Today is a proud day for Microsoft Research Connections and our academic collaborators, as two of our research efforts have been named 2013 IDG’s Computerworld Honors Program Laureates (opens in new tab). The Computerworld Honors program, founded in 1988, recognizes organizations and individuals who have used information technology to promote positive social, economic, and educational change. The program judges reviewed more than 700 nominations this year to select 269 Laureates from 29 countries. Microsoft Research is being honored for our collaborative work on combatting scourges that affect millions around the world: pneumonia and HIV infection.
Working in collaboration with the University of Oxford, our research strives to make pneumonia vaccine more effective.
Pneumonia persists as a leading cause of death in children worldwide, despite the availability of a vaccine. To be properly vaccinated against the disease, children must receive a series of three shots over a period of several months. The research for which we’re being honored, “Adjusting Pneumonia Vaccination Periods to Save Lives (opens in new tab),” strives to make vaccination more effective by changing the timing of the shots. In collaboration with the University of Oxford, we have developed software that can be used to create and deploy clinical trial support infrastructure in a fraction of the time, at a fraction of the cost, of conventional methods. The system can collect well-defined and standardized data from multiple sources; however, the greater benefit is its ability to combine data simply and efficiently, enabling large-scale data analysis. Such analysis is now being used by the Oxford Vaccine Group to evaluate the effectiveness of revised schedules of immunization.
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Our HIV program involves support of the efforts of the Ragon Institute at Massachusetts General Hospital to create an effective HIV immunization agent.
HIV infection remains another prolific killer, taking the lives of approximately 5,000 people a day—despite the emergence of antiviral therapies that can control, but not cure, the disease. Until a cure is found, the best hope in controlling HIV infection lies in creating an effective vaccine. This is why our second honored program, “Uncovering New Ways the Human Immune System Fights HIV (opens in new tab),” involves support for the efforts of the Ragon Institute at Massachusetts General Hospital to create an effective HIV immunization agent. In collaboration with South African healthcare workers, the Ragon Institute has recruited large numbers of South African HIV-positive patients, whose blood samples enable studies of the body’s defense mechanisms in the laboratory. Joining the Ragon Institute in this effort are the Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa (CAPRISA) and the KwaZulu-Natal Research Institute for Tuberculosis and HIV (K-RITH). Microsoft Research is working with the Ragon Institute to quantify how the immune system attacks various fragments of HIV—data that we hope will, one day, lead to a vaccine.
These two global research programs not only capture the very essence of our mission at Microsoft Research Connections: to collaborate with the world’s top academic researchers and institutions to develop technologies that fuel data-intensive scientific, but also help Microsoft Research improve “Big Data” algorithms to further advance Microsoft products. We look forward to the presentation at The Computerworld Honors Laureate Ceremony and Awards Gala (opens in new tab) at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium in Washington, D.C., on June 3, 2013.
—Tony Hey (opens in new tab), Vice President of Microsoft Research Connections
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