{"id":363722,"date":"2021-02-03T13:26:57","date_gmt":"2021-02-03T21:26:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/?post_type=msr-academic-program&#038;p=363722"},"modified":"2024-02-14T11:29:26","modified_gmt":"2024-02-14T19:29:26","slug":"dissertation-grant","status":"publish","type":"msr-academic-program","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/academic-program\/dissertation-grant\/","title":{"rendered":"Dissertation Grant"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"what-it-is\">What it is<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>A research grant for PhD students at universities in the United States and Canada, who are underrepresented in the field of computing and pursuing research aligned to the research areas carried out by researchers at Microsoft.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"how-to-submit-a-proposal\">How to submit a proposal<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Doctoral students enrolled in their fourth year or beyond of PhD studies and who are underrepresented in the field of computing must <a href=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/academic-program\/dissertation-grant\/#!proposal\">submit their proposal directly<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"contact-us\">Contact us<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Direct any questions not answered in the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/academic-program\/dissertation-grant\/#!faq\">FAQ<\/a> to the Grant\u2019s Program Chair, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/people\/bongshin\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bongshin Lee<\/a>, and Program Manager, Mariah L. Christianson, at <a href=\"mailto:msrgrant@microsoft.com?subject=Microsoft%20Research%20Dissertation%20Grant\">msrgrant@microsoft.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Microsoft recognizes the value of diversity in computing. The Microsoft Research Dissertation Grant aims to increase the pipeline of diverse talent receiving advanced degrees in computing-related fields by providing a research funding opportunity for doctoral students who are underrepresented in the field of computing. This includes those who self-identify as a woman, African American, Black, Hispanic, Latinx, American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, LGBTQI+, and\/or person with a disability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"timeline\">Timeline<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Proposals and letters of recommendation were accepted through Monday, March 22, 2021 at 12:00 PM (Noon) Pacific Daylight Time<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Recipients announced by June 30, 2021<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"provisions-of-the-2021-award\">Provisions of the 2021 award<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>The 2021 Microsoft Research Dissertation Grant recipients will receive funding up to $25,000 USD for academic year 2021-22 to help them complete research as part of their doctoral thesis work.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>An invitation to the PhD Summit: a two-day workshop in the fall hosted by Microsoft Research where grant recipients will meet with Microsoft researchers and other top students to share their research. We hope to offer both a virtual and in-person participation option; we will continue to monitor local and national health and safety guidance and may hold a completely virtual event if advisable.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"eligibility-criteria\">Eligibility criteria<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Microsoft\u2019s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Grant recipients should support this mission and embrace opportunities to foster diverse and inclusive cultures within their communities.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>PhD students must be enrolled at a university in the United States or Canada.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Proposed research must be closely related to the general research areas carried out by researchers at Microsoft as noted in the <em>Our research<\/em> tab above.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Students must be in their fourth year or beyond of a PhD program as of March 22, 2021, the proposal deadline. Students must have started their PhD in September 2017 or earlier to be considered in their fourth year of the program having taken into account transfers, approved leaves of absence, etc.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>PhD students submitting a proposal for this grant must self-identify as a woman, African American, Black, Hispanic, Latinx, American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, LGBTQI+, and\/or person with a disability.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>PhD students must continue to be enrolled at the university in the fall of 2021 or forfeit the award. Grants are not available for extension. If you require time away for family or medical leave, this will be accommodated. If you are unsure if a particular need for time away will affect the award, you can contact us at Microsoft Research Grants (<a href=\"mailto:msrgrant@microsoft.com?subject=Microsoft%20Research%20Dissertation%20Grant\">msrgrant@microsoft.com<\/a>).<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Payment of the award, as described above, will be made directly to the university and dispersed according to the university\u2019s policies. Microsoft will have discretion as to how any remaining funds will be used if the student is no longer qualified to receive funding (e.g., if the student unenrolls from the program, graduates, or transfers to a different university).<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Funding is for use only during the recipient\u2019s time in the PhD program; it cannot be used for support in a role past graduation, such as a postdoc or faculty position. Those interested in receiving this grant will need to confirm their PhD program starting month and year, as well as their expected graduation month and year.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>A recipient of the Microsoft Research Dissertation Grant subject to disciplinary proceedings for inappropriate behavior, including but not limited to discrimination, harassment (including sexual harassment), or plagiarism will forfeit their funding.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>If you do not meet the above criteria, you may be eligible for other <a href=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/academic-programs\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Academic Programs<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Microsoft actively seeks to foster greater levels of diversity in our workforce and in our pipeline of future researchers. We are always looking for the best and brightest talent and celebrate individuality. We invite candidates to come as they are and do what they love.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"how-to-submit-your-grant-proposal\">How to submit your grant proposal<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Proposals and letters of recommendation for the 2021 Microsoft Research Dissertation Grant were accepted through Monday, March 22, 2021 at 12:00 PM (Noon) Pacific Daylight Time. The below outlines the information necessary to submit your proposal in our submission portal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You will be asked to answer the below questions in a form:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Your name, email, country, university, and department<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Primary and secondary research areas (click on the <em>Our research<\/em> at the top of the page for a full list)<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Working title of your dissertation<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Month and year you entered the PhD program and expected graduation date (you must be in your fourth year or beyond of the PhD program as of March 22, 2021, the proposal deadline)<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Attestation that you are a doctoral student who is underrepresented in the field of computing which include those who self-identify as a woman, African American, Black, Hispanic, Latinx, American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, LGBTQI+, and\/or person with a disability<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Total amount of funding requested up to $25,000 USD<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Three to six names of researchers at Microsoft identified as someone with topical expertise who may be asked to evaluate your grant proposal. You can identify researchers by selecting your primary research area from the <em>Our research<\/em> tab at the top of the page. Then provide keywords related to your research to filter. Do not contact the researchers for the purpose of listing them as a potential reviewer. Do not list researchers with a title like Corporate Vice President or Director.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>One to three conferences you are most likely to attend<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Self-assessment of the Statement of Good Standing: <em>\u201cI declare I have never been disciplined for inappropriate behavior, including, but not limited to discrimination, harassment (including sexual harassment), or plagiarism. If I am selected to receive funding under Microsoft\u2019s Grant program, during my funding time period, I agree to inform Microsoft should I be subjected to disciplinary proceedings for inappropriate behavior, including but not limited to discrimination, harassment (including sexual harassment), or plagiarism which would result in forfeiture of funding under Microsoft\u2019s Grant program.\u201d<\/em><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>URL to your professional website (optional, but strongly recommended; you are encouraged to make certain it is up-to-date)<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Where and when you held any internships (optional, does not impact your ability to receive a grant)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>You will be asked to upload 3 documents:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Your curriculum vitae, thesis topic description, and one-page description of how the grant would be used will be uploaded separately. Accepted formats are docx, doc, and pdf. Email or hard-copy submissions will not be considered. Name the individual files using the convention indicated below. Include your first name and last name as part of your file name each separated by an underscore (e.g., Jane_Smith_cv.docx).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Curriculum vitae \u2013 <strong>file name: cv<\/strong><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Thesis topic description (maximum two pages including references, font no smaller than 10-point) \u2013 <strong>file name: thesis<\/strong><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Description of how the grant would be used, including a budget (maximum one page) \u2013 <strong>file name: budget<\/strong>\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>You will be asked to request 3 letters of recommendation via the submission portal:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Add the contact information (name, affiliation, email) and send the email request through the submission portal to your three recommenders as soon as possible so they have ample time to provide a letter. Their deadline is the same as your proposal deadline on <strong>Monday, March 22, 2021 at 12:00 PM (Noon) Pacific Daylight Time<\/strong>. They should be established researchers familiar with your research (at least one letter must be from your primary academic advisor\/supervisor and only one letter can be from a current Microsoft employee). Once you send the request through the submission portal, they will receive a private link to upload a letter of recommendation for you. Please note that you and your recommenders may need to check your junk folders in order to find emails from our portal. As reference, here is a list of the <a class=\"msr-external-link glyph-append glyph-append-open-in-new-tab glyph-append-xsmall\" href=\"https:\/\/support.zenginehq.com\/article\/873-not-receiving-emails-troubleshooting\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">various system email addresses<span class=\"sr-only\"> (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> you can add to allowed emails.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>Proposals submitted to Microsoft will not be returned. Microsoft cannot assume responsibility for the confidentiality of information submitted in the proposal. Therefore, proposals should not contain information that is confidential, restricted, or sensitive. Microsoft reserves the right to make public the information on those proposals that receive awards, except those portions containing budgetary or personally identifiable information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Incomplete proposals will not be considered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Due to the volume of submissions, Microsoft Research cannot provide individual feedback on proposals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-buttons is-layout-flex wp-block-buttons-is-layout-flex\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-button\"><a data-bi-type=\"button\" class=\"wp-block-button__link wp-element-button\" href=\"https:\/\/webportalapp.com\/sp\/2021_msr_dissertation_grant\">Submit a proposal<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n\n<p>Below are the answers to frequently asked questions about the 2021 Microsoft Research Dissertation Grant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"eligibility-criteria\">Eligibility criteria<\/h3>\n\n\n\n\n\n<p>Yes, if you are a full-time international student attending a school in the United States or Canada and meet the eligibility requirements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n<p>This program includes only schools in the United States and Canada. If you are a student attending a school outside the United States and Canada, you are not eligible for this grant. You may be eligible for other academic research awards found on our <a href=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/academic-programs\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Academic Programs<\/a> page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n<p>Students must still be enrolled in their PhD program during the fall of 2021 in order to receive and use the grant. Grants are for completing dissertation research only, and cannot be used for support in a role past graduation, such as a postdoc or faculty position.