On August 12, 2008 Microsoft celebrates 10th anniversary of Microsoft Research Asia. Bill Gates also present in Hong Kong to celebrate this occasion. In past 10 years Microsoft Research Asia grown from dozen of people to an organization. Microsoft Research Asia employee more then 350 researchers and engineers, has welcomed more than 2,500 interns, has awarded over 250 Microsoft fellowships, has published over 1,500 papers for top international journals and conferences, and has achieved many technological breakthroughs.
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 and our company’s latest releases ¨C 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).
Microsoft Research Asia focuses on following five research areas
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Natural User Interfaces enable users to interact with a computer using speech, gestures, and expressions.
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Next-generation Multimedia allows people to search for and to be immersed in interactive online shopping, education, meeting, and entertainment activities.
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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.
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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.
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Fundamental Computer Science includes areas such as theoretical computer science (theory), systems, networking, and machine learning that will have an impact on multiple applications and products.
Bill Gates Said on the Microsoft Research Website
When I visited China in 1997," Gates recalled recently, "I was deeply impressed by the talent, the enthusiasm, and the creativity of the Chinese university students I met. That trip played a pivotal role in our decision to establish a fundamental research lab in Beijing in 1998. The research lab in Beijing exceeded even my own high expectation. by making significant contributions to our technical knowledge and products within its first few years of existence. As a result, we expanded the lab to include the top researchers from the entire Asia Pacific region, and it is now known as Microsoft Research Asia. Our largest research lab outside of the United States, it has achieved remarkable things in the past 10 years
