Microsoft Research (MSR) is the research subsidiary of
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...
. It was created in 1991 by
Richard Rashid
Richard Farris Rashid is the founder of Microsoft Research, which he created in 1991. Between 1991 and 2013, as its chief research officer and director, he oversaw the worldwide operations for Microsoft Research which grew to encompass more than ...
,
Bill Gates
William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American business magnate and philanthropist. He is a co-founder of Microsoft, along with his late childhood friend Paul Allen. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions ...
and
Nathan Myhrvold
Nathan Paul Myhrvold (born August 3, 1959), formerly Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft, is co-founder of Intellectual Ventures and the principal author of ''Modernist Cuisine'' and its successor books. Myhrvold was listed as co-inventor o ...
with the intent to advance state-of-the-art computing and solve difficult world problems through technological innovation in collaboration with academic, government, and industry researchers. The Microsoft Research team has more than 1,000 computer scientists, physicists, engineers, and mathematicians, including
Turing Award
The ACM A. M. Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to computer science. It is generally recognized as the highest distinction in compu ...
winners,
Fields Medal
The Fields Medal is a prize awarded to two, three, or four mathematicians under 40 years of age at the International Congress of the International Mathematical Union (IMU), a meeting that takes place every four years. The name of the award ho ...
winners,
MacArthur Fellow
The MacArthur Fellows Program, also known as the MacArthur Fellowship and commonly but unofficially known as the "Genius Grant", is a prize awarded annually by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation typically to between 20 and 30 ind ...
s, and
Dijkstra Prize
The Edsger W. Dijkstra Paper Prize in Distributed Computing is given for outstanding papers on the principles of distributed computing, whose significance and impact on the theory and/or practice of distributed computing has been evident for at lea ...
winners.
Between 2010 and 2018, 154,000 AI patents were filed worldwide, with Microsoft having by far the largest percentage of those patents, at 20%.
[Louis Columbus, January 6, 201]
Microsoft Leads The AI Patent Race Going Into 2019
''Forbes
''Forbes'' () is an American business magazine owned by Integrated Whale Media Investments and the Forbes family. Published eight times a year, it features articles on finance, industry, investing, and marketing topics. ''Forbes'' also re ...
'' According to estimates in trade publications, Microsoft spent about $6 billion annually in research initiatives from 2002-2010 and has spent from $10–14 billion annually since 2010.
Microsoft Research has made significant advances in the field of AI which it has infused in its products including
Kinect
Kinect is a line of motion sensing input devices produced by Microsoft and first released in 2010. The devices generally contain RGB cameras, and infrared projectors and detectors that map depth through either structured light or time of flig ...
,
Bing
Bing most often refers to:
* Bing Crosby (1903–1977), American singer
* Microsoft Bing, a web search engine
Bing may also refer to:
Food and drink
* Bing (bread), a Chinese flatbread
* Bing (soft drink), a UK brand
* Bing cherry, a variety ...
,
Holo Lens,
Cortana,
Microsoft Translator
Microsoft Translator is a multilingual machine translation cloud service provided by Microsoft. Microsoft Translator is a part of Microsoft Cognitive Services and integrated across multiple consumer, developer, and enterprise products; including B ...
,
Linkedin
LinkedIn () is an American business and employment-oriented online service that operates via websites and mobile apps. Launched on May 5, 2003, the platform is primarily used for professional networking and career development, and allows job se ...
,
Havok and
Dynamics to provide its customers with more benefits and better service.
The mission statement of MSR is:
# Expand the state of the art in each of the areas in which we do research
# Rapidly transfer innovative technologies into Microsoft products
# Ensure that Microsoft products have a future
Key people
Microsoft Research includes the core Microsoft Research labs and Microsoft Research AI, Microsoft Research NExT (for New Experiences and Technologies), and other incubation efforts all directed by corporate vice president
Peter Lee.
Research areas
Microsoft research is categorized into the following broad areas:
Microsoft Research sponsors the ''Microsoft Research Fellowship'' for graduate students.
Research laboratories
Microsoft has research labs around the world including the following non-exhaustive list:
![Microsoft_Bangalore](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ce/Microsoft_Bangalore.jpg)
* Microsoft Research Redmond was founded on the Microsoft Redmond campus in 1991. It has about 350 researchers and is headed by Donald Kossmann. The bulk of research on the Redmond, Washington campus focuses on areas such as theory, artificial intelligence, machine learning, systems and networking, security, privacy, HCI, and wearable technologies.
* Microsoft Research Cambridge was founded in the United Kingdom in 1997 by
Roger Needham
Roger Michael Needham (9 February 1935 – 1 March 2003) was a British computer scientist.
Early life and education
Needham was born in Birmingham, England, the only child of Phyllis Mary, ''née'' Baker (''c''.1904–1976) and Leonard Wil ...
and is headed by
Christopher Bishop
Christopher Michael Bishop (born 7 April 1959) is the Laboratory Director at Microsoft Research, Microsoft Research Cambridge, Honorary Professor of Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh and a Fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge. Bis ...
. Antony Rowstron and
Abigail Sellen
Abigail Jane Sellen is a Canadian cognitive scientist, industrial engineer, and computer scientist who works for Microsoft Research in Cambridge. She is also an honorary professor at the University of Nottingham and University College London.
