Archive notice: This article was originally published on July 27, 2007. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Microsoft today announced the establishment of the Internet Services Research Center (ISRC). The practice-oriented research organization will develop innovations in search and advertising technologies. These will be made available to advertisers and customers quickly. The new research team is part of Microsoft Research and will work closely with MSN, Windows Live and other Microsoft product teams. The headquarters will be in Redmond, with teams in Silicon Valley and Beijing.
Rick Rashid, Senior Vice President of Microsoft Research, emphasizes the central importance of cooperation between different groups for the project: “We want to interlink our development and product teams even more closely. The ISRC is therefore pursuing a new approach in order to develop technologies as quickly as possible from the status of a research project into market-ready products and services.”
Satya Nadella, Corporate Vice President of the Microsoft Search & Advertising Platform Group, cites the cooperation between the Windows Live Search development team and the Microsoft Research Community as an example of such collaboration. This has led to progress in the areas of search accuracy, spam protection, product search, content discovery and text recognition for book research. “In recent years, we have made great progress in obtaining better and faster research results for our customers and in offering added value to our advertising customers”, Nadella says.
Head of the ISRC is Dr. Harry Shum, who has also been appointed Corporate Vice President by Microsoft. After joining Microsoft in 1996, he worked at Microsoft Research first as a researcher, then as a research director, deputy managing director and finally as managing director of Microsoft Research Asia. He will continue to hold this position in parallel.
Microsoft has set itself the task of conducting basic research and applied research in the fields of computer science and software engineering. In 1991, the research division was founded in Redmond under the name Microsoft Research – MSR for short. Further research laboratories are located in Silicon Valley, Cambridge (England), Bangalore (India) and in Bejing in China. The research focuses on four topics: the learning and comprehension of machines (“machine learning and perception”), programming principles and tools (“programming principles and tools”), systems and working in networks (“systems and networking”), and the interaction of systems (“interactive systems”). Further information is available on the MSR website.
Further links:
- Microsoft Research
