The best minds in the right places

The Best Minds in the Right Places
Microsoft Research has expanded over the years to eight locations worldwide and a number of collaborative projects that bring together the best minds in computer science to advance a research agenda based on their unique talents and interests:

Microsoft Research’s original lab at the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Wash., now houses more than 300 researchers and staff working across every discipline in computer science. The lab also includes product-management and technology-transfer teams that ensure that the innovation and ingenuity from each worldwide lab is reflected in the company’s products and services.

Microsoft Research Cambridge was established in 1997 with three researchers. The city of Cambridge, England, was the clear choice for the location of Microsoft’s first overseas lab, because of its world-renowned reputation and rich history as a center of learning together with its more recent fame as the heart of “Silicon Fen”. Today, more than 100 researchers from throughout Europe work here on programming languages, machine learning, computer vision, humancomputer interaction, operating systems, networking, and computational science.

Microsoft Research Asia, Microsoft’s fundamental research arm in the Asia Pacific region, conducts curiosity-driven research in areas such as natural user interfaces, next-generation multimedia, dataintensive computing and search and online ads. By attracting the best talent from Asia and the world, Microsoft Research Asia, created in 1998, has grown into a world-class research lab with over 250 researchers and developers.

Established in 2001 on the Microsoft campus in Mountain View, Calif., Microsoft Research Silicon Valley employs more than 70 researchers who focus on fields that drive the state of the art in distributed computing, including privacy, security, protocols, fault tolerance, large-scale systems, the

Web, concurrency, computer architecture, and related theory.

Since 2005, Microsoft Research India has been engaged in cutting-edge basic and applied research in algorithms, cryptography, systems, natural language processing, software engineering and the role of technology in socio-economic development. In addition to innovating and contributing key technologies to Microsoft products, the lab collaborates with a wide range of scientific and academic institutions to advance the state of the art in computing research in India.

Opened in 2008, Microsoft Research New England is pursuing new, interdisciplinary areas of research that bring together computer scientists and social scientists to understand, model, and enable the computing and online experiences of the future. The group’s work includes applied projects in areas as diverse as economics, social media, and health care, as well as theoretical projects in areas such as mathematics and cryptography. Additionally, the lab’s proximity to MIT, Harvard and other institutions creates further opportunities for collaboration within and outside the field of computer science.

Based in Redmond, the eXtreme Computing Group is tasked to go beyond incremental innovation to advance the state of the art in computing. Collaborating cross-company to solve the most challenging, strategic problems, the team accomplishes this goal through basic and intentional research, advanced prototyping and industry partnerships. The eXtreme Computing Group works to accelerate change in hardware, systems, platforms and applications.