Microsoft has research labs in the USA, UK, China and India, but its research lab in Zhongguancun, the heart of Beijing’s IT industry, is the largest of all, boasting 300 researchers.

The Beijing lab also opens its doors to 200-300 interns each year, most of them graduate students. Mizuki Oka (27), a 3rd year Computer Science doctoral course student at the University of Tsukuba Graduate School of Systems and Information Engineering is one such intern, joining the lab for a six-month spell from April. She is enjoying working in a section that conducts research at the cutting edge of computer graphics, saying that “the researchers and Chinese interns are all really topnotch people, and discussing the field with them is really stimulating.”

Oka thought of applying for a Beijing internship after reading a paper by her mentor at the lab, project leader Ying-Qing Xu (47), on technology for the harmonious rendering of color in computer graphics. She was struck by the fact that computer science research enabled the exploration of something as aesthetic as color, and in this sense, her coming to Beijing was incidental, but she says that she also felt that it was probably because China was still developing that it offered the opportunity for such study.

Oka is highly rated at the Microsoft Research Asia Lab, being chosen as one of the ten “Best Interns”, an honor that also won her the chance to attend a party at Bill Gates’ Seattle home. She is currently studying technologies for using graphic data as passwords. “In the research world, your connections can open doors to success,” Oka says with her sights on the future. “I want to keep up the ties I’ve made here and build on them when I get back to Japan.”