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n<p>Students must be in their fourth year or beyond in a PhD program when they submit their grant proposal. Students must have started their PhD in September 2017 or earlier to be considered in their fourth year of the program, and must continue to be enrolled through the fall of 2021. If you do not meet this criteria, you may be eligible for other academic research awards found on our <a href=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/academic-programs\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Academic Programs<\/a> page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n<p>Employees and directors of Microsoft Corporation, and its subsidiaries and affiliates are not eligible, nor are persons involved in the execution or administration of this grant, or the family members of each above (parents, children, siblings, spouse\/domestic partners, or individuals residing in the same household).<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-css-opacity is-style-dots\"\/>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"research-areas\">Research areas<\/h3>\n\n\n\n\n\n<p>There are plenty of both hardware and software projects currently in Microsoft Research. The reason the areas of research are broad is that Microsoft Research is very broad, and there are a number of people reviewing the fellowship proposals across a wide range of areas. Look at the work, people in Microsoft Research are doing by clicking on the areas noted in the Our research tab above which will give you some idea of the focus areas within the broad areas to guide your focus area choice. In the end, propose the work you are interested in doing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n<p>It depends on the individuals involved in reviewing the proposal, and it is hard to say what is going to be of more interest. The trends of the industry are probably going to be reflected in what is interesting in general. Guiding question: Imagine you succeed. Tell us how someone\u2019s life changes as a result.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n<p>Your choices of primary and secondary areas help us choose who reviews your proposal. Pick areas that align with conferences\/journals where you would publish.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n<p>Microsoft Research is interdisciplinary, so it is something we understand. What you choose as a research area is a \u201csoft\u201d preference and will simply help us better route your proposal. Utilize the primary and secondary research area option to help capture and communicate your research area the best you can.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Here are some suggestions and guiding questions to help you choose a research area:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Do you have a home conference? Are there one or two conferences you go to in a more specific area?<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Who do you want to be reading your proposal?<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Who would you want to network with? What area of research are they in?<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Who would be most excited about my topic? What area of research are they in?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n\n\n<p>Your work should be of interest to researchers at Microsoft; however, it doesn\u2019t need to directly line up with an existing project or topic. It is important for your work to be related enough that researchers at Microsoft will be able to review it and have interest in supporting it. Microsoft Research is large and interdisciplinary, and covers a broad area \u2014 use the <em>Our research<\/em> tab above as a guideline for the areas we cover. When in doubt, we suggest you browse the webpages of researchers who look like they may be related to your area and see if they have papers in the similar topics or publish in conferences you publish in and\/or attend. If you find one or more such researchers that share these connections with you, then you can feel confident that your work is related enough to submit a proposal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-css-opacity is-style-dots\"\/>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"proposal\">Proposal<\/h3>\n\n\n\n\n\n<p>Accomplishment, impact, and alignment with the work that we are doing at Microsoft Research. Highlight papers you have published and any awards you have received and describe the impact that your research will have on others and how the Dissertation Grant will enable your research.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-css-opacity is-style-dots\"\/>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"letters-of-recommendation\">Letters of recommendation<\/h3>\n\n\n\n\n\n<p>Given you have three letters, it would be good to include a letter from one person who can speak about your current research and one person who has known you longer, even if it may not be in your current research area. The longer-term perspective is definitely important and valuable. The value of a letter is evaluating how you work, how you collaborate with people, and what your process is as a researcher. This transcends what your particular topic is. Keep in mind that one letter doesn\u2019t have to address all things; across all three letters, we want to get a full picture of who you are over a longer term, but also insight into your recent work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n<p>The purpose of a letter of recommendation is to provide us with the bigger picture of what you are doing, how you work as a researcher, how you learn, how you approach projects, and how you collaborate with others. The letter will also provide us with insight from people who have been working with you and observing you for some amount of time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n<p>At least one recommendation needs to come from an advisor\/supervisor, but letters of recommendation from collaborators are allowed. We are looking for people who can speak to you, your work as a researcher, and your character.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n<p>Those you provided as references in our system will be sent an auto-generated email with instructions to upload their letters of recommendation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-css-opacity is-style-dots\"\/>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"review-process\">Review process<\/h3>\n\n\n\n\n\n<p>Reviewers will rate proposals based on the technical\/scientific quality and the potential impact of the proposed research.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n<p>Proposals will be reviewed by researchers at Microsoft with appropriate topical expertise. The three to six Microsoft researchers identified as someone with topical expertise to evaluate the grant proposal could be among those asked to review that individual\u2019s submission. You can identify researchers by selecting your primary research area from the <em>Our research<\/em> tab at the top of the page. Then provide keywords related to your research to filter. Do not contact the researchers for the purpose of listing them as a potential reviewer. We strongly suggest restricting your suggestions to people whose title is <em>Researcher<\/em>, <em>Senior Researcher<\/em>, <em>Principal Researcher<\/em>, or <em> Senior Principal Researcher<\/em> (i.e., if you list someone with a title like <em>Corporate Vice President<\/em> or <em>Director<\/em> it is very unlikely they would be available to review your proposal). Your choice of primary and (optional) secondary research area descriptors in the proposal will also help us select researchers at Microsoft to review your proposal (i.e., researchers whose own work falls under those research categories).<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n<p>Selected proposals will receive notification no later than June 30, 2021. Due to the volume of submissions, Microsoft Research cannot provide individual feedback to those individuals who do not receive research grants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n<p>There were over 200 proposals submitted last year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-css-opacity is-style-dots\"\/>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"award-details\">Award details<\/h3>\n\n\n\n\n\n<p>Persons awarded a Microsoft Research Dissertation Grant in June will receive their financial awards by September of that year. Microsoft sends the payment directly to the university, who will disperse funds according to their guidelines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n<p>No. This award will be provided as an unrestricted gift with no terms and restrictions applied to it. No portion of these funds should be applied to overhead or other indirect costs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n<p>The tax implications for the research grant are based on the policy at the university and applicable tax laws.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n<p>The Microsoft Research Dissertation Grant is not subject to any intellectual property (IP) restrictions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n<p>If you accept a Microsoft Research Dissertation Grant, you may receive another fellowship from another company or institution during the same academic period. However, if your tuition and\/or stipend are being covered by a fellowship award, then you should not request tuition\/stipend funds from the grant as part of your budget.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n<p>Absolutely! There is no limit to the amount of grant funding that can be used for childcare.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n<h2>2021 Grant Recipients<\/h2>\n<div style=\"height: 25px\"><\/div>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-746254 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/05\/Haley-Adams_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"2021 Dissertation Grant recipient: Haley Adams\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/05\/Haley-Adams_150x208.jpg 150w, https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/05\/Haley-Adams_150x208-9x12.jpg 9w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 150px) 100vw, 150px\"><\/p>\n<h3><a class=\"msr-external-link glyph-append glyph-append-open-in-new-tab glyph-append-xsmall\" href=\"http:\/\/haleyscommit.dev\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Haley Adams<\/a><\/h3>\n<p>Vanderbilt University<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Exposing Blind Spots in XR Accessibility With Simulated Vision Impairments<\/p>\n<p>Over fourteen million people in the United States of America have some form of vision disability in which vision cannot be corrected with glasses alone. Many people within this population are unable to use extended reality (XR) head-mounted displays due to their inaccessible designs. Worse yet, best practices for accessibility in immersive XR are still a nascent area of research. In my dissertation, I develop an immersive visual impairment simulation that is both eye-tracked and data-driven. Furthermore, this testbed is validated by analyzing behavioral responses across both visually impaired and normally sighted users. My testbed will allow normally sighted individuals to better understand and design for people with visual impairments by allowing them to experience visual impairments firsthand.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-746266 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/05\/Stella-Arthur_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"2021 Dissertation Grant recipient: Stella Arthur\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/05\/Stella-Arthur_150x208.jpg 150w, https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/05\/Stella-Arthur_150x208-9x12.jpg 9w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 150px) 100vw, 150px\"><\/p>\n<h3><a class=\"msr-external-link glyph-append glyph-append-open-in-new-tab glyph-append-xsmall\" href=\"https:\/\/uwaterloo.ca\/interrai-canada\/about\/people\/snaawire\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Stella Arthur<\/a><\/h3>\n<p>University of Waterloo<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Predicting Adverse Outcomes Among Frail Surgical Patients in Acute Care Hospitals<\/p>\n<p>The pace of global aging speaks to the urgency with which frailty must be addressed. Frailty is not an inevitable consequence of aging, but a preventable and even reversible vulnerable state. Multimodal approaches comprising early identification, risk prediction of pertinent outcomes, and targeted intervention protocols are needed. By bridging clinical expertise and AI, my research harnesses big data grounded in integrated information system to develop premorbid predictive risk algorithms that translate into meaningful standard practice. The algorithm predicts negative outcomes including delays in discharge or alternate level of care (ALC). Using Chi-squared automatic interaction detection (CHAID) and classification and regression tree (CART), results will be validated within home and community care and acute-care hospital cohorts. This lays the foundation for a collaborative framework involving real-time clinical exchange where decision support tools are seamlessly incorporated into routine workflows. This optimizes transitional care challenges like discharge planning and proactively tackles ALC and the woes of \u201challway medicine\u201d.