User Interface

The User Interface Group at Microsoft Research Asia conducts research in advanced natural user interface technologies. In the era of the information explosion and with the increasingly complex environment of various computing devices, it is critical for the user interface to enable natural human-computer interaction and easy information retrieval. New technologies are emerging that support human-machine communication with features natural to humans. The challenge is to learn to utilize these still imperfect technologies to transcend the benefits of any single one and deliver innovative user interfaces to millions of users.

Interaction Design

The Interaction Design Group focuses on innovative design of user experience and creating hardware technologies for human-computer interaction that exploit not just the natural abilities of users, but also the interaction in a social computing system. The long term goal is to redefine the experience of Internet and PC through user experience and hardware innovation.

Machine Learning

The Machine Learning Group at Microsoft Research Asia is focused on research and innovation in algorithms and technologies to discover knowledge from large-scale data. With the continuing increase of information on the Web and user behavior online, it is critical for service providers to learn and make sense of what information users access and what they do with that information to allow developers to better meet user needs. Our research includes statistical learning, knowledge discovery, pattern recognition, text mining, optimization, game theory, and information retrieval with large-scale and diverse data, such as textual data, graphical data, Web log data and software usage data. Online advertising and other digital marketing areas serve as a test bed to apply innovative new technologies.

Data Intelligence and Tools Group

The Data Intelligence and Tools group at Microsoft Research Asia is dedicated to the research and development of data intelligence and exploration tools for future data-driven and Internet-driven software and services. Software design, development, and maintenance are areas becoming increasingly complex. All are largely dependent on data collected from numerous sources such as system log data, customer feedback, and the Internet. Efficient use of information from these data sources is critical to improving software usability, veliability, performance, and security.

Natural language Computing

The information era has brought us vast amounts of digitized text that are generated, propagated, exchanged, stored, and accessed through the Internet everyday all over the world. The accumulation of this data is making information acquisition increasingly difficult with language becoming a critical obstacle to growth. To overcome these difficulties, the Natural Language Computing (NLC) Group is focusing its efforts on a variety of research topics including multi-language text analysis, machine translation, cross language information retrieval, and question answering. Over the years, the group has made significant contributions to Microsoft products including a Japanese and Chinese Input Method Editor (IME), English writing assistant for Office 2007, Chinese couplet game for Windows Live, Chinese word breaker, pinyin search and search speller for the MSN search engine, text mining for SQL Servers and Sharepoint, and meta data extraction for MSN. Our research achievements have been published at most prestigious NLP conferences including 19 papers at ACL and 7 papers at SIGIR, from 2000-2006.

Speech

Using speech to communicate continues to be the most natural and the easiest way to exchange ideas and thoughts. However, it becomes a new game when we need to communicate with machines like computers. At MSR Asia, the Speech Group is working to make the speech chain smooth and robust when there is a machine inside the chain. We work to develop spoken language technologies, enable human-computer voice interaction, and enrich human-to-human voice communications.

The group's current focus includes automatic speech recognition to enable computers to facilitate access to data, help create content, and perform tasks; speech synthesis to enable computers to speak with a human-sounding voice, to respond and provide information, and to read; spoken-document retrieval and processing to enrich communication between people, like converting voice-mail into text; signal processing to improve the conditioning of signals, change speech signal parameters like pitch, speaking rate, voice characteristics seamlessly. Extension of statistical learning algorithms developed in speech to other pattern recognition applications like hand-written math equations and East-Asian character recognition is pursued jointly with peer groups.

Microsoft adLab Beijing

The Microsoft adLab Beijing is a joint effort between Microsoft adCenter and Microsoft Research to establish a state-of-the-art lab to research and incubate advanced technologies for Microsoft adCenter.