{"id":215593,"date":"2016-04-19T02:37:41","date_gmt":"2016-04-19T02:37:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/?post_type=msr-academic-program&p=215593"},"modified":"2023-02-26T23:41:51","modified_gmt":"2023-02-27T07:41:51","slug":"fellowships-microsoft-research-asia","status":"publish","type":"msr-academic-program","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/academic-program\/fellowships-microsoft-research-asia\/","title":{"rendered":"Fellowship at Microsoft Research Asia"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
Application deadline<\/strong>: June 10, 2022, 11:59 PM Beijing Time<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Microsoft Research Asia Fellowship Program aims to empower and encourage PhD students in the Asia-Pacific region to realize their potential in computer science-related research.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Microsoft Research Asia Fellowship Program identifies the next generation of research leaders through a unique program that offers a combination of mentorship, research, networking, and academic opportunities to promising young candidates. Since its inception in 1999, the program has attracted over one thousand PhD candidates from top universities in the Asia-Pacific region, and 452 outstanding PhD students have been awarded the Microsoft Research Asia Fellowship honor. Fellows have gone on\u202fto become prominent researchers and influential individuals in academia and industry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fellows earn more than a simple scholarship; they enjoy\u202flong-term close engagement with Microsoft Research Asia, one of the leading computer science research labs in the world.\u202fEach winner has the opportunity to complete an internship, during which they participate in hands-on, advanced research at Microsoft Research Asia<\/a> in Beijing, China.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For questions about this program, please contact fellowra@microsoft.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Microsoft Research Asia Fellowship Program offers some of the industry\u2019s most competitive incentives and rewards, including: <\/p>\n\n\n\n Microsoft has always been committed to the mission of empowering every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more and has actively promoted the extensive application of computer technology in various fields and in public welfare undertakings. With the progress of data acquisition, data processing, and artificial intelligence in recent years, computer technology is playing an increasingly important role in the research of basic science. The current problems and challenges faced by human society also require the urgent intersection and integration of basic scientific research and computer science. Based on the current trends and demand, the 2022 MSRA Fellowship will continue to welcome applicants in the field of Computational Science (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> in order to discover academic talents who are innovating computer theory and technology to promote the development of basic scientific research, and to support and encourage them to better carry out their potential research work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Please refer to the Research Areas > Other Sciences menu in the top navigation of this site to learn more about these research areas:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n In the Computational Science area, The MSRA Fellowship program focuses on doctoral students who have promoted and expanded research work in the above fields through innovations in computer theory, algorithms, and systems and have made influential achievements. We also look at doctoral students who have made contributions to the development of computer technology by introducing the research methods, theories, and technologies of basic science into the computer science field.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n The 2022 Microsoft Research Asia Fellowship application period closes on Friday, June 10, 2022, at 11:59 PM Beijing Time<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Program dates subject to change and will be updated here as needed.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n April 20, 2022<\/strong>: Application period opens The research statement should provide a summary of your research accomplishments and current work and highlight your most outstanding contribution to the academia. Importantly, it should clearly discuss the future direction and potential of your work, especially your research plan for the next few years of PhD study. It should be technical but remain intelligible to any reviewer of the track (we have four general tracks, which you can find in the online application tool). Because your research statement may be read by a reviewer with same track but outside of your subdiscipline, it is important to keep the \u201cbig picture\u201d in mind. A strong research statement presents a readable, compelling, and realistic research agenda with clear potential results. Research statements can be weakened by overly ambitious proposals, a lack of clear direction, and a lack of big-picture focus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some general advice:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Required application materials can be submitted directly online by the applicant. The online application tool is available at: https:\/\/cmtint.research.microsoft.com\/MSRAFellowship2022 (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n All application materials must be in English. All documents submitted must be in Word document, text-only file, PDF, or ZIP file format.