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-746251 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/05\/Dhruv-DJ-Jain_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"2021 Dissertation Grant recipient: Dhruv DJ Jain\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/05\/Dhruv-DJ-Jain_150x208.jpg 150w, https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/05\/Dhruv-DJ-Jain_150x208-9x12.jpg 9w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 150px) 100vw, 150px\"><\/p>\n<h3><a class=\"msr-external-link glyph-append glyph-append-open-in-new-tab glyph-append-xsmall\" href=\"https:\/\/homes.cs.washington.edu\/~djain\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Dhruv \u201cDJ\u201d Jain<\/a><\/h3>\n<p>University of Washington<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Sound Sensing and Feedback Techniques for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Users<\/p>\n<p>Sound provides rich information about our world, ranging from actionable cues (e.g., a microwave beep) to safety related cues (e.g., a fire alarm) to cues that make one feel present (e.g., a bird chirp). However, sounds are not always accessible to people who are d\/Deaf and hard of hearing (DHH). In my work, I am leveraging advances in Human Computer Interaction, signal processing, and machine learning to sense and provide sound feedback to DHH people. Specifically, I am designing and evaluating three related systems: (1) a smarthome system, called HomeSound, to sense and visualize sounds in the home, (2) a smartwatch app, called SoundWatch, to notify about sounds in diverse contexts, and (3) an augmented reality head-mounted display system, called HoloSound, to display speech transcription and other conversation cues (e.g., speaker identification, location). All three systems are being deployed and tested with DHH users. My overarching vision is to transform how DHH people think about, experience, and engage with the sound.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-746263 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/05\/Oscar-Lemus_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"2021 Dissertation Grant recipient: Oscar Lemus\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/05\/Oscar-Lemus_150x208.jpg 150w, https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/05\/Oscar-Lemus_150x208-9x12.jpg 9w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 150px) 100vw, 150px\"><\/p>\n<h3><a class=\"msr-external-link glyph-append glyph-append-open-in-new-tab glyph-append-xsmall\" href=\"https:\/\/oscarlemus.cargo.site\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Oscar A. Lemus<\/a><\/h3>\n<p>Indiana University Bloomington<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Technology and Women Micro-Entrepreneurs in the Global South and North: Managing Economic and Home Life Boundaries with Digital Tools and Analog Artefacts<\/p>\n<p>Spaces and technologies are routinely and strategically used by women micro-business owners in the Global South and Global North to manage how they present themselves to the public, define and manage their family obligations, and turn a profit to make a living. To date, however, little research has focused on exactly how these ever-present yet somehow also invisible, overlooked workers do this. By noting the use, personalization, and integration of technologies, social practices, and spaces and time, this mixed-method dissertation examines how women micro-entrepreneurs in Guatemala and the U.S. manage their economic and home boundaries while shedding light on the general concept of \u201centrepreneur\u201d, the work it entails, and the tangible consequences of this classification on women\u2019s lives, tech and economic policies, and literature on work and computing. This dissertation will inform the design of digital technologies for women micro-entrepreneurs and the future of work-oriented policy.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-746260 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/05\/Maria-Pacheco_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"2021 Dissertation Grant recipient: Maria Pacheco\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/05\/Maria-Pacheco_150x208.jpg 150w, https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/05\/Maria-Pacheco_150x208-9x12.jpg 9w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 150px) 100vw, 150px\"><\/p>\n<h3><a class=\"msr-external-link glyph-append glyph-append-open-in-new-tab glyph-append-xsmall\" href=\"https:\/\/mlpacheco.github.io\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Maria Leonor Pacheco<\/a><\/h3>\n<p>Purdue University<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Neural-Symbolic Modeling for Natural Language Discourse<\/p>\n<p>Modeling realistic natural language scenarios requires dealing with long, noisy inputs and accounting for complicated structural dependencies. Traditionally, there have been two approaches for doing this. Structured prediction methods combine symbolic representations of knowledge and probabilistic inference, while neural approaches learn distributed representations that capture the underlying dependencies in a latent high-dimensional space. In my dissertation, I motivate the integration of these two modeling paradigms for natural language discourse scenarios, and propose a neural-symbolic framework to model both the language input, and the context surrounding the language event. The content consists of the different chunks of language and the way they flow together to convey meaning. The context is the frame that surrounds the communicative event and provides resources for its interpretation. I identify four key challenges and opportunities in the space of neural-symbolic methods for discourse: declarative modeling, computational considerations, deriving explanations and learning with humans in the loop.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-746242 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/05\/Chara-Podimata_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"2021 Dissertation Grant recipient: Chara Podimata\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/05\/Chara-Podimata_150x208.jpg 150w, https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/05\/Chara-Podimata_150x208-9x12.jpg 9w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 150px) 100vw, 150px\"><\/p>\n<h3><a class=\"msr-external-link glyph-append glyph-append-open-in-new-tab glyph-append-xsmall\" href=\"https:\/\/www.charapodimata.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Chara Podimata<\/a><\/h3>\n<p>Harvard University<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Algorithms for Incentive-Compatible and Incentive-Aware Learning<\/p>\n<p>My research addresses questions related to strategic behavior in Machine Learning (ML). These questions are of utmost importance nowadays, since ML algorithms are increasingly used in real-world, highly consequential decision-making that affects our everyday lives, ranging from online ad auctions guiding our purchasing behavior to complex algorithms deciding whether we should be approved for a loan or not. My dissertation serves as a building block towards establishing a theory of incentives for ML algorithms and studying their societal implications through the two paradigms of incentive-compatible and incentive-aware ML \u2013 two terms that are borrowed from the Game Theory literature while providing novel learning algorithms tailored to these strategic settings.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-746248 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/05\/David-Porfirio_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"2021 Dissertation Grant recipient: David Porfirio\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/05\/David-Porfirio_150x208.jpg 150w, https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/05\/David-Porfirio_150x208-9x12.jpg 9w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 150px) 100vw, 150px\"><\/p>\n<h3><a class=\"msr-external-link glyph-append glyph-append-open-in-new-tab glyph-append-xsmall\" href=\"https:\/\/dporfirio.github.io\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">David Porfirio<\/a><\/h3>\n<p>University of Wisconsin\u2013Madison<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Authoring Social Interactions Between Humans and Robots<\/p>\n<p>As robots are progressively used in the workplace, at home, and in public settings, design tools for creating social human-robot interactions become increasingly critical. Interaction designers and developers must coordinate individual behavioral modalities, such as speech and locomotion, to produce appropriate social behaviors, all while ensuring that the interaction logic, or how the robot responds to sensory input, produces a natural interaction flow. Furthermore, the success of a social human-robot interaction is defined by variable criteria, depending on the norms, constraints, and user preferences of the interaction context. The focus of my dissertation is on how human-robot interaction \u201cauthoring\u201d tools can mitigate these challenges. Specifically, I seek to answer how authoring tools can help designers and developers create robust interactions by (1) filling in gaps in designer knowledge and expertise and (2) eliciting knowledge already possessed by designers and assisting with the integration of this knowledge into interaction designs.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-746245 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/05\/Chengcheng-Wan_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"2021 Dissertation Grant recipient: Chengcheng Wan\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/05\/Chengcheng-Wan_150x208.jpg 150w, https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/05\/Chengcheng-Wan_150x208-9x12.jpg 9w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 150px) 100vw, 150px\"><\/p>\n<h3><a class=\"msr-external-link glyph-append glyph-append-open-in-new-tab glyph-append-xsmall\" href=\"http:\/\/people.cs.uchicago.edu\/~cwan\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Chengcheng Wan<\/a><\/h3>\n<p>University of Chicago<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Accurate Anytime Learning for Energy and Timeliness in Software Systems<\/p>\n<p>Machine learning (ML) provides efficient solutions for a number of problems that were difficult to solve with traditional computing techniques. Deep neural networks have become a key workload for many computing systems due to their high inference accuracy. This accuracy, however, comes at a cost of long latency, high energy usage, or both. It also introduces many ML-specific bugs into software systems. My thesis aims to help developing accurate, efficient, and robust machine learning software systems. In the past few years, my work has focused on creating robust methods to incorporate neural networks into software systems to satisfy differing requirements and goals across a variety of users and applications. My past research has led to first-author papers published at ATC\u201920, ICML\u201920, and ICSE\u201921.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-746269 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/05\/Yawen-Wang_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"2021 Dissertation Grant recipient: Yawen Wang\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/05\/Yawen-Wang_150x208.jpg 150w, https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/05\/Yawen-Wang_150x208-9x12.jpg 9w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 150px) 100vw, 150px\"><\/p>\n<h3><a class=\"msr-external-link glyph-append glyph-append-open-in-new-tab glyph-append-xsmall\" href=\"http:\/\/web.stanford.edu\/~yawenw\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Yawen Wang<\/a><\/h3>\n<p>Stanford University<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Improving Cloud Efficiency with Online Learning<\/p>\n<p>Cloud computing has emerged as the dominant platform for computing due to its ease of use and scalability advantages. To maintain high-performance services in a cost-effective manner, cloud providers need to efficiently administer a large number of management tasks including resource scheduling, power management, maintenance planning and more. Recent works have shown promising results with machine learning assisted resource management policies. To account for more dynamic changes in the cloud environment, online learning becomes necessary where the model is continuously updated online with live data. My dissertation research focuses on facilitating the integration of online learning into cloud resource managers. I propose to build a general framework that guides developers to reason through agent-specific issues while automatically catching and handling common problems shared across learning-based management agents during deployment. Such a framework will help deploy more safe and robust online learning-based resource managers in the cloud to improve resource efficiency.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-746257 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/05\/Ihudiya-Finda-Williams_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"2021 Dissertation Grant recipient: Ihudiya Finda Williams\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/05\/Ihudiya-Finda-Williams_150x208.jpg 150w, https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/05\/Ihudiya-Finda-Williams_150x208-9x12.jpg 9w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 150px) 100vw, 150px\"><\/p>\n<h3><a class=\"msr-external-link glyph-append glyph-append-open-in-new-tab glyph-append-xsmall\" href=\"http:\/\/www.ihudiyaogburu.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Ihudiya Finda Williams<\/a><\/h3>\n<p>University of Michigan<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Using Participatory Research to Design Mobile Technology that Teaches Digital Literacy with Returning Citizens<\/p>\n<p>Job search today involves digital elements such as applying online or conducting an interview. Yet, inmates have very limited opportunities to learn digital skills \u2013 at least in the United States, prisons do not provide internet access, and digital literacy trainings if offered at all are limited. My research focuses on understanding what mobile phone-based interventions could build on existing social support to improve formerly incarcerated individuals\u2019 digital literacy skills? To explore this question, I will run a participatory design workshop where formerly incarcerated individuals and their support systems will design the elements of a mobile phone-based set of tools that can be used to learn digital literacy skills for job search. Next, I will develop a prototype and evaluate it by conducting a usability study. My empirical research will contribute to the much-needed conversation of how to support formerly incarcerated individuals in a world that increasingly relies on digital technology.