pursues projects in a wide variety of directions, not all of which fall neatly into a particular discipline, but remain critical to advancing the state of the art in computer science and related fields.