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The eScience Initiative in Depth
The External Research and Programs team of Microsoft Research
builds links between the academic research community and Microsoft
in strategically important areas. Examples include computing in
emerging economies, improving education using technology and
widening the appeal of computer science training. In some cases,
Microsoft researchers or product teams develop toolkits of use to
the academic research community and we work to ensure that academics
can use them to advance their research while providing insights into
how we might improve our products. In addition, we choose to invest
in areas of research where we see potential to change the world.
Robotics, sensor networks and pen computing are some examples of our
current areas of interest.
eScience is one of the areas where computing has the potential to change the world. Simply put, it is no longer possible to do science without doing computing. Computers are used to generate,
collect, filter, analyze and visualize scientific data in increasing
quantities and the analytical methods of computing are increasingly
being applied in domains of research far removed from computer
science. The increasingly sophisticated methods of experimentation
and analysis made possible by computing have meant that the nature
of science itself is now changing — the questions we ask and the
answers we obtain no longer need to be comprehensible to the unaided
human mind.
Microsoft is interested in this broad area because of the lessons
we can learn. There are many unsolved challenges in eScience
— how
to manage ambiguity and inaccuracy in data, how to deal with issues
of ethics, confidentiality and the social implications of scientific
advance; how to make systems that can extract meaning from vast
amounts of data and how to make these powerful tools reliable,
flexible and accessible to the communities they serve. These may be
the challenges of cutting-edge science today, but experience has
shown us that the challenges faced by researchers today frequently
become the challenges of business tomorrow and the challenges of us
all in the future. By helping to identify and meet these challenges
today, Microsoft can contribute to advancing the state of the art
while learning valuable lessons which will influence future
generations of software products.
eScience is immensely rich in computational challenges; we work
to identify emerging areas of research in the academic community
through conferences which focus on common computational challenges
across many disciplines and smaller events which focus on challenges
specific to a research domain. We periodically solicit proposals
from the academic community in an effort to understand a specific
problem area and explore potential areas where Microsoft may be able
to make a contribution. Our specific interests change over time, but
current areas of interest include:
- Assisted cognition
- Social networks
- Capture of large-scale sensor data
- Building tools for bioinformatics
- Synthetic biology
- Biomedical informatics
- Mobile devices and healthcare
- Personalized medicine
- Cross-disciplinary research and
education
We are always interested in new areas which might have strategic
value to Microsoft or where Microsoft tools and technologies might
be able to advance the state of the art.
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