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n Students must be doing research work that relates to computing topics in which Microsoft Research is concerned with (click on Research Areas at the top of the page for a full list).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Four major directions for reference:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n First-year students are eligible to apply if they have already enrolled in a PhD program by the time of the nomination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n It depends on the expected graduation date of the normative PhD study you are enrolled in. If the student will graduate in 2024 or later, then they are eligible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n Selected applicants will receive notification of their acceptance status by early October 2022. Due to the volume of submissions, Microsoft Research Asia cannot provide individual feedback on applications that do not receive fellowship awards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n The funds are given as an unrestricted gift. Fellowship recipients are not subject to intellectual property restrictions unless they complete an internship at Microsoft Research Asia. If that is the case, they are subject to the same intellectual property restrictions as any other Microsoft Research Asia intern.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n Microsoft Research Asia Fellowship only accepts applicants with universities in mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n Please send email directly to fellowRA@microsoft.com<\/a> for other questions<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Renmin University of China<\/p>\n\n\n\n Supervisors: Zhewei Wei (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Research interests:<\/strong> Large-Scale Graph Analysis and Learning<\/p>\n\n\n\n Long-term research goal:<\/strong> Driven by the exponential blowup in data volumes, efficient algorithms are now in higher demand more than ever before. The massive data volume also challenges the classical notion of efficient algorithms. Characterizing efficient algorithms in terms of exponential\/polynomial time complexity may no longer be sufficient for solving today’s problems. In light of the pressing needs for the algorithms with high scalability, the core of my research primarily focuses on the development of provably-good scalable algorithms for graph data. In particular, I am interested in designing nearly linear or sub-linear time algorithms to efficiently compute results for large-scale graph analysis and learning problems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology<\/p>\n\n\n\n Supervisor: Huamin Qu (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Research interests:<\/strong> Data Visualization, Visual Analytics, and Human-Computer Interaction<\/p>\n\n\n\n Long-term research goal:<\/strong> Recent years have witnessed an explosion of data, both in type and quantity. However, humans\u2019 ability to analyze data does not match such fast growth. To address the challenge, intelligent visual analysis tools have gained growing interest since they enable accurate and rapid data sensemaking by leveraging humans\u2019 high-bandwidth vision systems. My research aims to promote human-in-the-loop intelligent visual analysis with techniques from visualization, human-computer interaction, and machine learning. To achieve the goal, I devoted myself to understanding real-world practices of visualizations for data analysis and leveraging the findings to develop intelligent visual analysis tools. By combining the efforts in the two directions, I hope to contribute to an ecosystem where humans can perform effortless and adaptive visual data analysis with the support of machine intelligence. With the ecosystem, everyone can analyze data visually without barriers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n The University of Tokyo<\/p>\n\n\n\n Supervisors: Yasuo Kuniyoshi (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n Research interests:<\/strong> Robotics<\/p>\n\n\n\n Long-term research goal: <\/strong>Recently, robotics has been gaining attention as a solution for the aging society that many countries are facing. Even though there is a high demand for automation of tedious work that now human labor is doing, robots’ skills are premature and face difficulty for simple tasks. My research goal is to construct a unified robot learning architecture that can imitate human skills. To achieve this, I have focused on attention-based deep imitation learning inspired by physiological studies of humans. My research has achieved many dexterous robot tasks such as banana peeling, needle threading, and knot tying. My long-term research will focus on the unsupervised discovery of robot behavior\u2019s segmentation and structure that can be used for data-efficient robot training and adaptation. As a result of this study, I expect the robot to free humans from tedious, repetitive, and dangerous labor and make humans focus on more creative jobs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Renmin University of China<\/p>\n\n\n\n Supervisors: Ji-Rong Wen (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>, Wayne Xin Zhao (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n Research interests: <\/strong>Natural Language Process, Information Retrieval<\/p>\n\n\n\n Long-term research goal:<\/strong> My research mainly focuses on learning effective representations for sequence data (e.g., textual sentences and user behaviors), which can be widely used on a variety of NLP and IR tasks. Despite the remarkable progress in recent years, there are two challenging problems to be resolved: how to learn transferable, scalable and robust representations from large-scale unsupervised