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<div class=\"js-accordion\" data-accordion-prefix-classes=\"msr-accordion\" data-accordion-expandall=\"true\">\n<h4 class=\"js-accordion__header\">\n            \t2020 Grant Recipients            <\/h4>\n<div class=\"js-accordion__panel\">\n<p class=\"msr-accordion-content\">\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-663039 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/05\/Rogerio-Bonatti_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"2020 Dissertation Grant: Rogerio Bonatti\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\"><\/p>\n<h3>Rogerio Bonatti<\/h3>\n<p>Carnegie Mellon University<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Active Vision: Autonomous Aerial Cinematography with Learned Artistic Decision-Making<\/p>\n<p>Aerial cinematography is revolutionizing industries that require live and dynamic camera viewpoints, such as entertainment, sports, and security. Fundamentally, it is a tool with immense potential to improve human creativity, expressiveness, and sharing of experiences. However, safely piloting a drone while filming a moving target in the presence of obstacles is immensely taxing, often requiring multiple highly trained human operators to safely control a single vehicle. My dissertation focuses on building autonomous systems that can empower any individual with the full artistic capabilities of aerial cameras. I am developing intelligent cameras that actively reason about the cinematographic quality of viewpoints, and safely generate sequences of shots that avoid collisions and occlusions with obstacles. The theory and systems developed in this work can impact video generation for both real-world and simulated environments, such as professional and amateur movie-making, videogames, and virtual reality.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-663033 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/05\/Kiante-Brantley_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"2020 Dissertation Grant: Kiante Brantley\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\"><\/p>\n<h3>Kiant\u00e9 Brantley<\/h3>\n<p>University of Maryland, College Park<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Practical Techniques for Leveraging Experts for Sequential Decisions and Predictions<\/p>\n<p>My research addresses practical and theoretical sample complexity issues which arise in reinforcement learning by leveraging knowledge from experts, specified in the form of \u201cAnnotations.\u201d As the impact of machine learning on all aspects of our lives continues to grow, having systems that can learn through interaction with users and the world becomes more pressing. Unfortunately, today\u2019s approaches\u2014typically driven by reinforcement learning algorithms\u2014require a large number of interactions, which is feasible only for systems we can fully simulate. But for many real-world systems, simulators do not already exist. This means we need to develop algorithms that can interact with real systems and have very low sample complexity so that they can learn in a reasonable amount of time. I propose that for many such systems, we can leverage certain forms of expert knowledge, which I call \u201cAnnotations\u201d, to reduce sample complexity and lead to more practical algorithms in real-world settings.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-663036 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/05\/Mayara-Figueiredo_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"2020 Dissertation Grant: Mayara Figueiredo\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\"><\/p>\n<h3>Mayara Costa Figueiredo<\/h3>\n<p>University of California, Irvine<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Self-Tracking for Fertility Care: A Holistic Approach<\/p>\n<p>With the recent popularity of self-tracking technologies, individuals are increasingly using and interacting with their personal data. Fertility is a health matter that has been progressively assisted by consumer health technologies, which aim to support people in tracking diverse data potentially associated with their fertility cycles. However, fertility is a complex context for self-tracking, presenting many challenges, involving diverse goals and transitions, and entangled with social factors and taboos. My dissertation research combines multiple studies to investigate self-tracking for fertility care, focusing on understanding individuals\u2019 data practices, how technology influences these practices, and the consequences of using such data. Based on these studies, I explore how design and technology can be used to reinforce positive experiences, avoid negative emotional burden, and support holistic tracking for fertility.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-663042 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/05\/Sami-Davies_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"2020 Dissertation Grant: Sami Davies\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\"><\/p>\n<h3>Sami Davies<\/h3>\n<p>University of Washington<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Complex Analysis, Hierarchies, and Matroids\u2014Improving Algorithms via a Mathematical Perspective<\/p>\n<p>As a theoretical computer scientist, my goal is to design algorithms with provable guarantees for practically motivated problems. Some of the main topics in my thesis work are fair allocation, scheduling, and statistical reconstruction. These problems are united by the need to understand some underlying mathematical structure. In fair allocation, we discover a connection to matroids allowing for a simpler, more general, and more efficient approximation algorithm. Additionally, we make major progress on a scheduling problem using linear programming hierarchies and a partitioning algorithm for metric spaces. I also use tools from complex analysis and probability theory to study generating functions arising from various statistical reconstruction problems.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-663030 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/05\/Farah-Deeba_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"2020 Dissertation Grant: Farah Deeba\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\"><\/p>\n<h3>Farah Deeba<\/h3>\n<p>The University of British Columbia<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Placenta: Towards an Objective Pregnancy Screening System<\/p>\n<p>The placenta forms the critical interface between the fetus and the mother. Placental insufficiency has adverse effects on the neonatal outcome and life-long health of the offspring as well as the mother. The current clinical practice of ultrasound-based pregnancy monitoring relies heavily on user interpretation. Additionally, conventional ultrasound suffers from low sensitivity to detect the underlying pathophysiological change resulting from placental insufficiency. There is a need to develop effective parameters that would be the predictor of the underlying pathophysiology, and therefore, would serve as potential biomarkers of placenta-mediated diseases. The objective of my dissertation research is to develop a system and user-independent pregnancy screening system that will provide a quantifiable measure of placental health. The quantitative ultrasound (QUS) based multiparametric screening will allow the identification of the early symptoms of the placental abnormalities with an opportunity of intervention to prevent clinical manifestation and long-term effects.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-663024 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/05\/Anna-Fariha_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"2020 Dissertation Grant: Anna Fariha\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\"><\/p>\n<h3>Anna Fariha<\/h3>\n<p>University of Massachusetts Amherst<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Enhancing Usability and Explainability of Data Systems<\/p>\n<p>The growth of data science and its reach to an ever-growing user base of non-experts require data systems to be democratized and offer more transparency. Democratization entails a system that can be used by people with different skills and backgrounds alike, and transparency requires explanation mechanism for the users to understand the system behavior, especially when unexpected behavior occurs. Unfortunately, most data systems are usable only by the expert users. Furthermore, they lack explainability, making them unreliable for even the most expert users. The first aim of my work is to enhance usability of complex data systems for non-experts where I focus on example-driven techniques that complement traditional task-specification mechanisms. The second aim of my work is to provide causality-guided explanation frameworks to enable understanding of certain outcomes of complex data systems. Finally, my work aims at developing data profiling techniques for achieving trust and fairness in data-driven machine learning.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-663027 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/05\/Diego-Gomez-Zara_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"2020 Dissertation Grant: Diego Gomez-Zara\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\"><\/p>\n<h3>Diego G\u00f3mez-Zar\u00e1<\/h3>\n<p>Northwestern University<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Using Online Team Recommender Systems to Form Diverse Teams<\/p>\n<p>Embracing diversity can yield measurable benefits for teams and organizations. Although society extols the benefits of diversity, particularly to teams, assembling diverse teams is not a simple task. Online team recommender systems may facilitate diverse team formation by enabling people to filter, curate, and review recommendations for prospective teammates from a wider pool and based on deep-level information. My dissertation sheds light on how team recommender systems shape users\u2019 motivations and actions to assemble diverse teams. My goals are threefold: (i) characterize the diversity of teams assembled online, (ii) understand the basis of users\u2019 decisions when they are forming teams online, and (iii) evaluate a team recommender system with regard to diversity. By tracking users\u2019 prior actions and interactions, team recommender systems can leverage a combination of digital trace data, network information, and individual characteristics to assemble diverse teams in organizations.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-663021 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/05\/Zerina-Kapetanovic_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"2020 Dissertation Grant: Zerina Kapetanovic\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\"><\/p>\n<h3>Zerina Kapetanovic<\/h3>\n<p>University of Washington<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Low-power Communication for Environmental Sensing Systems<\/p>\n<p>Over the last decade the Internet of Things (IoT) has been changing the world, from enabling connected electronics, smart homes, to smart agriculture. I am deeply passionate about the role that IoT plays when it comes to environmental monitoring, which is now increasingly relevant in the times of the climate change crisis and the need to achieve biodiversity conservation. My thesis focuses on enabling low-power communication for environmental sensing systems. In particular dealing with two major challenges: resources constraints and scale. For example, devices deployed in remote locations often lack power and Internet connectivity. This becomes even more challenging when considering the size of forest, farms, and oceans all requiring large-scale sensing systems. My past and ongoing research focuses on addressing these challenges by developing systems like <a href=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/project\/farmbeats-iot-agriculture\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">FarmBeats<\/a> to enable data-driven agriculture, enabling low-power communication using backscatter techniques, and using machine learning to improve the performance of mainstream IoT solutions.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-663048 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/05\/Urvashi-Khandelwal_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"2020 Dissertation Grant: Urvashi Khandelwal\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\"><\/p>\n<h3>Urvashi Khandelwal<\/h3>\n<p>Stanford University<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Understanding and Exploiting the Use of Linguistic Context by Neural Language Models<\/p>\n<p>The meaning of any piece of text is determined by the words contained in it. Proper use of this linguistic context is an extremely important part of every task in the field of natural language processing (NLP). Yet, the black-box nature of neural networks makes it extremely unclear what contextual information is captured and how it can be used to further improve existing models. In my dissertation, I address this problem for neural language models\u2014the basis of modern language understanding and generation tasks. First, I use analysis techniques to shed light on how these models use linguistic context and what features are learned from it. Then, using the knowledge gained from the analysis, I show how pre-trained neural language models can be improved and adapted to larger datasets and different domains without any additional training, by simply relying on the high-dimensional representations learned from linguistic context.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-663045 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/05\/Sannon_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"2020 Dissertation Grant: Shruti Sannon\" width=\"150\" height=\"207\"><\/p>\n<h3>Shruti Sannon<\/h3>\n<p>Cornell University<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Towards a More Inclusive Gig Economy: Examining Privacy, Security, and Safety Risks for Workers with Chronic Illnesses and\/or Disabilities<\/p>\n<p>Workers in the gig economy do not receive traditional labor protections, and the precarity of their work can lead them to prioritize financial incentives over protecting themselves from risk. Even more problematically, workers with chronic illnesses and\/or disabilities may face disproportionate risks in terms of their privacy, security, and safety during the course of their work, in addition to navigating the economic precarity of gig work. Through a large qualitative study, my dissertation will develop a comprehensive account of the risks and opportunities posed by a range of gig platforms for this group of workers. Ultimately, this work aims to inform how gig platforms can be more inclusive for workers with chronic illnesses and\/or disabilities while mitigating the risks they encounter during their work.