A couple of weeks back (sorry still catching up) I had the great fortune of being invited to visit a MS Research event called TechFest. MS Research hosts this event annually for fellow MS Employees and opens up their doors so they can see what they've been working on, and for the first time in their 15 year history, they allowed those of us without the trademark MS employee blue-badge to attend. The "exhibit hall" was very "science fair" full of academic research geeks and no marketing folks.
MS Product teams have been going through an era of transparency over the past few years and it was nice to see this principle infect MSR. A few quick facts that impressed me about MSR:
- MSR has been grown from 0 to 750 researchers over the past 15 years. This is the equivalent of creating a new Berkeley CompSci Faculty...each of those 15 years.
- MSR has researchers in facilities located in Redmond, Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Cambridge, Beijing and Bangalore.
- MSR runs the largest CompSci Ph.D. internship program. Currently there are 800 Ph.D. interns working worldwide in MSR labs. In the US last summer, MSR had 300 interns in their labs which is impressive considering that the US produces about 1200 CompSci Ph.D.'s annually
There was lots of interesting projects to learn about, some very space-age and cool, others kind of weird and hard to see any use for, and some that you wish were in a shipping product yesterday. Then there are some that caused attendees with certain allergies to get all stuffed up. Check out some of the videos here and here.