sequence data, and how to capture the latent high-level knowledge and logic within the available sequence data. My long-term research goal is to address the two problems, and learn general, knowledgeable and practical sequence representations for various real-world applications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Tsinghua University<\/p>\n\n\n\n Supervisors: Kaisheng Ma<\/p>\n\n\n\n Research interests:<\/strong> Knowledge Distillation, Efficient Machine Learning<\/p>\n\n\n\n Long-term research goal:<\/strong> My research interest is knowledge distillation, a deep learning technique to compress the neural networks, making them small enough to be deployed on the edge devices. Current deep neural networks usually have enormous parameters and computation which has hindered their usage on edge devices for real-world applications. I hope my research can bridge the gap between the large ML models and small edge devices, and also bridge the gap between our life and an intelligent future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Peking University<\/p>\n\n\n\n Supervisors: Zhenjiang Hu, Yingfei Xiong <\/p>\n\n\n\n Research interests:<\/strong> Program Synthesis<\/p>\n\n\n\n Long-term research goal:<\/strong> Algorithms are crucial for improving the efficiency of programs, and studying algorithms has become a must thing for people related to programming and computer science. Despite their importance, algorithms are well-known to be complex. On the one hand, learning algorithms is a big challenge for most programmers. On the other hand, optimizing via algorithms is error-prone in practice. Such optimization can greatly increase the complexity, break the modularity, and thus bring risks of flaws. My research goal is to automatically synthesize efficient algorithms and thus provide a safe and mechanical method for performing algorithmic-level optimizations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Peking University<\/p>\n\n\n\n Supervisors: Jiaying Liu (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Research interests:<\/strong> Computer Vision, Image Restoration<\/p>\n\n\n\n Long-term research goal:<\/strong> Image restoration is to recover an image from a corrupted version. Traditionally, it is designed to meet users’ demands on subjective visual quality, i.e., human vision. As intelligent software is replacing humans in works of image analysis, more and more images are used for downstream machine learning tasks, i.e., machine vision. However, most of existing image restoration methods neglect machine vision, which poses threats to applications using restored images for further analysis. My long-term research goal is to bridge the gap between human vision and machine vision. I aim to deepen the understanding of low-level and high-level computer vision, and pave a new way for the research of image restoration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Tsinghua University<\/p>\n\n\n\n Supervisors: Guoliang Li (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>, Jianhua Feng<\/p>\n\n\n\n Research interests:<\/strong> Autonomous Database Systems<\/p>\n\n\n\n Long-term research goal:<\/strong> Database optimization techniques have been studied for over 50 years, which is like the \u201cmoat\u201d of database kernels, i.e., reducing the cost of ownership, optimizing the performance, and even improving the system robustness. However, most database products only adopt heuristic tools, which are manually crafted and have limited optimization capability. By integrating ML techniques, databases can automatically decide the logical and physical designs based on workload\/system characters, and potentially turns from \u201cdriver-assisted\u201d to \u201cself-driving\u201d. Thus, my long-term goal is to build a practical \u201cself-driving\u201d database system, which is equipped with three critical characters (i.e., proactive monitoring, configuration tuning, and learned optimizer), and can efficiently adapt to various SLA requirements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n KAIST <\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Supervisors: <\/strong>Steven Euijong<\/strong> (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> Whang<\/strong> (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Research interests:<\/strong> Trustworthy AI, Model Fairness, Human-Centered AI<\/p>\n\n\n\n Long-term research goal:<\/strong> Trustworthy AI is becoming indispensable for modern machine learning applications. Among various trustworthiness aspects, I am especially interested in building fair AI frameworks without demographic disparities. As my long-term research goal, I aim to bridge the gap between fair AI technology and the real world by building human-centered fair AI systems. Most of the existing fairness algorithms assume mathematical definitions of fairness, which do not fully capture various social contexts. To address this problem, I aim to build a human-centered fair training system that better reflects humans needs of fairness into any application. I envision that this research will take us a step closer to positively impacting society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Tsinghua University<\/p>\n\n\n\n Supervisors: Cheng Wu (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>; Gao Huang (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Research interests:<\/strong> Dynamic Neural Networks; Efficient Deep Learning; Computer Vision<\/p>\n\n\n\n Long-term research goal:<\/strong> Human brains are far more efficient than current deep learning models. The brains can learn from a small amount of multi-modal data (e.g., vision, language, and audio) with minimal power consumption. The inference process of brains is quite cheap such that it can be