Microsoft Research Asia

Microsoft Research Asia, Microsoft’s fundamental research arm in the Asia Pacific region, was founded on November 5, 1998. In 2004, Technology Review named Microsoft Research Asia “the hottest computer lab in the world”.^[1]

Over its ten-year history, Microsoft Research Asia has grown into an organization that employs over 350 researchers and engineers, has used more than 2,500 interns, has awarded over 230 Microsoft fellowships, has published over 1,500 papers for top international journals and conferences, and has achieved many technological breakthroughs.^[2]

Technologies from Microsoft Research Asia have had an influence not only within Microsoft but also on the broader community. Over 200 innovations from the lab have been transferred to Microsoft products, including Office XP, Office System 2003, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows XP Media Center Edition, Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, Xbox, MSN, Windows Live, Windows Vista and Office 2007. In addition, technologies from the lab have been adopted by international standards bodies such as MPEG4 (error-resilient video transmission), IETF (TCP/IP header compression), and ITU/ISO (video-compression technology).

Many of these successes are the result of an ambitious research agenda that boils down to five areas central to Microsoft’s long-term vision and strategy:

• Natural User Interfaces enable users to interact with a computer using speech, gestures, and expressions.

• Next-generation multimedia allows people to search for and to be immersed in interactive online shopping, education, meeting, and entertainment activities.

• Data-Intensive Computing explores the new infrastructures, algorithms. Tools, and applications to collect, analyze, and mine results for data-intensive business in both the consumer and enterprise sectors.

• Search and Online Ads take Web search and online advertising to the next level by applying data-mining, machine-learning, and knowledge-discovery techniques to information analysis, organization, retrieval, and visualization.

• Computer Science Fundamental includes areas such as theoretical computer science (theory), systems, networking, and machine learning that will have an impact on multiple applications and products.

University Relations

MRA holds strong corporation with many universities in Asia countries, mainly through founding Joint Laboratories. The University Relations (UR) program at Microsoft Research Asia seeks broad engagement with the academic community and governments across the Asia-Pacific region to foster innovative research, advanced education, and to promote academic collaboration.

The UR team has forged strong relations with universities and institutions to organize various programs and events, including theme-based research projects, joint labs, international conferences, faculty summits, visiting researcher programs, and on-campus lectures and courses. We also offer an internship program and a fellowship program. Since 1998, UR has sponsored more than 600 events in some 10 countries and regions that have attracted 300,000 participants. UR has partnered with nearly 100 universities and institutes.

In recent years, UR has launched a series of initiatives to develop strategic relations with governments and academia across the region. An important component of these new initiatives is an emphasis on regional programs that extends collaboration with universities in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore. With a greater focus on local research interests and education, Microsoft Research Asia is looking ahead to making the University Relations program as extensive and diverse as the academic community.

See also

It is one of the six Microsoft Research labs, see Microsoft Research.

References

1. ^ Huang, Gregory T. (June 2004). "The World's Hottest Computer Lab". MIT Technology Review. MIT. http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/13616/. Retrieved 2010-08-05. 
2. ^ "Microsoft Research Asia". http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/beijing/events/innovationday_2008/msrasia.aspx.