Richard Black

About

Richard is a Partner Research Manager at Microsoft Research, Cambridge (opens in new tab), where he leads a team researching data-center scale storage technologies, new storage media using advanced tools from AI materials science (opens in new tab), and related applications to cloud and AI infrastructure.  Richard is part of the Future AI Infrastructure Areas of Excellence (opens in new tab).

Past research projects on storage include, his role as Research Director for Project Silica (opens in new tab), an archival data storage media storing data inside glass using ultra-short-pulse lasers which transferred to development within Microsoft Azure (opens in new tab), the Pelican (opens in new tab) project, which stored cold data in rack-scale hard disk storage units with over a thousand hard drives per server, which transferred to development within Microsoft Azure (opens in new tab), and the Software Defined Storage (opens in new tab) project, which became part of Windows Server (opens in new tab).

Beyond storage, Richard’s past research interests within the Cloud Systems Futures (opens in new tab) research group include computer security, where he was part of the team inventing Control Flow Guard (opens in new tab), which has helped protect billions of Microsoft customers from malware since its inclusion in Windows and other Microsoft products since 2014.

Richard has also contributed to projects on performance analysis of distributed systems, digital networking, and operating systems.  Richard enjoys the mix of academic publishing and potential for high real-world impact which Microsoft Research provides. You can figure out the time-line of his particular mix from looking at the dates of his publications.

Richard’s research projects regularly recruit Residents within the Microsoft Research Cambridge Residency (opens in new tab) program, which are advertised on the opportunities page (opens in new tab) and the Microsoft Careers (opens in new tab) site.

Richard has been at Microsoft Research Cambridge for over 25 years, having previously been a Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory (opens in new tab) and faculty member at the University of Glasgow Department of Computing Science (opens in new tab).  Richard has both Bachelor and Doctorate degrees in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge (opens in new tab).