The list of great European scientists extends back to ancient
Greece and such seminal figures as Pythagoras, Aristotle, and
Archimedes. As the Renaissance began to coalesce, the drumbeat of
innovation intensified, and the equal of any of the founding
fathers of modern-day science was Isaac Newton.
Newton first won acclaim in the 17th century while at the
University of Cambridge, and his pioneering scientific spirit
continues to flourish at that institution to this day, including
the adjacent Roger Needham Building, the headquarters of
Microsoft Research Cambridge.
In the 14 years since the founding of that facility by the late
Roger Needham, it has become known for its intensive, dedicated
efforts to address the challenges that face society and for the
assistance it provides toward advancing the state of the art in
European computer science.
From April 13 to 15, such efforts will take center stage during
the inaugural
Software Summit, organized by Microsoft Research at the
Microsoft Le Campus in Issy-les-Moulineaux, just southwest of
central Paris.
Tony
Hey, corporate vice president of
Microsoft Research Connections, and Andrew
Herbert, chairman of Microsoft Research EMEA, will highlight
some of the themes and issues in computer science today
Andrew HerbertMicrosoft chose to establish its first research lab outside of
the USA in Europe due to the world-class scientific and engineering
expertise of the region, Herbert says. This commitment has clearly
proved successful, with many technological advances as a result.
Collaborating with and nurturing this talent is a priority for
Microsoft Research, and hosting our inaugural Software Summit in
Europe is an important step in our continued investment.
The event will gather more than 200 European thought leaders
from academia, research, funding agencies, and Microsoft. They will
discuss software research and development via a programme of talks,
panels, workshops, and demonstrations that provide a clear,
comprehensive understanding of how industrial research plays a key
role in collaborating with academia and the scientific community to
improve society, education, and the quality of computer
software.
In addition, the Software Summit will feature
new information about the
Kinect for Windows software-development kit (SDK), to be
released this spring.
Kinect for Xbox 360
features Microsoft Researchs
astounding advances in body-part recognition, representing
research by Jamie
Shotton, Andrew
Fitzgibbon, Mat Cook, Toby
Sharp, and Andrew
Blake, managing director of Microsoft Research Cambridge. The
SDK is a starter kit that will make it simpler for the academic
research and enthusiast communities to create rich, natural user
interfaces using Kinect technology. The SDK will give users access
to key elements of Kinect-system capabilities, including robust
skeletal tracking, advanced audio capabilities, RGB video, and
depth-data streams, along with sample code and
documentation. Free for download to academic researchers and
enthusiasts, the SDK will include system application-programming
interfaces, device interfaces, installer documents, and resource
materials.
The Software Summits inception underscores the importance
Microsoft ascribes to research and innovation in Europe, which is
home to a thriving talent pool in the inter-related disciplines of
science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, offering
world-class expertise and contributing profound technological
breakthroughs. European science plays a vital role in the
continuation of economic productivity and sustainable growth.
Herbert will serve as summit host, Hey will deliver one of four
keynote addresses, and Judith
Bishop, director of
Computer Science for Microsoft Research Connections, will act
as programme chair for the event.
Keynote speakers during the Software Summit include:
Tony HeyIn addition to computer vision, exemplified by the Microsoft
Research Cambridges contribution to Kinect, the facility pursues
projects in dozens of other computer-science areas, including
programming systems. For instance,
F#, a type-safe, succinct, efficient, and expressive functional
programming language for the .NET platform, has been
added as a first-class language in Visual Studio
2010.
Another novel language stemming from Microsoft Research
Cambridge enables the design and
simulation of DNA circuits. The DNA Strand Displacement
Language helps facilitate the compilation of DNA circuits to
nucleotide sequences for use in digital logic circuits and
catalytic signal-amplification circuits that function as efficient
molecular detectors.
And then theres the Microsoft Research Cambridge work in cloud
computing. The
Virtual Multidisciplinary EnviroNments Using Cloud
Infrastructures (VENUS-C) project, a partnership between
Microsoft Research, the European Commission, and many other eminent
consortium members. VENUS-C is designed to enable European
scientists to deploy cloud-computing services to manage and learn
from the prodigious volumes of data generated by todays low-cost
sensors, improved computers, and advanced experiments and
simulations.
Cloud-computing capabilities also support European efforts to
enhance forest-fire management via a platform, initiated by Greeces
University of Aegean, that enables the sharing of data and
information easily, promptly, and to multiple users, reducing
deployment time and costs and enabling authorized users to access
the platform from anywhere in the world.
On March 22, the Brussels-based Microsoft Cloud and
Interoperability Center, which promotes cloud-computing innovation
in Europe by showcasing the latest technologies and solutions, was
inaugurated. Part of the Microsoft
Executive Briefing Center for European Innovation, the Cloud
and Interoperability Center is designed to host as many as 15
cloud-based solutions developed by partners across Europe.