...
are Deputy Directors. The lab conducts research on topics including machine learning, security and information retrieval, and maintains close ties to the University of Cambridge and the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory.
* Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) was founded in Beijing in November 1998. It has expanded rapidly and now has more than 300 researchers and developers, along with approximately 300 visiting scientists and students (including its new satellite office in Shanghai). Its focus includes natural user interfaces, multimedia, data-intensive computing, search and online advertising, NLP, and computer science fundamentals.
* Microsoft Research India is sited in
Bengaluru
Bangalore (), officially Bengaluru (), is the capital and largest city of the Indian state of Karnataka. It has a population of more than and a metropolitan population of around , making it the third most populous city and fifth most ...
(Bangalore) and is headed by Sriram Rajamani.
* Microsoft Research Station Q, on the campus of the
University of California, Santa Barbara
The University of California, Santa Barbara (UC Santa Barbara or UCSB) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Santa Barbara County, California, Santa Barbara, California with 23,196 undergraduate ...
, was founded in 2005. Its collaborators explore theoretical and experimental approaches to creating the quantum analog of the traditional bit—the qubit. The group is led by
Michael Freedman
Michael Hartley Freedman (born April 21, 1951) is an American mathematician, at Microsoft Station Q, a research group at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 1986, he was awarded a Fields Medal for his work on the 4-dimensional gen ...
.
* Microsoft Research New England was established in 2008 in Cambridge, Massachusetts adjacent to the MIT campus by
Jennifer Chayes
Jennifer Tour Chayes is Associate Provost of the Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society and Dean of the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining Berkeley, she was a Technical Fellow and Managing Dir ...
who also managed the New York and Montreal labs. The lab is now managed by
Susan Dumais
Susan Dumais (born August 11, 1953) is an American computer scientist who is a leader in the field of information retrieval, and has been a significant contributor to Microsoft's search technologies.
According to Mary Jane Irwin, who heads the At ...
. The lab collaborates with the broader research community and pursues interdisciplinary research that brings together computer scientists and social scientists to develop future applications.
* Microsoft Research New York City was established on May 3, 2012. Susan Dumais serves as Managing Director of this location as well as the New England and Montreal labs. The lab collaborates with academia and other Microsoft Research labs in computational and behavioral social sciences, computational economics and prediction markets, machine learning, and information retrieval.
* Microsoft Research Montreal was established after the acquisition of
Maluuba by Microsoft in 2017. Susan Dumais serves as Managing Director of this location as well as the New England and New York City labs. The lab collaborates with academia and other Microsoft Research labs in natural language processing (specifically machine reading comprehension), deep learning and reinforcement learning.
Former research laboratories
* Microsoft Research Silicon Valley, located in
Mountain View, California
Mountain View is a city in Santa Clara County, California, United States. Named for its views of the Santa Cruz Mountains, it has a population of 82,376.
Mountain View was integral to the early history and growth of Silicon Valley, and is the ...
, was founded in August 2001 and closed in September 2014. Silicon Valley research focused on
distributed computing
A distributed system is a system whose components are located on different computer network, networked computers, which communicate and coordinate their actions by message passing, passing messages to one another from any system. Distributed com ...
and included security and privacy, protocols,
fault-tolerance
Fault tolerance is the property that enables a system to continue operating properly in the event of the failure of one or more faults within some of its components. If its operating quality decreases at all, the decrease is proportional to the ...
, large-scale systems,
concurrency
Concurrent means happening at the same time. Concurrency, concurrent, or concurrence may refer to:
Law
* Concurrence, in jurisprudence, the need to prove both ''actus reus'' and ''mens rea''
* Concurring opinion (also called a "concurrence"), a ...
,
computer architecture
In computer engineering, computer architecture is a description of the structure of a computer system made from component parts. It can sometimes be a high-level description that ignores details of the implementation. At a more detailed level, t ...
,
Internet search
A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...
and services, and related theory.
Collaborations
Microsoft Research invests in multi-year collaborative joint research with academic institutions at
Barcelona Supercomputing Center
The Barcelona Supercomputing Center ( es, Centro Nacional de Supercomputación) is a public research center located in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. It hosts MareNostrum, a 13.7 Petaflops, Intel Xeon Platinum-based supercomputer, which also include ...
,
INRIA
The National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology (Inria) () is a French national research institution focusing on computer science and applied mathematics.
It was created under the name ''Institut de recherche en informatiq ...
,
Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...
,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...
, São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), the Microsoft Research Centre for Social NUI and others.
See also
*
Microsoft Award
*
Microsoft Research Maps Microsoft Research Maps (MSR Maps) was a free online repository of public domain aerial imagery and topographic maps provided by the United States Geological Survey (USGS). The site was a collaboration between Microsoft Research (MSR), Bing Maps, a ...
References
External links
*
The Microsoft Research BlogMicrosoft Developing Project(news archive from
Softpedia
Softpedia is a software and tech news website based in Romania. It indexes, reviews and hosts various downloadable software and reports news on technology and science topics.
Website
Softpedia hosts reviews written by its staff—each review in ...
)
Microsoft Research Asialocal Chinese website
{{authority control
1991 establishments in the United States
Computer science research organizations
Human–computer interaction researchers
Organizations established in 1991
Research and development organizations
Research institutes in Washington (state)