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<h4 class=\"js-accordion__header\">\n            \t2019 Grant Recipients            <\/h4>\n<div class=\"js-accordion__panel\">\n<p class=\"msr-accordion-content\">\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-667296 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Larwan-Berke_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Larwan Berke\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\"><\/p>\n<h3>Larwan Berke<\/h3>\n<p>Rochester Institute of Technology<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Automatic Speech Recognition as a Captioning Tool: Enabling Greater Accessibility for Users who are Deaf or Hard-of-Hearing<\/p>\n<p>As the accuracy of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology improves over time, it may become a viable method for transcribing audio input in real-time. Such technology can provide access to spoken language for people who are Deaf or Hard-of-Hearing (DHH). However, ASR is imperfect and will remain so for a while, thus there is a need for users to cope with errors in the output. Our proposed solution is to add markup to the captioning so the DHH viewer is able to discern when the ASR may be erroneous by utilizing the confidence values in the ASR output. My goal is to empower the DHH individual with greater autonomy in scenarios such as one-on-one meetings with hearing people when in-person interpreters are not available.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-667284 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Alexander-Gamero-Garrido_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Alexander Gamero-Garrido\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\"><\/p>\n<h3>Alexander Gamero-Garrido<\/h3>\n<p>University of California, San Diego<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Inferring Country-Level Transit Influence of Autonomous Systems<\/p>\n<p>Our work explores the country-level influence exerted by transit providers, a set of networking organizations that often have less direct contact with users, but who are nonetheless responsible for delivering an important fraction of transnational traffic into and out of many countries, and who may have the capability to observe, manipulate, or disrupt some of that traffic. For instance, an accidental misconfiguration or a state-ordered disconnection implemented by one of these operators may render popular services delivered on the Internet (such as email or social media) unreachable in entire regions. These concerns are not abstract, as previous instances of state-ordered disconnections have propagated to other countries and temporarily disabled some of the world\u2019s most popular services there. By studying the ways in which these operators (Autonomous Systems) connect to one another and to the rest of the Internet, we aim to highlight each country\u2019s relative risk exposure.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-667308 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Sumegha-Garg_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Sumegha Garg\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\"><\/p>\n<h3>Sumegha Garg<\/h3>\n<p>Princeton University<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Understanding the Limits of Computational Models and Learning Algorithms<\/p>\n<p>The primary aim of my research has been studying the computation limits of and the role of randomness in space-bounded computational models. In particular, my work has focused on proving for a large class of learning problems the following: a low-memory learning algorithm requires an exponential number of samples to learn. These also give cryptographic protocols with unconditional security against low-space adversaries. The second aim of my research has been algorithmic fairness and investigating the sources of unfairness in classification algorithms. Machine learning algorithms are increasingly being used for making decisions about humans, which raises concerns that these might inadvertently discriminate against certain groups of society. In particular, my work has focused on understanding the role of information in fairness and exploring the mechanisms\/incentives that lead to fair predictions.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-667299 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Megh-Marathe_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Megh Marathe\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\"><\/p>\n<h3>Megh Marathe<\/h3>\n<p>University of Michigan, Ann Arbor<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Was That a Seizure? Understanding Everyday Ambiguity in the Clinical Diagnosis and Lived Experience of Epilepsy<\/p>\n<p>Epilepsy is a chronic illness characterized by recurrent and unpredictable seizures, during which people lose voluntary control over body-mind function. Seizure symptoms often resemble bodily sensations such as muscle spasms and dizziness; but seizures require medical care whereas common muscle spasms require hydration or rest. This ambiguity between seizure-like symptoms and seizures troubles people with epilepsy (PWE), confounding the decision between three courses of action: report to ER, schedule a doctor\u2019s appointment, or rest. This ambiguity also arises in clinical diagnosis, where neurologists must distinguish social and environmental factors from seizures: being patted on the back, for instance, resembles seizures. My dissertation addresses this ambiguity through comparative ethnographic fieldwork and machine learning to design a wearable interface that combines clinical expertise with experiential knowledge to detect seizures. In doing so, I problematize the gap between the subjective experience of seizures and objective representations thereof in clinical diagnosis.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-667293 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Julian-Ramos-Rojas_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Julian Ramos Rojas\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\"><\/p>\n<h3>Julian A. Ramos Rojas<\/h3>\n<p>Carnegie Mellon University<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Personalized and Context-Aware Behavioral Interventions using Artificial-Intelligence<\/p>\n<p>In traditional behavioral interventions, a clinician personalizes a treatment to foster positive behaviors and replace unhealthy habits (eg., drinking, or smoking). Behavioral interventions are, however, limited to the number of available clinicians and their brief interactions with patients. For my PhD dissertation, I want to leverage the power of computing to scale behavioral interventions by creating a computational approach that fulfills the clinician\u2019s role of personalization: finding a treatment that aligns with the patient\u2019s goal, preferences, and desired outcomes. I will be using Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods and mobile sensors to personalize health interventions. As part of this work, I\u2019m currently piloting an android app that gives advice on how to improve sleep based on Fitbit data and user feedback using AI.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-667305 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Sonia-Jawaid-Shaikh_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Sonia Jawaid Shaikh\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\"><\/p>\n<h3>Sonia Jawaid Shaikh<\/h3>\n<p>University of Southern California<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Bounded Technological Rationality: How Human-AI Collaboration Impacts Prosocial and Antisocial Behaviors<\/p>\n<p>AI-enabled technologies such as intelligent assistants are increasingly being developed and deployed to make decisions that were previously made by humans alone. The widening use of intelligent assistants across physical and virtual spaces offers a unique opportunity to explore various issues pertaining to individual and group information exchange. This project empirically tests how and when intelligent assistants can serve as an intervention and nudge decision-makers to increase prosocial and decrease antisocial informational behaviors within various kinds of competitive and resource environments. The major goals of this project are: a) to unpack socio-psychological processes and behavioral outcomes in human-AI collaboration, b) to understand human rationality from a technological perspective, and c) to help develop AI-enabled technology for social good.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-667287 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Alexa-Siu_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Alexa Siu\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\"><\/p>\n<h3>Alexa Siu<\/h3>\n<p>Stanford University<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Advancing Accessible 3D Design for the Blind and Visually Impaired via 2.5D Tactile Shape Displays<\/p>\n<p>People with blindness and visual impairments (BVI) are experienced makers having to adapt the technology available to solve accessibility problems they face. This spirit of creative problem solving and tinkering has existed in parallel to the mainstream Maker Movement because most maker tools are inaccessible. Accessibility in making can not only provide access points for contextualized learning of STEM concepts but can also give the BVI community the tools to participate in the vibrant maker culture as designers themselves. My dissertation seeks to bridge this gap by increasing access to 3D design. It aims to create an accessible 3D design and printing workflow for BVI people through the use of 2.5D tactile displays, and to understand how BVI people use the workflow in the context of perception, interaction, and learning. At a broader level, it seeks to increase access to STEM concepts and give BVI people, a new medium for creative expression that others across the world already engage in.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-667290 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Angelique-Taylor_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Angelique Taylor\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\"><\/p>\n<h3>Angelique Taylor<\/h3>\n<p>University of California, San Diego<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Group Perception Methods to Support Human-Robot Teaming<\/p>\n<p>The field of robotics is growing at a vast pace with robot deployments in everyday environments. In many of these environments, people are often in groups; therefore, robots need a high-level understanding of groups in order to fluently assist and interact with them. Yet much prior work in human-robot interaction (HRI) focuses on dyadic interaction. To address this gap, my research focuses on designing perception methods to enable robots to work seamlessly in a group. My research contributes novel perception methods that enable robots to effectively identify groups, track them over time, infer their future motion trajectories, and navigate and interact among them in real-world settings. Furthermore, it will enable robots to join and participate in group interactions, which will enable the next generation of artificially intelligent systems. My dissertation will enable more robust, realistic HRI, and support the safe operation of mobile robots in human-centered environments.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-667311 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Troi-Williams_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Troi Williams\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\"><\/p>\n<h3>Troi Williams<\/h3>\n<p>University of South Florida<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Hunting Mosquito Breeding Habitats using Drones and State-Dependent Measurement Models<\/p>\n<p>To search for mosquito breeding habitats (MBHs) in forest-like areas, an autonomous robot such as a drone relies on sensor measurements to estimate its state and the state of the surrounding world; such states include the locations of the drone, tree trunks, branches, and MBHs. However, since measurements contain error (bias and uncertainty), state estimates are often inaccurate. My dissertation alleviates measurement error by modeling the errors using a novel concept called state-dependent measurement models, which estimate a measurement error probability distribution for each sensor measurement. While navigating in forest-like areas, drones can use such models to determine how confident they are about their state and the state of the world, which can help a drone safely maneuver amongst trees and competently perform tasks. My dissertation validates this concept by using it to build uncertainty-aware maps, autonomously navigate, and detect MBHs in dense forest-like areas with simulated and real drones.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-667302 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Qian-Yang_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Qian Yang\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\"><\/p>\n<h3>Qian Yang<\/h3>\n<p>Carnegie Mellon University<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Understanding AI as an HCI Design Material: Providing Methods and Tools for Sketching and Prototyping Human-AI Interaction<\/p>\n<p>My work focuses on understanding and addressing the human-computer interaction (HCI) challenges brought by the advances of AI. I worked to articulate why and where human-AI interaction seems particularly difficult to design, in comparison to many other complex interactive technologies. I identified effective methods for sketching and prototyping human-AI interactions. I distill these methods into a Designing AI toolkit, helping more AI designers and teams to translate the technical advances of AI into human-centered, thoughtful, and creative real world applications.