Microsoft Research has a longstanding, long-term commitment to
education, academic collaboration, and research and development in
the region. Microsoft Research Cambridge helps operate three joint
research institutes: the Microsoft Research University
of Trento Centre for Computational and Systems Biology in
Italy, the Microsoft Research-INRIA
Joint Centre in France, and the Barcelona
Supercomputing Centre-Microsoft Research Centre in Spain. These
collaborative institutes enable the partner institutions to seek
solutions and opportunities to address the challenges that face
todays computer scientists across Europe.
This support reflects Microsoft Researchs worldwide effort to
assist academia in developing the next generation of computer
scientists. In addition to the European
Microsoft Innovation Center (EMIC), based in Aachen, Germany,
Microsoft Research also offers Ph.D. scholarships, faculty
fellowships, various awards, and support for academics and
professional conferences, all in an effort to foster ongoing
development of intellectual capital.
Not only does Microsoft Research Cambridge employ more than 100
researchers pursuing projects across a broad range of the
computer-science spectrum, it also has a history of support for the
external academic community. The facility has supported more than a
hundred Ph.D. students, has hosted 465 student interns over the
last seven years, and is sponsoring many collaborative research
projects.
Each year, the lab hosts a summer school that offers Ph.D.
candidates a series of academic talks and poster sessions and gives
invited students an opportunity to present their work to Microsoft
researchers and Cambridge academics.
SEIF Awards
As evidence of that commitment to developing a global pipeline
of computer-science talent, the Software Summit will feature the
presentation of the winners of the 2011
Software Engineering Innovation Foundation (SEIF) Awards,
sponsored by Microsoft Research Connections and the Research in
Software Engineering group. The awards honor academic researchers
whose exceptional talent for software-engineering research and
thought leadership make them standouts in their fields.
Ensuring that there is a diverse, inspired, and talented group
of established and emergent researchers who are focused on critical
advances in computer science is essential to developing a
technology foundation upon which many of societys challenges will
be solved, Hey says. Microsoft Research is committed to recognizing
and helping support the work of these individuals.
This year, Bashar Nuseibeh, professor
at the United Kingdoms Open University and at Lero, the Irish
Software Engineering Research Centre, has been named the winner of
the top award in the program, which encourages proposals that
utilize Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft technologies such as .NET, C#,
and F#, and Microsoft Research tools and technologies such as Chess,
Pex, and Boogie.
Nuseibehs project is called Software Engineering for Usable
Mobile Privacy Management. Other winners of the 2011 Software
Engineering Innovation Foundation Awards include:
- Fillipo Lanubile,
associate professor, University of Bari (Italy), for Augmenting
Social Awareness in a Collaborative Development Environment.
- Néstor
Cataño, professor, Universidade da Madeira (Portugal),
for Extending Boogie to Support the Analysis of B Machines.
- Jan Vitek,
professor, Purdue University, for SHARD: Software Hardening for
JavaScript.
- André van der
Hoek, professor, University of California at Irvine, for
Calico: Software Design Sketching with a Cloud-Based Software
Whiteboard.
- Brad Myers, professor,
Carnegie Mellon University, for Better Tools for Authoring
Interactive Behaviors.
- Sunghun Kim, assistant
professor, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, for
GATE: Game-Based Automatic Testing Environment.
- Danny Dig, visiting
research assistant professor, University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, for Interactive Refactoring for Parallelism.
- Miryung Kim,
assistant professor, University of Texas at Austin, for RefFinder:
An Extensible Framework for Refactoring Reconstruction.
- Romain Robbes,
assistant professor, University of Chile, for Building and Mining a
Repository of Developer Interactions for Visual Studio.
During the Software Summit, attendees will get their hands on
tools that can help pave the way for scientific discovery and
innovation, including:
-
Pex4fun: a game that awards points for writing code.
- Rise4fun: a chance to play with
Microsoft Researchs latest software-engineering toolson your
phone.
- Try F#: an opportunity to gain
familiarity with the languagefor free.
- Academic Search:
a free search engine that provides quick information about academic
researchers papers, conferences, and journals.
The Programme Committee for the Software Summit includes Tony
Hoare, principal researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge and
winner of the 1980 A.M. Turing Award; Harold Javid, director of
Global Programs for Microsoft Research Connections; Fabrizio
Gagliardi, director of Microsoft Research Connections for
Europe, the Middle East, and Africa; Uli
Pinsdorf, program manager for Security at EMIC; and
Arjmand Samuel, a research program manager for Microsoft
Research Connections.
Event themes include Beyond Software, Mobile Computing,
Programming for the Next Generation, The Cloud, Empirical Software
Engineering, Natural User Interaction, Semantic Computing, and
Verified Software.
Members of Heys Microsoft Research Connections team will take
the lead for the events activities, which will include workshops,
three panel discussions, five breakout sessions, three tutorials,
and an April 14 demofest featuring 12 of Microsoft Researchs most
significant recent projects.
That adds up to a busy, eventful three days sure to place the
spotlight squarely on the benefits European software has to
offer.
