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Microsoft Research Fights Critics
coondoggie writes to tell us Network World is taking a look at why Microsoft Research has to fight so hard against critics. From the article: "When the word 'innovation' is tossed about many may look down their nose at the company sitting on top of the high-tech industry — Microsoft. [...] Microsoft Research incubates not only futuristic ideas but young minds, having hired 700 interns worldwide this year including 250 computer science PhD candidates in Redmond alone, which is roughly 21% of all the computer science PhD candidates in the United States."
I don't know of anybody criticizing Microsoft Research: there are lots of good people doing good work there. People are criticizing Microsoft's business practices and products. Good research doesn't necessarily translate into good products, in particular if a company's primary goal is market dominance through lock-in and other tricks.
* Singularity OS
* Socio-Digital systems
* Digital geographics
* Natural Language Processing
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
MSR is not a product development group. It is a research organization within Microsoft. MSR researchers pursue curiosity-driven research and publish in the normal academic channels.
That's not MSR. That's marketing research. (I don't know what the department that does that is named though.)
MSR's the group that came up with SLAM, which is now incorporated into the Windows driver framework. It's resulted in (over the last 5 years) two POPL papers (one of the two top-tiered programming language conferences), a PLDI paper (the other of the two), a PASTE paper, a TOPLAS paper, three TACAS papers, three CAV papers, a few workshop papers, and a spinoff project at UC Berkeley called BLAST which is doing things very similar to SLAM. (They've had their own fair share of papers, and probably a doctoral thesis or two, on it.)
MSR's the group that wrote Singularity, an experimental OS written in C#, that has an ASPLOS paper, two EuroSys papers (one of which got the best paper award), and three workshop papers.
MSR's the group that wrote Vulcan, a binary rewriter that allowed them to create a program that records the execution trace of another program and play it back later. This is useful in, for instance, temporal debugging. (Think the Omnicient Debugger for Java, except made to work on any program because it operates on binaries. Except that MSR developed two other applications for the recorded traces.) This, and other projects that MSR has done with Vulcan, have resulted in a number of other papers.
Say what you like about MS in general, but MSR publishes more good research than many (probably even most) university CS depts.
"I've read a lot of research papers for computer science, especially in the areas of databases and networking. I've developed the bias that the papers from researchers at companies, rather than universities, tend to suck"
interesting, I too have read a lot of comp science research papers from both academics and companies and I have generally found exactly the opposite of what you see. most academics have no real knowledge of IT or its applications and there research screams this at the top of their lungs. guess we just read different stuff.
I think the numbers quoted from the article here were bungled.
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> having hired 700 interns worldwide this year including
> 250 computer science PhD candidates in Redmond alone,
> which is roughly 21% of all the computer science PhD
> candidates in the United States."
http://www.cra.org/CRN/articles/may06/taulbee.htm
suggests around 1200 CS PhDs *awarded* in 2004-2005 in the USA and Canada. The number for the USA alone may be lower than this, but it might also be higher since 20% of departments surveyed did not respond. But assuming 1200/year is close to the mark, the number of "computer science PhD candidates in the United States" must be several times that, since a PhD takes several years and furthermore a lot of PhD students never complete their degree. I think an average of five years of studentship per PhD awarded would be a reasonably conservative estimate; then the 21% number quoted should be more like 4%.