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-667314 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Yixue-Zhao_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Yixue Zhao\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\"><\/p>\n<h3>Yixue Zhao<\/h3>\n<p>University of Southern California<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Reducing User-Perceived Latency in Mobile Apps via Prefetching and Caching<\/p>\n<p>Mobile devices have become the dominant computing platform and this trend is reflected in the billions of mobile devices and millions of mobile apps today. At the same time, user-perceived latency caused by network transfers remains a significant problem since mobile apps fetch data from the Internet constantly via unreliable wireless network. To tackle the network latency problem in mobile apps, my research focuses on prefetching and caching techniques as they can bypass the performance bottleneck and enable immediate response from a local store. However, such fundamental techniques are largely overlooked in the emerging mobile-app domain. Thus, my dissertation aims to establish the foundation for prefetching and caching techniques in the mobile-app domain by exploring the prefetching and caching opportunities in practice, and proposing a set of novel techniques that are suitable for mobile apps in order to reduce user-perceived latency.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<h4 class=\"js-accordion__header\">\n            \t2018 Grant Recipients            <\/h4>\n<div class=\"js-accordion__panel\">\n<p class=\"msr-accordion-content\">\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-667392 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Cynthia-Bennett_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Cynthia Bennett\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\"><\/p>\n<h3>Cynthia Bennett<\/h3>\n<p>University of Washington<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Toward Disability-Informed Human-Centered Design<\/p>\n<p>Experience shows us that people with disabilities can positively impact interaction design for everyone. However, publishers of interaction design rubrics\u2013such as Human-Centered Design\u2013have tended to focus on supporting the design process for people with disabilities, rather than by them. My research focuses on developing an inclusive toolkit that augments current Human-Centered Design activities to be accessible to people with disabilities. Drawing from this toolkit, I will offer new ways to connect disability with design, all based on the life experiences of people with disabilities.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-667395 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Eric-Corbett_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Eric Corbett\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\"><\/p>\n<h3>Eric Corbett<\/h3>\n<p>Georgia Institute of Technology<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title: <\/strong>Trust, Technology and Community Engagement<\/p>\n<p>The work of community engagement performed by public officials in local government provides valuable opportunities for city residents to participate in governance. Technology stands to play an increasingly important role in mediating community engagement; however, the practices and relationships that constitute community engagement are currently understudied in human-computer interaction (HCI). Of particular importance is the role that trust plays in the success of community engagements\u2014either establishing trust, or more frequently, overcoming distrust between public officials and city residents. To address this challenge, my research seeks to understand how trust could inform the design of technology to support the work of community engagement performed by public officials in local government. My research will culminate in a design framework that will inform development of technology for trust-based community engagement.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-667416 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Ryan-MCorey_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Ryan M. Corey\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\"><\/p>\n<h3>Ryan M. Corey<\/h3>\n<p>University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title: <\/strong>Array Signal Processing for Augmented Listening<\/p>\n<p>Augmented listening technologies, such as hearing aids, smart headphones, and audio augmented- reality platforms, promise to enhance human hearing by processing the sound we hear to reduce unwanted noise and improve understanding. State-of-the-art listening devices perform poorly, however, in noisy environments that have many competing sound sources. Large microphone arrays with dozens or hundreds of sensors could allow listening devices to separate, process, and enhance multiple sound sources in real time while sounding natural to the user. My dissertation addresses several unique challenges of array processing for real-time listening applications, such as tracking human movement, preserving the user\u2019s spatial awareness, estimating the dynamics of multiple simultaneous sound sources, and maintaining an imperceptible input-to-output delay. I am also developing first-of-their-kind wearable microphone array prototypes and data sets to help other researchers develop ambitious new augmented listening algorithms and applications.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-667407 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Maria-De-Arteaga_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Maria De-Arteaga\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\"><\/p>\n<h3>Maria De-Arteaga<\/h3>\n<p>Carnegie Mellon University<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title: <\/strong>Quantifying and Mitigating Risks of Algorithmic Decision Support<\/p>\n<p>Machine learning is increasingly being used for decision support in critical settings, where predictions have potentially grave implications over human lives. Examples of such applications include child welfare, criminal justice, and healthcare. In these settings, the characteristics of available data and of deployment contexts give rise to challenges that have not been sufficiently addressed in the machine learning literature, including the presence of selective labels, unobservables, and the effects of omitted payoff bias. When left unaddressed, these challenges may lead to systemic biases, self-fulfilling prophecies, and loss of human trust in the systems. My research is focused on quantifying the performance and fairness risks of algorithmic learning in these settings, and on reducing these risks by developing novel algorithms.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-667401 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Jane-E_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Jane E\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\"><\/p>\n<h3>Jane E<\/h3>\n<p>Stanford University<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title: <\/strong>Artistic Vision: Providing Context for Capture-Time Decisions<\/p>\n<p>As cameras become smarter and more pervasive, more people want to learn to be better content creators. People are willing to invest in expensive cameras as a medium for their artistic expression, but few have easy ways to improve their skills. Inspired by critique sessions common in in-person art practice classes, my dissertation research focuses on designing new interfaces and interactions that help people become better photo takers. Using contextual in-camera feedback, users can capture photos and videos in a way that is more informed and intentional, while still allowing for their aesthetic and creative decisions.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-667386 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Sahar-Hashemgeloogerdi_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Sahar Hashemgeloogerdi\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\"><\/p>\n<h3>Sahar Hashemgeloogerdi<\/h3>\n<p>University of Rochester<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title: <\/strong>Computationally Efficient Modeling and Audio Enhancement Algorithms for Reverberant Acoustic Systems using Orthonormal Basis Functions<\/p>\n<p>Highly interactive modeling methods and audio enhancement algorithms underlie the operation of modern acoustic systems. The capability of a system to produce lifelike acoustic experiences significantly depends on the accuracy and computational efficiency of the modeling and audio processing algorithms employed. Accordingly, my research has focused on the development of methods and algorithms that accurately model highly reverberant acoustic systems and process acoustic signals using as few parameters as possible. Such accurate yet computationally efficient modeling and processing algorithms are of essential interest in a wide variety of applications ranging from virtual acoustics to healthcare. My main contribution is the development of algorithms, which rely on orthonormal basis functions and time-frequency representation of an acoustic system, that provide high accuracy over a wide range of frequencies in real-time. As an early demonstration, I propose an efficient solution to adaptive feedback cancellation problems.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-667398 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Francesco-Pittaluga_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Francesco Pittaluga\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\"><\/p>\n<h3>Francesco Pittaluga<\/h3>\n<p>University of Florida<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title: <\/strong>Privacy Preserving Computational Cameras<\/p>\n<p>Major advances in computer vision and mobile technologies have set the stage for widespread deployment of connected cameras, spurring increased concerns about privacy and security. To address these concerns, I\u2019m building novel computational cameras that perform privacy processing, at the camera level, via optical filtering of the incident light-field and\/or sensor-level electronics, and developing a data-driven framework to learn privacy-preserving encoding functions through adversarial optimization. Moving forward, I aim to leverage this framework to build low-power privacy-preserving computational cameras with camera-level implementations of learned encoding functions.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-667413 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Ramya-Ramakrishnan_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Ramya Ramakrishnan\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\"><\/p>\n<h3>Ramya Ramakrishnan<\/h3>\n<p>Massachusetts Institute of Technology<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title: <\/strong>Human-Guided Reinforcement Learning in Real-World Environments<\/p>\n<p>Deploying AI systems safely in the real world is challenging. The rich and complex nature of the open world makes it difficult for machines trained on limited data to adapt and generalize well. The errors that can result from an imperfect model can be extremely costly (e.g., car accidents, incorrect diagnoses). My research focuses on using human feedback to help reinforcement learning agents better adapt to the real world, leading to safer deployment of these systems. This involves developing robust models that can accurately predict uncertainty in the world, use different forms of human input to learn, and adapt quickly in real-time to new changes in the environment. Developing such systems that learn from humans intelligently will move us closer towards more generalizable robots that perform a variety of tasks in such applications as assistive robotics, healthcare, and disaster response.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-667404 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Jo\u00e3o-Sedoc_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Jo\u00e3o Sedoc\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\"><\/p>\n<h3>Jo\u00e3o Sedoc<\/h3>\n<p>University of Pennsylvania<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title: <\/strong>Hierarchical Approaches to Improve the Flow, Style, and Coherence of Conversational Agents<\/p>\n<p>There has been a renewed focus on dialog systems, including non-task driven conversational agents (i.e. \u201cchit-chat bots\u201d). Dialog is a challenging problem since it spans multiple conversational turns. To further complicate the problem, there are many contextual cues and valid possible utterances. We propose that dialog is fundamentally a multiscale process, given that context is carried from previous utterances in the conversation. Neural dialog models, which are based on recurrent neural network (RNN) encoder-decoder sequence-to-sequence models, lack the ability to create temporal and stylistic coherence in conversations. My thesis focuses on novel hierarchical approaches to improve the responses of neural chatbots.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-667410 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Mina-Tahmasbi-Arashloo_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Mina Tahmasbi Arashloo\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\"><\/p>\n<h3>Mina Tahmasbi Arashloo<\/h3>\n<p>Princeton University<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title: <\/strong>Programmable Network Monitoring and Control<\/p>\n<p>Real-time and fine-grained network monitoring and control is crucial for operating networks that match the security and performance requirements of today\u2019s online services. To that end, modern network devices offer programming interfaces for fine-grained specification of what information to maintain across packets, and how to process packets based on it. These interfaces, however, are quite low-level and suitable only for programming a single device, making them cumbersome to use in today\u2019s large-scale networks. My thesis focuses on designing programming platforms that facilitate the use of programmable network devices for large-scale and real-time network monitoring and control. More specifically, these platforms consist of (i) domain-specific languages that are expressive enough for high-level specification of policies for end-to-end network transport, network-wide state-aware monitoring and control, and path-based network monitoring, and (ii) compilers that use efficient intermediate data structures to automatically distribute and implement these specifications on programmable network devices.