REDMOND, Wash., Nov. 3, 2003 — Microsoft Research — Asia (MSRA) today announced the founding of the Advanced Technology Center (ATC) in Beijing, a new division in MSRA that will focus on further developing innovations produced in the lab. The ATC will enable MSRA to work with a larger number of technologies and accelerate technology transfer to Microsoft®
product groups.
The division will grow to 80 engineers and developers in its first year and will also work to create products for Asian users that will make human-computer interaction more natural and productive.
“The ATC is a natural step in the evolution of Microsoft Research — Asia,” said Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research. “It will enable MSRA to get technology advances into customers’ hands at a quicker pace.”
Since the lab’s inception, researchers in the Beijing lab have made more than 70 key contributions to Microsoft products, from digital ink parsing and rendering technologies in the Tablet PC to advanced graphics for Xbox® games, an English Writing Wizard in the Chinese version of the Microsoft Office System, and the AutoMovie feature in Windows®
XP Movie Maker 2.
“By streamlining technology transfer with the ATC, we will enable researchers to remain focused on solving the hard problems in computer science that the industry is faced with,” said Ya-Qin Zhang, managing director of MSRA. “The mission of Microsoft Research — Asia is to drive the state of the art forward in areas such as graphics and multimedia, wireless and networking, user interface, and information processing. Our researchers strive to impact their respective fields externally by publishing peer-reviewed papers at leading conferences and collaborating with academic, corporate and government research organizations.”
MSRA has grown to 170 researchers in the past five years, and has hosted more than 250 visiting scientists and students from China and around the world. More than 750 scientific papers have been published at leading conferences organized by special interest groups in the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
About Microsoft Research
Founded in 1991, Microsoft Research is dedicated to conducting both basic and applied research in computer science and software engineering. Its goal is to develop new technologies that simplify and enhance the user’s computing experience, reduce the cost of writing and maintaining software, and facilitate the creation of new types of software. Microsoft Research employs more than 700 people, focusing on more than 55 areas of computing. Researchers in five labs on three continents collaborate with leading academic, government and industry researchers to simplify and enhance technology in such areas as speech recognition, user-interface research, programming tools and methodologies, operating systems and networking, graphics, natural language processing, and mathematical sciences. More information can be found at http://www.research.microsoft.com/ .
About Microsoft
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