supported with a little chemical energy. These advantages may come from the sparsity of human brains: only a few specialized neurons are activated and trained for each specific task. The long-term goal of my research is to develop the sparsely-activated deep networks that work like human brains. My ambition is to close the gap from AI to human intelligence in training\/inference efficiency by exploring this direction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n University of Chinese Academy of Sciences<\/p>\n\n\n\n Supervisors: Yong-Sheng Hu<\/p>\n\n\n\n Research interests:<\/strong> Energy storage, Machine Learning<\/p>\n\n\n\n Long-term research goal:<\/strong> Rechargeable batteries are crucial in many applications ranging from portable electronics and medical devices, to renewable energy integration in power grids and electric vehicles. It is important to predict the properties or improve performance of these batteries via in situ monitoring methods without damage. Thus, an intelligent battery management system is necessary. However, the chemical\/physical processes that take place inside a battery cell during operation are very complex. The overall goal of my research is to combine the electrochemical mechanisms and data-driven model to explore the underlying common laws of rechargeable batteries and further achieve dynamic battery life prediction and optimization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n University of Science and Technology of China<\/p>\n\n\n\n Supervisors: Baining Guo, Yong Wang<\/p>\n\n\n\n Research interests:<\/strong> Computer Vision, Foundation Model<\/p>\n\n\n\n Long-term research goal:<\/strong> My research has focused on developing basic neural architectures for computer vision, particularly the general-purpose visual backbone which extracts image\/video features and is applicable to various computer vision tasks. Visual backbone is the foundation for various visual problems and the improvements of backbone architecture will benefit almost all vision tasks. In the future, I will further explore how to build a more generic vision architecture that can handle almost all vision problems with various types of visual signals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Over one hundred fifty distinguished PhD candidates from 50 leading research academic institutions in China, Hong Kong SAR, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and Singapore were nominated for the 2021 Microsoft Research Asia fellowships. After evaluating each application, our review committee selected 11 outstanding PhD candidates whose exceptional talent and innovation in computer science-related research identifies them as emerging leaders in the Asia-Pacific region.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Microsoft Research Asia recognizes the following fellows, who represent the best and the brightest PhD candidates in the Asia-Pacific region.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Westlake University<\/p>\n\n\n\n Supervisors: Heping Xu (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Research interests:<\/strong> Computational Biology, Humoral Immunity<\/p>\n\n\n\n Long-term research goal:<\/strong> The humoral immune response is a type of adaptive immune response that enables the human body to defend itself in a targeted way, and is the basis for the vaccine to work. Despite considerable progress, there remain many knowledge gaps in the understanding of the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying humoral immunity, which hinders the production of effective vaccines against many deadly viruses. The overall goal of my research is to leverage computational biology approaches to deepen our understanding about humoral immunity, thus providing new prescriptions for the development of urgently needed vaccines. Moreover, such knowledge can also contribute to the development of therapies for autoimmune disease.<\/p>\n\n\n\n2022 Award schedule<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Provisions of the award<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Eligibility criteria<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Supplementary information<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Related Computational Science subject areas<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Evaluation criteria of computational science area applicants<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
How to apply<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Timeline<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
June 10, 2022<\/strong>: Application period closes
Mid-August 2022<\/strong>: Online interviews
September 2022<\/strong>: Selected applicants announced<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n\nFrequently asked questions<\/h2>\n\n\n\n\n\n
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Hanzhi Wang<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Haotian Li<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Heecheol Kim<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Kun Zhou<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Linfeng Zhang<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Ruyi Ji<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Wenjing Wang<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Xuanhe Zhou<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Yuji Roh<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Yulin Wang<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Yuqi Li<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Ze Liu<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Dianyu Chen<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Kaizhang Kang<\/strong><\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n