Another Day in the Antz Farm

Over the weekend, the Microsoft Research website was given a new coat of paint. The new home page features a cleaner information layout and two Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) researchers interviews with Drs. Guo Baining and Zhang Dongmei.

• Dr Guo Baining (Interview: Microsoft Research Asia’s Guo Discusses the Future of Graphics) is a computer graphics researcher and also the Assistant Managing Director of the Beijing lab. In his interview, he shared about his passion for geometrical modeling which led him into computer graphics, his Microsoft Research experience and also discussed Internet Graphics group future research directions.

• Dr Zhang Dongmei (Interivew: Chinese Researcher Leaps into Prominence) is a research manager from the User Interface Group. In her interview, she drew similiarities  in the necessary traits that led to her professional success from a long jump child athletic  and what fuels her passion for research today.

Zheng Yantao (NUS) received the 2008 Fellowship Award from Hon Hsiao-Wuen (MD, MSRA) during the Singapore 21st Century Computing Conference. Dr Su Guaning (NTU) and Prof Tan Eng Chye (NUS) witnessed the ceremony.

This years 4 winners from Singapore and Australia top universities received the Microsoft Research Asia Fellowship award after undergone a highly competitive and stringent process. These students received an open internship invitation to Microsoft Research Asia, a cash award and a commemorative plaque.

Australia

• Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller (Melbourne University)
  Floyd’s invention “Remote Impact” was recently short-listed amongst the top 11 most innovative games at the 2008 European Innovative Games Award 2008.
• Dong Yifei (University of New South Wales)

Singapore

• Huang Yi (Nanyang Technological University)
  Huang Yi is currently undertaking her internship under Steve Lin in MSRA.
• Zheng Yantao (National University of Singapore)
  Yantao is a member of NUS SoC’s Lab for Media Search.

Congratulation to ALL our 2008 MSRA Fellowship winners across Asia Pacific.

Last week in Singapore, Rick Rashid, Microsoft Senior Vice-President (Research) highlighted how computer science theories (and not just computers) are increasing scientists’ arsenal to fight the HIV virus. Below is an extract from the interview “Microsoft takes computer science into fight against HIV“.

Computer science is giving scientists new ways to look at the virus that causes AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome), perspectives that may help efforts to develop an effective vaccine and other medicines, according to the head of Microsoft’s research arm.

“It’s really focused on new ways of thinking about how to describe and analyze systemic activities within a cell,” said Rick Rashid, “Computer science theory, especially computer science languages, can actually be used to describe cell processes, and then the mathematics that we use to analyse programs can also be applied to analyse cell activities because there’s an underlying mathematical relationship,” Rashid said.

“It’s opening up peoples minds to how computers can help them, not just to do their work better, but how the underlying theory and underlying computer science changes the way they look at their problems,” he said.

Since 2005, Microsoft has sought to apply machine-learning techniques, including technology used in spam and antivirus filters, to AIDS research. The goal is to find genetic patterns in HIV that can be used to “train” the human immune system to fight the virus. In particular, Microsoft has looked for ways to track how HIV mutates to evade the human immune system.

“The idea is that because the genome is basically digital, it can be described as a string and analyzed as a string. It opens up an opportunity to think about a lot of problems in that space as data mining or machine-learning problems,” Rashid said.

Organising the 21st Century Computing Conference is the largest event I have ever been personally involved. It is a honour to be part of the team that brought the Asia lab’s flagship conference to Singapore. To commemorate this special event, I asked all the speakers to autograph my conference book.

Last Friday (7 Nov 2008), Microsoft Research Asia held its flagship conference – Computing the 21st Century Conference in Singapore for the very first time. There were more than 1100 researchers, academics, students and industry attendees at this event. Leading academics from Singapore took time from their heavy schedule to be at this event.

RADM(NS) Ronnie Tay, CEO, Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore was the guest of honour at this event. Dr Su Guaning (President, Nanyang Technological University) and Prof Tan Eng Chye (Deputy President & Provost, National University of Singapore) provided the academia opening address.

The University Presidents also witnessed the Microsoft Research Asia Fellowship award ceremony. Huang Yi was the NTU Fellow and is currently undertaking her internship in the Beijing lab. Her supervisor, Assoc Prof Cham Tat-Jen accepted the award on her behalf. NUS Fellowship was awarded to Zheng Yantao.

The conference kicked off with an introduction to MS Research, lead by Rick Rashid, the Senior VP (Research). This is followed by Raj Reddy, Tony Hoare, Hsiao-Wuen Hon and Butler Lampson. It is almost unheard of to have 3 Turing award recipients in 1 stage.

