With labs around the globe, Microsoft Research is ideally positioned to partner with leading academic and research institutes worldwide. One of the latest examples of this international cooperation is the Madrid Joint Research Center, a collaborative venture between Microsoft Research and the IMDEA Software Institute (opens in new tab). Now we are pleased to announce the center’s inaugural activity: a software workshop that takes place April 2 to 4, 2014, at IMDEA Software Institute’s campus in Madrid.
The Microsoft Research and IMDEA Software Institute Collaboration Workshop (opens in new tab) will bring together researchers from both partners and will focus on advances in verification, programming languages, and security. Thirty-six researchers and 20 students are involved in the collaboration, and, to date, some 20 papers have resulted from their joint work, with more in preparation.
At a workshop that emphasizes collaboration, it is heartening to hear about joint work that has been completed, as well as proposals for new initiatives. A prime example of the first kind is will be described in the keynote by Alexy Gotsman from IMDEA. He will talk about a new framework and set of proofs that tighten up the semantics of modern databases underlying large-scale Internet services that guarantee immediate availability—a joint project from Microsoft Research, INRIA (opens in new tab), and the University of Oxford (opens in new tab).
Said Manuel Hermenegildo, director of the institute, “Following the workshop, the center will broaden its reach to work with Microsoft in the following categories: cloud storage systems and mobile platforms; cloud/web security/malware detection; cryptography and privacy; concurrency, parallelism, and memory models; and programming languages and verification.”
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This will, we hope, be the first of many such workshops at the center, providing researchers and students a forum to discuss their collaborative work on hot topics in software. I am pleased to organize this joint research center with Georges Gonthier (opens in new tab) from Microsoft Research and Manuel Hermenegildo (opens in new tab) and Gilles Barthe (opens in new tab) from IMDEA Software Institute.
—Judith Bishop, Director of Computer Science, Microsoft Research Connections
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Programming languages and software engineering 
Security, privacy, and cryptography