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-667389 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Sarah-Tan_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Sarah Tan\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\"><\/p>\n<h3>Sarah Tan<\/h3>\n<p>Cornell University<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title: <\/strong>Methods in Interpretability and Causal Inference for Better Understanding of Machine Learning Models<\/p>\n<p>I aim to develop methods to help users of machine learning models increase both the trust in and understanding of their models. My dissertation is in the two fields of interpretability and causal inference. The two fields, seemingly disparate, actually share the common goals of revealing and adjusting for biases that can arise when building machine learning models. In interpretability, I am developing methods to probe tree ensembles and audit black-box risk scoring models such as COMPAS. In causal inference, I have worked on methods that use machine learning to more flexibly estimate treatment effects from observational data. To complete my dissertation, I plan to probe the definition of interpretability \u2014 still a subject of debate in machine learning \u2014 by conducting a large-scale comparison of different models claimed to be interpretable and augment this quantitative evaluation with human subject experiments using domain experts.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<h4 class=\"js-accordion__header\">\n            \t2017 Grant Recipients            <\/h4>\n<div class=\"js-accordion__panel\">\n<p class=\"msr-accordion-content\">\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-667518 alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Ebuka-Arinze_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Ebuka Arinze\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\"><\/p>\n<h3>Ebuka Arinze<\/h3>\n<p>Johns Hopkins University<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong>&nbsp;Nanoengineering for Tunable Energy-Efficient Optoelectronics<\/p>\n<p>Colloidal nanomaterials, such as semiconductor quantum dots, are of interest for various optoelectronic applications due to their size-tunable optical properties, distinctive electronic structure, and low-cost fabrication. Color-tuned and semi-transparent photovoltaics, devices with controlled and tunable reflection and transmission spectra, are of significant interest due to their potential applications in building-integrated photovoltaics, vehicular heat and power management, and multijunction photovoltaics. High-performance computing technologies coupled with advanced optimization methods have made it possible to rapidly and efficiently design and predict new device structures without having to rely on costly, time- and resource-intensive \u201ctrial-and-error\u201d lab-based experiments in the field of optoelectronics. My project focuses on using nanoengineering techniques, including multi-objective optimization algorithms, plasmonic nanoparticle enhancements, and hybrid-materials-based surface modifications, to design and build colloidal quantum dot-based devices with controlled optical and electrical properties for the next generation of inexpensive and ubiquitous light harvesting, detection, and emission technologies.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-667530 alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Juan-Camilo-Gamboa-Higuera_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Juan Camilo Gamboa Higuera\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\"><\/p>\n<h3>Juan Camilo Gamboa Higuera<\/h3>\n<p>McGill University<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title:&nbsp;<\/strong>Transfer of Robot Motor Behaviors from Low-Fidelity Domains<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve been working on algorithms for synthesizing controllers for a six-legged underwater autonomous vehicle, to perform a variety of navigation and pose control tasks. These algorithms allow us to specify data collection tasks, e.g. coral reef monitoring, from high level objectives encoded as numerical cost functions. To reduce the amount of data needed for each task, and since models of underwater dynamics are computationally expensive, we use model-based reinforcement learning techniques where the models are data-driven. A problem with these approaches is that, even if they are data efficient, collecting new data is expensive. I\u2019m investigating techniques that mitigate this cost by re-using prior knowledge, from simulation or similar environments. Our current&nbsp;approach, which we call policy adjustments, allows us to transfer previously learned controllers by reasoning about the discrepancies between the source of the knowledge (a simulator) and the deployment environment (a physical robot in the ocean).<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-667521 alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Esha-Ghosh_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Esha Ghosh\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\"><\/p>\n<h3>Esha Ghosh<\/h3>\n<p>Brown University<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title:&nbsp;<\/strong>Efficient, Privacy-Preserving, Secure Cloud Computation and Storage<\/p>\n<p>Adopting cloud services to reduce operational, maintenance and storage costs, is becoming increasingly common. However, outsourcing data and computations, is opening up new challenges in terms of integrity and privacy of the data and the computations on them. Along with such important security and privacy concerns, availability, and scalability are major factors in such settings. My thesis addresses various problems in this space of secure storage and computation outsourcing. In summary, the main contributions of my thesis are the following.<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Designing models and protocols for outsourced queries on structured dynamic data with efficiency, integrity and privacy guarantees along with prototype implementations.<\/li>\n<li>Designing efficient (general) verifiable computation primitives for data-intense applications along with prototype implementations.<\/li>\n<li>Developing an expressive framework for efficient graph queries on encrypted networks along with prototype implementations.<\/li>\n<li>Designing efficient protocols to facilitate secure storage of encrypted data in the cloud while enabling deduplication.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<hr>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-667533 alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Kavita-Krishnaswamy_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Kavita Krishnaswamy\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\"><\/p>\n<h3>Kavita Krishnaswamy<\/h3>\n<p>University of Maryland, Baltimore County<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title:&nbsp;<\/strong>Smart Algorithms via Knowledge Management of Safe Physical Human-Robotic Care<\/p>\n<p>The beginning of a new era in safe assistive robotics will occur when people with disabilities and seniors let intelligent software control a mobile robotic manipulator to safely reposition their body and limbs. Our goal is to explore the intersection between providing physical care and robotics, and how it is possible to translate safe patient handling and mobility guidelines into smart human-robotic interaction (HRI) algorithms. For a mobile manipulator with knowledge-managed algorithms. we propose to create an accessible low fidelity 3D Web interface for manipulating a high degree-of-freedom robot to safely reposition the human body and limbs. Our efforts seek to standardize protocols and regulations for how artificial intelligence agents related to physical HRI can achieve body and limb repositioning tasks. As assistive robotics become more mainstream, these best practices can improve safety in direct physical care in the process of repositioning the human body with a mobile robotic arm.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-667524 alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Himabind-Lakkaraju_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Himabind Lakkaraju\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\"><\/p>\n<h3>Himabindu Lakkaraju<\/h3>\n<p>Stanford University<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title:&nbsp;<\/strong>Interpretable Machine Learning for Human Decision Making<\/p>\n<p>My research primarily focuses on exploring how machine learning can help improve real world decision making in domains such as health care and criminal justice. To this end, my thesis addresses various challenges involved in developing and evaluating interpretable machine learning frameworks which can complement and provide insights into human decision making. More specifically, my thesis focuses on the following diverse yet related research directions: developing frameworks which can be used to compare the effectiveness of algorithmic and human decision making, building models for obtaining interpretable and diagnostic insights into the patterns of mistakes made by human decision makers, learning accurate and interpretable models (or approximations to existing machine learning models) which can complement human decision making. The main contribution of my thesis is to address these problems under realistic assumptions which hold in real world decision making such as presence of unmeasured confounders and limited availability of labeled data.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-667539 alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Paula-Mate_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Paula Mate\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\"><\/p>\n<h3>Paula Mate<\/h3>\n<p>Indiana University, Bloomington<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title:&nbsp;<\/strong>Examining the Implementation of the Health Information System in Mozambique: Understanding the Experiences of Health Care Workers with ICTs<\/p>\n<p>My study examines the implementation of the health information system (HIS) in Mozambique and the roletechnologies play in educating health professionals for better delivery of care. Through a comprehensive examination of the HIS, from development to roll-out, I analyze the relationship between colonial and (post)colonial governmental top-down policies and compare them to the on-the-ground reality of using information and communications technology (ICTs) to provide health education given social, economic, and political realities in Mozambique. Part of the problem with studies of technologies in poor parts of the world is that they are often conducted by highly educated researchers and are conducted in English. However, majority of the population in poor nations does not speak English. Such studies become irrelevant to the life experiences of those being studied. I will disseminate findings from this study in Portuguese and English through talks and publications in U.S., Mozambique, and other international venues.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-667536 alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Martez-Edward-Mott_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Martez Edward Mott\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\"><\/p>\n<h3>Martez Edward Mott<\/h3>\n<p>University of Washington<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title:&nbsp;<\/strong>Accessible Touch Input for People with Motor Impairments<\/p>\n<p>Touch-enabled devices such as smartphones, tablets, and interactive kiosks are some of the most pervasive technologies in the world today. As a result, touch has emerged as one of the most dominant forms of input for computing devices. Despite the overwhelming popularity of touch input, it presents significant accessibility challenges for millions of people with motor impairing conditions such as cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy, and Parkinson\u2019s disease. My dissertation research takes an ability-based design approach toward improving the accessibility of touch-enabled devices for people with motor impairments. I intend to create intelligent interaction techniques that allow people with motor impairments to touch in whichever ways are most comfortable and natural for them, and for the system to react as if it was touched precisely.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-667542 alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/ShadiA-Noghabi_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Shadi A. Noghabi\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\"><\/p>\n<h3>Shadi A. Noghabi<\/h3>\n<p>University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title:&nbsp;<\/strong>Building Large-scale Production Systems for Latency-sensitive Applications<\/p>\n<p>In this era of increased engagement with technology, many latency-sensitive applications processing large amounts of data have emerged. For example, we expect social networks to show hashtag trends within minutes, data from IoT to be processed within seconds, and online gaming to react within milliseconds. In all these diverse areas, handling large scale data in a real-time fashion is crucial. At scale, providing low latency becomes increasingly challenging with many complexities in distribution, scaling, fault-tolerance, and load-balancing.&nbsp;My research has focused on developing techniques that broadly explore these issues with particular attention to end-to-end latency and building massive-scale solutions. Most of my work is deployed in large-scale production systems with hundreds of millions of users. My research contributions span a wide range of frameworks including: Ambry (LinkedIn\u2019s mainstream geo-distributed media store), Apache Samza (a stream processing engine used by LinkedIn, Uber, TripAdvisor, etc.), and Freeflow (a high-performance container networking solution).<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-667527 alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/JohnR-Porter_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"John R. Porter\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\"><\/p>\n<h3>John R. Porter<\/h3>\n<p>University of Washington<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title:&nbsp;<\/strong>Understanding and Improving Real-World Video Game Accessibility<\/p>\n<p>My dissertation work attends to the intersection of accessible human-computer interaction and video game design. Games continually grow more complex, pervasive, and significant in 21st century life. However, due to&nbsp;inaccessibility, games are often actively disabling experiences for many gamers with impairments, systematically excluding them from full participation in an increasingly important activity. Therefore, my work proposes to understand the play experiences of gamers with impairments and offer novel design solutions for mitigating the accessibility barriers they face. My proposed investigations seek to understand how accessibility barriers manifest in mainstream games, to empower gamers with impairments to better navigate the landscape of game accessibility through novel information design, and to address underlying institutional concerns that perpetuate systemic accessibility issues in the game development industry through education interventions.