After Butler Lampson’s session, there was a vigorous Q&A session from the floor. 15mins later, Baining Guo, the Conference Chair announced the successful conclusion of the 2008 21st Century Computing Conference in Singapore.

More conference pictures – http://www.flickr.com/photos/bernardoh/sets/72157607566885535/

11 Nov 2008: Click here for the 2008 Singapore 21st Century Computing Conference summary and pictures.

This week, Microsoft Research Asia celebrates our 10th Anniversary with two major celebrations in Beijing and Singapore. The celebration kicks off with the Microsoft Research Asia Faculty Summit, Beijing Computing in the 21st Century (held in Peking University) and Innovation Day in Beijing. This coming Friday, 7 Nov 2008, Singapore will host the second leg of the Computing in the 21st Century Conference (21CCC) at Hall 601, Suntec City Convention Centre.

The Singapore event speakers line-up consist of:

• Raj Reddy (1994 Turing Award recipient),
• Butler Lampson (1992 Turing Award recipient),
• Tony Hoare (1980 Turing Award recipient),
• Rick Rashid (Microsoft Senior Vice-President, Research) and
• Hsiao-Wuen Hon (Managing Director, Microsoft Research Asia)

Computing in the 21st Century is an academic conference held by Microsoft Research Asia supported by the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Nanyang Technological University and the National University of Singapore. This event is targeted at researchers, academics, students and ICT trends/ research/ education policy decision makers.

For close to ten years, the conference has welcomed Turing Award recipients, famous Microsoft scientists and well-known scholars from all over the world to share their vision on the future of computing and exchange ideas with the innovative minds of China and Asia.

The conference Guest of Honour is RADM(NS) Ronnie Tay (CEO, Infocomm Development Authority, Singapore) and the event will also be opened by Dr Su Guaning (President, Nanyang Technological University) and Prof Tan Eng Chye (Deputy President & Provost, National University of Singapore)

Download Event Flyer. To register for the conference, please visit this link.

To find out more about this conference, please visit http://research.microsoft.com/asia/21stcomputing/2008/ENindex1_1.html

Microsoft Research Asia released a book (“Innovation Together” ISBN 978-0-387-87860-7) which contained papers previously published in respected journals to coincide with its 10 Year Anniversary celebration. These papers compiled by the University Relation team is a testimony of Microsoft Research Asia’s collaboration with the Asia Pacific academic community.

Click on the images for expanded view.

 
(I got a mention in the Editor’s forward!)

Last week, Microsoft Research celebrated the opening of it’s newest lab – Microsoft Research New England with a day-long symposium at MIT on the intersection of computer science and the social sciences. You can now review the symposium individual sessions online.

There were some excellent content presented at the event including:

• Computer Science Is Everywhere
  - Erik Demaine, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT
• Understanding Socio-Technical Phenomena in a Web 2.0 Era
  - Danah Boyd, Fellow, Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society
• Designing Experience/The Experience of Design
  - Bill Buxton, Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research
• The Changing Role of Research Universities and Industrial and National Laboratories in the 21st Century
  - Venkatesh Narayanamurti, Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University

Related links:

• Microsoft Research Lab Opens Quietly Next to MIT, Director Says Area’s Intellectual Climate Like “Dry Timber” Ready to Ignite (Xconomy) (With a list of its founding members)
• Doors Open at Microsoft Research New England (Xconomy)

John Warren (my manager) wrote an article about the life as a University Relations (UR) manager on Microsoft Research Asia web site. In the article, he describes about various UR programs, the multi-facets engagements and the challenges this role entails.

Inside the article he discussed about:

• MSRA “theme projects”
• Internal (Public Sector, Legal and Corporate Affairs) and external customers (from research institutions and sometimes government agencies)
• The amount of legal agreement negotiation and review we undertake for each joint research projects (it’s not funny, trust me)
• The reasons why he enjoys his role as a UR manager

If you are interested to get a snap shot of what I do, check out John’s article “A week in the life of a University Relations Manager“

Who says the evolution of web browsers is over? Hot after the launch of Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2, Google released its browser – Chrome. Chrome is now avaliable for download from Singapore (Australia and pretty much everywhere else on the WWW in 40 other languages).

I’ll waiting for the reviews and further iterations of Chrome before I will consider downloading it for review purposes. It is highly encouraging to see the different set of innovative features added to the latest versions of the various web browsers.

“We owe a great debt to many open source projects, and we’re committed to continuing on their path. … and in that spirit, we are making all of our code open source as well. We hope to collaborate with the entire community to help drive the web forward.” (Source: Google Blog, 1 Sep 08)

On a separate note, where is the link to download Chrome source code? Google’s intention is commendable, but where is the follow-up action?

Related link: The 10 features of Google Chrome (Video)