With the academic year drawing to a close, Microsoft Research Cambridge was delighted to welcome more than 60 doctoral students for the sixth PhD Summer School (opens in new tab) at the end of June 2011. Participants came from as far afield as Israel and Russia, numerous European countries, and locales across the UK. It was also a pleasure to host students from Cambridge Computer Laboratory, just across the road.
More than 60 PhD students converge on Microsoft Research Cambridge. (Volodymyr Kuznetsov, Enuo He, Sadia Ahmed, Georgios Varisteas, Varun Bhaskar Kothamachu, Hannah Smith, Andrej Mikulik, Larissa Pschetz, David Kim, Su-Yang Yu, Michal Ficek, Gian Marco Palamara, Peter Wortmann, Nicolas Mobilia, Davide Cacchiarelli, Niek Bouman, Petra Korica-Pehserl, Timothy Rudge, Dmitri Kornev, Gjata Nerta, Christine Rizkallah, Mohamed Amir Yosef, Evgeny Rodionov, Yury Tumanov, Fidaa Abed, Milovan Duric, Ivan Ratkovic, Anastasia Tugaenko, Milan Stanic, Yaniv Ben-Itzhak, Faraz Makari Manshadi, Maximilian Dylla, Sergiy Byelozyorov, Alexander Chigorin, Syama Sundar Rangapuram, Sergey Milyaev, Roman Shapovalov, Evgeny Novikov, Vladimir Kononov, Gleb Krivovyaz, Sergey Shveykin, Pavel Shved, Silke Jansen, Stepan Kuznetsov, Dmitry Laptev, Moshe Gabel, Victor Chernyshov, Ariella Voloshin, Dmitry Ivankov, Jan Margeta, Jiaxin Han, Quan Guo, Madhura Killedar, Michelle Furlong, Edoardo Tescari, Zhen Bai, Lech Swirski, Andra Adams, Steven Marsh)
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This annual event provides an opportunity for some of the brightest graduate students to come together at the Microsoft Research Cambridge lab (opens in new tab) for a week of immersive technical talks, personal development sessions, and socialising. Representing 32 universities and institutes, the participants are working on a wide range of subjects, from how to program a million-core neural computer and parallel operating systems, to cloud computing and machine learning. Although most are computer science students, others are studying subjects as diverse as Amazonian road networks and cosmology.
An extensive range of technical talks by Microsoft researchers provided insights into the whole spectrum of work at the Cambridge lab, including research on computer science as applied philosophy, parallel software, machine learning for Kinect, social computing, medical imaging, functional programming, computational ecology, and computing to cure cancer. Moshe Gabel, a participant from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, was impressed, noting that “the Summer School really opened my eyes to the amazing range of sub-fields in computer science”.
Christine Rizkallah, from the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft Institute in Germany, explains her research over lunch to lab researchers.
The lawn marquee provided an opportunity for the students to showcase their research to the dozens of Microsoft researchers who swarmed around their posters, asking probing questions and giving advice over lunch. Seventeen of our new Microsoft PhD scholars, funded through Microsoft Research Connections (opens in new tab), had the opportunity to meet with their Microsoft co-supervisors—just one way that our programme enables close collaboration between students and Microsoft.
A key goal of the week was to facilitate personal development, with deep-dive sessions on such topics as “How to Write a Great Research Paper and Give a Great Talk,” by Simon Peyton-Jones (opens in new tab), and “A Rough Guide to Being an Entrepreneur,” by Jack Lang (opens in new tab), from the Judge Business School at Cambridge University. These sessions had wide appeal; as Jiaxin Han from Durham University observed, “As a non-computer science student, I’ve also benefited a lot from general guidance on PhD study, as well as gaining a 3-D view of Microsoft”.
The Summer School provides a fantastic opportunity for the next-generation of technology leaders to interact with the researchers at Microsoft Research Cambridge, and for Microsoft Research—and, more specifically, the Microsoft Research Connections group—to provide a window into what we do. Many of the students were impressed with the wide latitude given to Microsoft researchers. “Seeing projects like Worldwide Telescope and Microsoft Academic Search made me realise that Microsoft gives its researchers some freedom in working on interesting projects that are not directly related to their mainstream products,” explained Christine Rizkallah, from the Max Planck Institute.
For the lab, it is a source of inspiration and pride to be working with such talented young individuals, who are the future of science and computing. We’re already looking forward to next year’s PhD Summer School in Cambridge!
—Scarlet Schwiderski-Grosche (opens in new tab), Program Manager, Microsoft Research Connections EMEA, and Kenji Takeda (opens in new tab), Solutions Architect and Technical Manager, Microsoft Research Connections EMEA
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