July 13, 2016 - July 15, 2016

Faculty Summit 2016

Location: Redmond, WA, USA

Each year, we hold events the day after Faculty Summit to provide opportunities for deeper technical engagement. The following seven workshops took place at the Microsoft Conference Center on Friday, July 15, 2016.

  • Chair: Kuansan Wang, Microsoft Research

    Friday, July 15, 8:30 AM – 3:00 PM | Microsoft Building 99, Room #1915

    Microsoft Research and several academic partners have formed the Open Academic Society, with the mission to contribute to and create a shared, open and expanding knowledge graph of research and education-focused entities and relationships. Seeded by the Microsoft Academic Graph, the reach and depth of knowledge data will come through the Society members’ contributions. Microsoft and other Society members will release their data under an open data license as well as provide workshops, challenges, and data sharing activities for the benefit of the larger computer science community.  This inaugural meeting of the Society focused on the organizational structure, logistics of data contributions, establishment of by-laws and committee structure, and planned for upcoming workshops, challenges, and events.

  • Chair: Evelyne Viegas, Microsoft Research

    Speakers: Fernando Diaz, Katja Hofmann, Eric Horvitz, Tim Hutton, Pushmeet Kohli, Microsoft Research

    Friday, July 15, 8:00 AM – 4:00 PM | Microsoft Conference Center, Lassen

    Given the investment and evidence of progress in Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the last five years, some suggest that it is merely a matter of time until AI matches, complements or surpasses, human intelligence. This workshop took the position that AI is still at an extremely early stage compared to human intelligence. This workshop gathered researchers and scientists and together reviewed recent research and advances in machine learning, cognitive science, neuro-science, and discussed the needs and design principles to support fundamental research in AI via approaches (including platforms and tools) that foster collaboration between researchers. The community was invited to experience Project Malmo, an AI experimentation platform on top of Minecraft, as an example to support AI research.

  • Chair: Krysta Svore, Microsoft Research

    Speakers: Scott Aaronson, Lior Eldar, Aram Harrow, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Fernando Brandao, Microsoft; Stephen Jordan, University of Maryland-College Park; Dmitri Maslov, University of Maryland; Jeremy O’Brien, University of Bristol; David Poulin, University of Sherbrooke; Barbara Terhal, University of Aachen; Matthias Troyer, Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich

    Friday, July 15, 8:30 AM – 5:30 PM | Microsoft Conference Center, Sonora

    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 highlighted recent advances in quantum algorithms, quantum devices, control systems, and quantum error correction.

  • Chair: Ashish Kapoor, Microsoft Research

    Speakers: Pieter Abeel, Trevor Darrell, Anca Dragan, Claire Tomlin, University of California-Berkeley; Rajeev Alur, University of Pennsylvania; Sanja Fidler, Raquel Urtasun, University of Toronto; Martial Herbert, Carnegie Mellon University; Rupak Majumdar, Max Planck Univeristy; Siegwart Roland, ETHZ; Nicholas Roy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

    Friday, July 15, 8:30 AM – 5:00 PM | Microsoft Conference Center, Baker

    Recent advances in cyber physical systems, such as drones, robots, autonomous cars and other Internet of Things (IoT) devices, have led to increased consumer interest and start-up businesses. However, in order to fully harness the capabilities of these systems, we need to facilitate safe and reliable autonomy. For example, a robot immersed in the real world needs to model the environment and take only those actions that will not jeopardize the safety of itself and individuals, while still making progress on the assigned task. Addressing this problem entails an interdisciplinary approach, where cutting edge ideas from perception, sensing and modeling need to work with advances in controls, planning and decision making. Further, given the large scale effort required in software and hardware engineering, it is important to consider these ideas in the context of programming languages and verification. Our workshop brought together experts in the areas of machine learning, vision, planning, programming languages and verification to discuss the latest advances with the aim of catalyzing a joint effort to address building Safe Autonomous Cyber Physical Systems. The day long workshop consisted of invited talks, demos and a panel discussion reflecting upon the best approach to effectively collaborate between academia and industry.

