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It’s been another year of great research, growth, and connection at Microsoft Research New England (opens in new tab). We’ve had more than 350 academic visitors this year, many of whom have engaged deeply with other Microsoft Research researchers and with our product groups.
GigaPath: Whole-Slide Foundation Model for Digital Pathology
Digital pathology helps decode tumor microenvironments for precision immunotherapy. In joint work with Providence and UW, we’re sharing Prov-GigaPath, the first whole-slide pathology foundation model, for advancing clinical research.
The Social Media Collective (opens in new tab) (SMC) had an amazing year. We added three prominent researchers—Nancy Baym (opens in new tab), Kate Crawford (opens in new tab), and Mary Gray (opens in new tab)—to the SMC. Together with danah boyd (opens in new tab), there is no doubt that we now have the leading social-media-research group worldwide. Our SMC researchers and visitors have done groundbreaking research on questions concerning youth and marginalized populations online, as well as in the study of social interactions around online music and games.
We continued to have great results from our Empirical Economics program. Susan Athey (opens in new tab) and Markus Mobius, now joined by Justin Rao (opens in new tab) of Microsoft Research New York City (opens in new tab), drive an ongoing engagement with more than a dozen external economists on empirical questions concerning online advertising, business models for our online properties and the cloud, and health-care economics.
(opens in new tab)We now have a thriving machine-learning effort, led by Sham Kakade (opens in new tab) and Adam Kalai (opens in new tab), who have engaged with visitors and the local community. More than 300 researchers from local universities and the local tech community attended our New England Machine Learning Day (opens in new tab). In addition, our machine-learning researchers are working closely with the Cloud Numerics group at the Microsoft New England Research & Development Center (opens in new tab), building a data-analysis layer for Windows Azure (opens in new tab), and with Raghu Ramakrishnan’s efforts on the cloud in Microsoft’s Server and Tools Business.
Moshe Tennenholtz (opens in new tab)’s efforts in the Herzliya branch of Microsoft Research New England have been phenomenal. It has been the first year of the Microsoft-Technion e-Commerce Research Center (opens in new tab), and there already are 10 ongoing projects among Microsoft Research researchers, Microsoft product groups, and Technion faculty and students. Moshe and collaborators also delivered a new type of floor pricing to Microsoft’s Online Services Division.
Our lab has received many honors this year: Two of our postdocs, Aleksander Madry (opens in new tab) and David Steurer (opens in new tab), won ACM Doctoral Dissertation Honorable Mention, and another, Ivan Corwin (opens in new tab), won the 2012 Clay Research Fellowship (opens in new tab). Tennenholtz won the ACM Autonomous Agents Research Award (opens in new tab). Boyd was named by The Boston Globe as one of Boston’s Most Powerful Women in Technology for 2012 (opens in new tab), and by Foreign Policy as one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers for 2012. Yours truly was named one of the Boston Business Journal’s 2012 Women to Watch (opens in new tab), won the Anita Borg Institute 2012 Women of Vision Award (opens in new tab), and was named an inaugural Fellow of the American Mathematical Society (opens in new tab).
Perhaps most excitingly, Microsoft Research New England researchers have welcomed their new colleagues at Microsoft Research New York City and have begun to work with them on problems at the boundary of computer science and the social sciences. I have high hopes for these interactions, as our amazing researchers bring their different approaches—theoretical, empirical, and computational—to these incredibly important problems.