Each year, we hold events in conjunction with the Faculty Summit to provide opportunities for deeper technical engagement. Below, you will see a number of opportunities participants had for further engagement during the 2015 Faculty Summit.
Tuesday, July 7
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Chair: Vani Mandava, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Research
Tuesday, July 7, 3:00 – 5:00 PM | Hyatt Regency Bellevue Hotel
Join us for a 90-minute Microsoft Azure Machine Learning (opens in new tab) (Azure ML) all-hands training where you will explore the power of cloud-based predictive analytics. Hear from students who have used Azure ML and how it has helped facilitate collaboration with colleagues without extensive technical training in the academic community. Azure ML will enable you with the following:
- Capability to visually compose machine learning experiments
- Access to proven algorithms from Microsoft Research, Bing, and Xbox
- First-class support for R, enabling you to bring in existing work seamlessly
- Unmatched ease of collaboration; simply click share my workspace and share experiments with anyone, anywhere
- Tools to help you immediately deploy a predictive model as a machine-learning web service on the cloud
Take advantage of the Microsoft Azure for Research program and learn how you can receive a free Azure award (opens in new tab)! We want to hear from researchers and students who are focusing on solving real problems for the benefit of society. Proposals are due August 15, 2015.
Note for participants: please bring a laptop and power cord for your use at this training.
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Chairs: Tom Zimmermann and Andrew Begel, Senior Researchers, Microsoft Research
Tuesday, July 7, 10:00 AM – 4:30 PM | Hyatt Regency Bellevue Hotel
The Software Engineering Mix provides a forum for our colleagues from academia to interact directly with Microsoft engineers. The program will feature talks from academics: highlights of published research that is highly relevant for Microsoft and blue sky talks summarizing emerging research areas. In addition, practitioners will give presentations about theoretical and pragmatic engineering challenges they face, perhaps soliciting help from academia. A coffee round table setting will be used to facilitate discussions. This session builds on the success of SEIF Days, which provided a discussion forum about the future of software engineering.
Friday, July 10
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Chair: Krysta Svore, Senior Researcher, Microsoft Research
Friday, July 10, 8:30 AM – 4:30 PM | Microsoft Conference Center, Sonora
This workshop aims to answer the question: if we had a quantum computer, what would we do with it? Quantum computers are hypothetical devices that would use the quantum mechanical properties of superposition and entanglement to solve problems that are likely to be forever out of reach of classical computers. There is currently a major worldwide effort to build quantum computers in order to realize these speedups over classical, digital computing. Already we have dramatic and diverse examples of quantum algorithms that outperform the classical counterparts: Shor’s factoring algorithm and its variants break all currently used public-key cryptosystems, and quantum simulations, as initially proposed by Feynman, will have applications throughout chemistry and material science. More recent work suggests that quantum computers may have important applications in machine learning and even in the simulation of classical systems. But quantum algorithms are generally much less well understood than their classical cousins. In particular, we lack a good understanding of which important problems can be solved much faster on quantum computers and which cannot. In this workshop, we will discuss current challenges in building a quantum computer, designing quantum algorithms, and implementing them in hardware.
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Chair: Alex Wade, Principal Program Manager, Microsoft Research
Friday, July 10, 9:00 AM – 3:00 PM | Microsoft Conference Center, St. Helens
Citation counts and related metrics, such as Journal Impact Factor (JIF) and researcher h-index calculations, attempt to quantify the relative impacts of published works, journals, and authors with mixed success and with often unintended re-applications. Others have run experiments of the citation graph in order to discover emerging areas of research, collaboration and influence networks, ranked lists of researchers and institutions, and funding trends. Several core challenges, such as the tools and methods for analyzing and mining scholarly data will be the main center of discussions at the workshop. The goal of this Birds of a Feature workshop is to foster a community interested in collaborating around this area, including new ranking approaches, recommender systems, social network analysis and other appropriate technologies.
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Chair: Roy Zimmermann, Director, Microsoft Research
Friday, July 10, 9:00 AM – 3:00 PM | Microsoft Conference Center, Lassen
Microsoft distributed large, next-generation touch displays to academic researchers to seed early research. The research conducted on these prototype devices included information visualization, human computer interaction, health informatics, visual analytics, science visualization, accessibility and education. This workshop will be an opportunity for the researchers to share their findings with each other, envision the future potential of large touch display devices, as well as with other interested researchers and Microsoft engineers.
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Chair: Dan Fay, Senior Director, Microsoft Research
Friday, July 10, 9:00 AM – 11:00 AM | Microsoft Conference Center, Hood
Holograms are the next evolution in computing. While we have just scratched the surface of what is possible, this workshop will discuss potential research around how Holographic computing and, specifically, Microsoft HoloLens. Microsoft HoloLens goes beyond augmented reality and virtual reality by enabling you to interact with three-dimensional holograms blended with your real world. Microsoft HoloLens features see-through, holographic, high-definition lenses and spatial sound so that you can see and hear holograms in the world around you. Complete with advanced sensors and a new Holographic Processing Unit (HPU) that understands the world around you, Microsoft HoloLens is able to run without any wires while processing terabytes of data from the sensors in real-time. Workshop attendees will learn more about how to get started designing and developing for Microsoft HoloLens and explore how to bring their apps to life.
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Chair: Judith Bishop, Director, Microsoft Research
Friday, July 10, 9:00 AM – 3:00 PM | Microsoft Conference Center, Rainier
Distributed computing with the cloud in mind is not easy. Having systems that are reliable and fast is taken for granted these days, but the software required to build them is still hard to use. This workshop will start with a deep dive into one of the more successful systems for developing reliable, scalable interactive applications for the cloud: Orleans (opens in new tab). Orleans is used by Microsoft as the basis for the Halo game, among other applications, and in January 2015 was released as open source. Thereafter there will be talks and discussion of other similar systems, and of how open source can be utilized to advance and improve the tools we have. The Orleans team as well as Microsoft Research Outreach will be at the workshop to start a community in building high-scale distributed computing applications.
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Chair: Arjmand Samuel, Senior Research Program Manager, Microsoft Research
Friday, July 10, 9:00 AM – 3:00 PM | Microsoft Conference Center, Baker
Catapult is a Microsoft project investigating the use of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to improve performance, reduce power, and provide new capabilities in the datacenter. We have designed an FPGA board that plugs into the Microsoft-designed server that was released publically as the Open CloudServer v1. The Catapult project started as a collaboration between Microsoft Research and Bing. Catapult improved the operations per second of a critical component of Bing’s search engine by nearly a factor of two. Many other applications and services can be accelerated as well. The bottom line for datacenters is more throughput and lower latencies, translating to lower power and cost, higher quality results, or a combination of both. In this workshop the speakers will present design of Catapult and possible applications where the power of Catapult can be harnessed to the fullest.