  • Coordinator: Thomas Zimmermann, Microsoft Research

    Speakers: Laura Dabbish, Carnegie Mellon Univeristy; Vladimir Filkov, University of California-Davis; Mei Nagappan, Rochester Institute of Technology

    Friday, July 15, 8:30 AM – 3:30 PM | Microsoft Conference Center, Hood

    Software Engineering Mix (SE-MIX) provided a forum for our colleagues from academia to interact directly with Microsoft engineers. The program featured talks from academics: highlights of published research that is highly relevant for Microsoft and blue sky talks summarizing emerging research areas. In addition, practitioners gave presentations about theoretical and pragmatic engineering challenges they face, soliciting help from academia. A coffee round table setting was used to facilitate discussions. This session built on the success of SEIF Days, which provided a discussion forum about the future of software engineering.

    The topic of this year’s SE-MIX was the large-scale data analysis of software repositories (like GitHub for example). Many teams are using GitHub for their OSS projects and would like to have a richer understanding and insight into that activity. While some projects like GHTorrent and GitHub Archive exist, and some insights are available for analyzing a single project, everyone touching this topic sees an enormous potential in the data. The SE-MIX was intended to jumpstart connections between academia and Microsoft on the vast opportunities in leveraging GitHub data and data from other software repositories to develop software more efficiently.

  • Chair: Kathryn McKinley, Microsoft Research

    Speakers: Doug Burger, Douglas Carmean, Sameh Elnikety, Microsoft Research; Boris Grot, University of Edinburgh; Ben Lee, Duke University; Sherief Reda, Brown University; Ion Stoica, University of California-Berkeley; Karin Strauss, Microsoft Research; Lingjia Tang, Marc Tremblay, Microsoft; Adam Wierman, California Institute of Technology; Tom Wenisch, University of Michigan

    Friday, July 15, 8:30 AM – 3:00 PM | Microsoft Conference Center, St. Helens

    Cloud services offer a plethora of new resource management and efficiency problems as service providers seek to meet the demands of interactive and batch services in modern data centers. This session described novel system approaches, ranging from architecture to OS to applications with a focus on emerging challenges for system design.

    This workshop included a wide range of cloud hardware and software system designers and researchers. It focused on the challenges, workloads, and opportunities for scale up and scale out for cloud services.

    We planned a non-standard workshop structure to improve group engagement. We sat at round tables of approximately 8 people. The entire workshop consisted of 4 sessions that were structured as 3 short talks, followed by 10 minutes table talk, 10 minutes group discussion with the 3 speakers, and 10 more minutes of table talk.

  • Chair: Roy Zimmermann, Microsoft Research

    Speakers: Steven Drucker, MSR; Dave Slobodin, Surface Hub; Michel Pahud, MSR; Andruid Kerne/Andrew Webb/Alyssa Valdez, Texas A&M; John Stasko, Georgia Tech; Andy van Dam/Tim Kraska, Brown University; Ruigang Yang, University of Kentucky; Charlie Case, Surface Hub; Aaron Quigley, University of St. Andrews; Tim Large, Surface Hub; Dave Brown, MSR

    Friday, July 15, 8:30 AM – 4:00 PM | Microsoft Conference Center, Rainier

    This workshop was co-hosted by Steven Drucker, MSR Principal Researcher and Dave Slobodin, GM of Surface Hub. The workshop discussed the intersection of data and graphics visualization with Microsoft’s new Surface Hub technology. Participants were invited to share their work and research in graphics and visualizations for large, multi-touch platforms. The workshop included demos from MSR, the Surface Hub team and external researchers. The discussion covered current and emerging trends in the graphics and visualization domains as well as the current state of Surface Hub. There was an opportunity for participants to offer feedback and exchange ideas with Microsoft researchers and engineers as well as other researchers active in large interactive displays.