Microsoft Research (MSR) In 1991, under the direction of Nathan Myhrvold, Microsoft founded its own research division, Microsoft Research (http://research.microsoft.com). The idea was that Microsoft's products could only benefit from research done by the brightest minds in the country. So that is what Microsoft has been assembling for the past thirteen years. Today, MSR employs over seven hundred people in more than fifty areas, such as data mining, machine learning, natural language processing, and speech recognition. Although the main research facility is located in Redmond, Washington, there are adjunct facilities located in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Beijing, and Cambridge, England. MSR researchers have received many prestigious honors, including the Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology and the Turing Award of the Association for Computing Machinery. Many of the researchers have been recruited from top universities and maintain their academic ties by routinely publishing papers for peer review. MSR is able to attract such top researchers by offering them something that not every company can freedom to work on what they want, while still having access to abundant resources. To maintain the close connection between research and product development, MSR sponsors an annual event to demonstrate the latest advances to Microsoft developers a geek fest appropriately named "TechFest." Many of the technologies that began at MSR have made their way into current Microsoft products. Analysis Services and the Speech Application SDK are both direct results of this research. When describing the goals of MSR, Bill Gates, chairman and chief software architect at Microsoft, stated: "We're focusing more on research than ever. We're building the technology that will enable computers to see, listen, speak and learn so people can interact with them as naturally as they interact with other people." |