Each year, we hold events the day after the Faculty Summit to provide opportunities for deeper technical engagement. The following seven events took place at the Microsoft Conference Center on Wednesday, July 16, 2014, starting at 9:00 A.M.
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The rapid, continuous, and economically viable evolution of semiconductor technology scaling has, in multiple cases, outpaced the system stack’s ability to evolve adequately. However, growing economic difficulties in extending scaling may make it difficult to sustain further efficiency gains via semiconductor technology. The recent movements toward multicore, specialization, and optimized storage stacks follow from this phenomenon. The demands of applications and their data on storage and processing capabilities are not expected to stop growing, putting even more pressure on system efficiency. This full-day workshop will provide insights on the efficiency issue through examples, and then promote discussion of opportunities in this area through a mix of driving application scenarios and synergistic opportunities across the system stack.
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Today’s data-driven research and development is stymied by an inability for scientists and their collaborators to easily reproduce and augment one another’s experiments. CodaLab addresses this problem by providing a cloud-based virtual “workbench” where computer scientists can conduct data-driven experiments quickly and easily. These experiments can then be easily copied, re-worked, and edited by other collaborators in order to advance the state of the art in data-driven research and machine learning. CodaLab allows communities to create competitions to focus on some tasks, which results can then be provided back to the community as experiments for further development. By improving productivity by multiple orders of magnitude, CodaLab makes it easy for scientists and their collaborators to focus on the challenges at hand and not get delayed by the difficult and laborious work of setting up a new experiment.
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The iSchools Organization (opens in new tab) is a growing worldwide association of Information Schools dedicated to advancing education in social media, digital youth, data science, cybersecurity, information policy, and other aspects of the field of information science, and preparing students to meet the information challenges of the twenty-first century. This half-day Faculty Summit ancillary event is intended to bring together Microsoft Research and the iSchool heads to continue the dialog between our organizations and to foster collaboration opportunities.
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The goal of the Lab of Things (LoT) Workshop 2014 is to enable the LoT community to exchange ideas and form collaborations. It will be a day for current and future LoT researchers to share experiences and discuss future directions. The Lab of Things team will present an introduction to LoT along with current status and an update about our future plans.
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The annual Software Engineering Innovation Foundation (SEIF) Day brings together SEIF winners, influential software engineering researchers, and researchers from Microsoft Research to present and discuss existing software engineering projects being pursued by the SEIF community, and future directions in software engineering research.
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Latest semiconductor, sensing, communication, energy harvesting, and energy storage technology advances keep pushing the boundaries of low power devices and computing paradigms. They are giving rise to sensing and computing systems with extremely low power consumption, and bring challenges in terms of designing, programing, and interacting with such systems. This workshop provide a forum for top researchers in the field to present their latest research results and discuss future potentials, from enabling technologies, hardware and software platforms, to applications. With this event, we hope to foster cross-disciplinary collaborations and to boost the awareness and impact of ultra-low power computing.
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Location: Building 99/1915-Lecture Room A
In 1981, Richard Feynman proposed a device called a “quantum computer” that would take advantage of methods founded on the laws of quantum physics and promise computational speed-ups over classical methods. In the last three decades, quantum algorithms have been developed that offer fast solutions to problems in a variety of fields including number theory, optimization, database search, chemistry, and physics. For quantum devices, this past year marks significant progress towards scalable quantum bits and gates. The workshop will highlight recent advances in quantum algorithms, quantum devices, control systems, and quantum error correction. Other quantum topics may be covered depending on the speakers’ preferences.