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-667512 alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Andrew-S-Stamps_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Andrew S. Stamps\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\"><\/p>\n<h3>Andrew S. Stamps<\/h3>\n<p>Mississippi State University<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title:&nbsp;<\/strong>Applications of Heterodox Rendering Methods to Visualization<\/p>\n<p>Information visualization is an illustrative method to depict data, and the structure of this data is not necessarily known beforehand. The classic rendering via rasterization of visualization primitives tends to minimize extraneous details; every drawn pixel or glyph has a tight correspondence to the data on which it is based. A simple line chart for example. It is thought that a more expressive or artistic rendering of data might harness additional insight through abstraction, or even an emotional connection. These expressive methods which I have classified as Heterodox Visualization (HV) methods, include non-photorealistic rendering (NPR), stylized rendering processes like pixelization, and other rendering approaches, like those that mimic natural media e.g. painting or sketching. To date there has been little systematic guidance covering how these HV methods could be applied to information visualization. My research will help determine, through experiment, which techniques pose a benefit to different types of visualizations.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-667509 alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Vasuki-Narasimha-Swamy_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Vasuki Narasimha Swamy\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\"><\/p>\n<h3>Vasuki Narasimha Swamy<\/h3>\n<p>University of California, Berkeley<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title:&nbsp;<\/strong>Real-time Ultra-reliable Wireless Communication<\/p>\n<p>My research focuses on designing wireless communication protocols for Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications that require low-latency and high-reliability. This can enable exciting new interactive and immersive applications such as exoskeletons, inter-vehicle communication for self-driving cars, robotics & factory automation, virtual & augmented reality, high-performance gaming, and the smart grid. I am developing wireless communication protocols that employ simultaneous relaying by all radios in the network. This allows us to overcome bad channels and guarantee the latency requirements. My early work dealt with understanding the fundamental limits of using cooperative communication for high-performance applications. Currently, I am exploring the key physical layer requirements that are needed to implement these protocols. I am modeling how synchronization and channel estimation impacts the performance of these protocols. Ultimately, understanding the fundamental limits of high-reliability and low-latency wireless will enable us to engineer exciting applications.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-667515 alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Cesar-Torres_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Cesar Torres\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\"><\/p>\n<h3>C\u00e9sar Torres<\/h3>\n<p>University of California, Berkeley<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dissertation title:&nbsp;<\/strong>Hybrid Aesthetics \u2013 A New Media Framework for the Computational Design of Creative Materials, Tools, and Practices within Digital Fabrication<\/p>\n<p>Technology plays an important role in both constraining and guiding how users explore, express, and innovate in a variety of creative tasks. Practices are emerging which blend both physical and computational techniques and materials providing new opportunities to expand the aesthetic repertoire available to creative practitioners. This thesis contributes a framework for understanding how to create these hybrid elements and develop materials, tools, and practices that stimulate the imagination to explore a wider gamut of creative expressions. Through a series of design tools, the thesis introduces data structures that break constrictive digital modes of practice, conceptual framings for guiding aesthetic exploration, and design principles for the adoption, sharing, and teaching of hybrid techniques. This work serves as a bridge between art and technology and challenges the narrative of who can participate and use digital fabrication technologies to include traditional artists, designers, and the broader community of creative practitioners.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n\n<div class=\"ms-grid \">\n<div class=\"ms-row\">\n\t\t\t <span style=\"float: none;background-color: #ffffff;color: #333333;cursor: text;font-size: 16px;font-style: normal;font-variant: normal;font-weight: 400;letter-spacing: normal;text-align: left;text-decoration: none;text-indent: 0px;text-transform: none\"><\/p>\n<article class=\"msr-light-gray-bgc m-col-12-24 l-col-8-24 bg-clip-content white-bgc margin-bottom-sp3 msr-project-card\" data-bi-slot=\"3\">\n<div class=\"padding-horizontal padding-vertical-sp2\">\n<h3 class=\"subtitle\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<a href=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/blog\/2019-dissertation-grant-recipients-embarking-on-diverse-paths-to-scientific-and-societal-impact\/\" class=\"semibold\">2019 Dissertation Grant recipients embarking on diverse paths to scientific and societal impact<\/a><br \/>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/h3>\n<div class=\"gray-d1-c\">\n<div class=\"body-alt tight\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tI\u2019m pleased to announce the winners of the 2019 Microsoft Research Dissertation Grants. Each dissertation grant provides up to $25,000 in funding to doctoral students at North American universities who are underrepresented in the field of computing. This is the third year Microsoft Research has offered these research grants\u2026<div style=\u201dheight: 7px;\u201d><\/div><br>June 2019\t\t\t<\/div>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<article class=\"msr-light-gray-bgc m-col-12-24 l-col-8-24 bg-clip-content white-bgc margin-bottom-sp3 msr-project-card\" data-bi-slot=\"4\">\n<div class=\"padding-horizontal padding-vertical-sp2\">\n<h3 class=\"subtitle\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<a href=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/blog\/microsoft-research-dissertation-grants-broadening-the-phd-pipeline-to-increase-innovation\/\" class=\"semibold\">Microsoft Research Dissertation Grants: Broadening the PhD pipeline to increase innovation<\/a><br \/>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/h3>\n<div class=\"gray-d1-c\">\n<div class=\"body-alt tight\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tResearch shows that diverse teams are more productive teams. Diversity, particularly in the area of computing research, means including unique perspectives that otherwise might not have a voice, fueling innovation. These are some of the key reasons that Microsoft is committed to diversity. One aspect of demonstrating that\u2026<div style=\u201dheight: 7px;\u201d><\/div><br>June 2018\t\t\t<\/div>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<article class=\"msr-light-gray-bgc m-col-12-24 l-col-8-24 bg-clip-content white-bgc margin-bottom-sp3 msr-project-card\" data-bi-slot=\"5\">\n<div class=\"padding-horizontal padding-vertical-sp2\">\n<h3 class=\"subtitle\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<a href=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/blog\/give-dissertation-boost-grant-microsoft-research\/\" class=\"semibold\">Give your dissertation a boost with a grant from Microsoft Research<\/a><br \/>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/h3>\n<div class=\"gray-d1-c\">\n<div class=\"body-alt tight\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tNeed funding to clear a hurdle in the final stages of your dissertation research? Microsoft Research is offering grants of up to US $25,000 to help a select group of doctoral students cross the finish line and enter the workforce. The Microsoft Research Dissertation Grant is for PhD students at U.S. and Canadian universities from underrepresented groups in computing, including\u2026<div style=\u201dheight: 7px;\u201d><\/div><br>February 2018\t\t\t<\/div>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<p><\/span><\/div>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"ms-grid \">\n<div class=\"ms-row\">\n<article class=\"msr-light-gray-bgc m-col-12-24 l-col-8-24 bg-clip-content white-bgc margin-bottom-sp3 msr-project-card\" data-bi-slot=\"6\">\n<div class=\"padding-horizontal padding-vertical-sp2\">\n<h3 class=\"subtitle\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<a href=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/blog\/dissertation-grant-program-winners\/\" class=\"semibold\">Dissertation Grant Winners Announced<\/a><br \/>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/h3>\n<div class=\"gray-d1-c\">\n<div class=\"body-alt tight\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tThe Microsoft Research Dissertation Grant program offers financial support to selected doctoral students from groups that are under-represented in the field of computing in the form of grants to complete their dissertations. The grants were announced today, so I sat down with Dr. Meredith (Merrie) Ringel Morris, chair of the Microsoft Research Dissertation Grant program and a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, to find out more about the recipients\u2026<div style=\u201dheight: 7px;\u201d><\/div><br>June 2017\t\t\t<\/div>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<article class=\"msr-light-gray-bgc m-col-12-24 l-col-8-24 bg-clip-content white-bgc margin-bottom-sp3 msr-project-card\" data-bi-slot=\"7\">\n<div class=\"padding-horizontal padding-vertical-sp2\">\n<h3 class=\"subtitle\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<a href=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/blog\/microsoft-research-dissertation-grant-support-underrepresented-groups-computing\/\" class=\"semibold\">New Dissertation Grant provides support to under-represented groups in computing<\/a><br \/>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/h3>\n<div class=\"gray-d1-c\">\n<div class=\"body-alt tight\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tMicrosoft Research is funding a new academic program, the Microsoft Research Dissertation Grant, offering selected doctoral students doing computing research at U.S. and Canadian universities up to US $20,000 to fund their dissertation work. This program is open to students currently under-represented in the technology sector, including women, people with disabilities\u2026<div style=\u201dheight: 7px;\u201d><\/div><br>March 2017\t\t\t<\/div>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n","protected":false},"featured_media":369419,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":true,"_classifai_error":"","footnotes":""},"msr-opportunity-type":[155533],"msr-region":[197900],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-program-audience":[243724],"msr-post-option":[],"msr-impact-theme":[],"class_list":["post-363722","msr-academic-program","type-msr-academic-program","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","msr-opportunity-type-grants-and-fellowships","msr-region-north-america","msr-locale-en_us","msr-program-audience-students"],"msr_description":"A research grant for PhD students enrolled in their fourth year or beyond at North American universities who are underrepresented in the field of computing.","msr_social_media":[],"related-researchers":[],"tab-content":[{"id":0,"name":"About","content":"Microsoft recognizes the value of diversity in computing. The Microsoft Research Dissertation Grant aims to increase the pipeline of diverse talent receiving advanced degrees in computing-related fields by providing a research funding opportunity for doctoral students who are underrepresented in the field of computing. This includes those who self-identify as a woman, African American, Black, Hispanic, Latinx, American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, LGBTQI+, and\/or person with a disability.\r\n<h2>Timeline<\/h2>\r\n<ul>\r\n \t<li>Proposals and letters of recommendation were accepted through Monday, March 22, 2021 at 12:00 PM (Noon) Pacific Daylight Time<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Recipients announced by June 30, 2021<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<h2>Provisions of the 2021 award<\/h2>\r\n<ul>\r\n \t<li>The 2021 Microsoft Research Dissertation Grant recipients will receive funding up to $25,000 USD for academic year 2021-22 to help them complete research as part of their doctoral thesis work.<\/li>\r\n \t<li>An invitation to the PhD Summit: a two-day workshop in the fall hosted by Microsoft Research where grant recipients will meet with Microsoft researchers and other top students to share their research. We hope to offer both a virtual and in-person participation option; we will continue to monitor local and national health and safety guidance and may hold a completely virtual event if advisable.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<h2>Eligibility criteria<\/h2>\r\n<ul>\r\n \t<li>Microsoft\u2019s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Grant recipients should support this mission and embrace opportunities to foster diverse and inclusive cultures within their communities.<\/li>\r\n \t<li>PhD students must be enrolled at a university in the United States or Canada.<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Proposed research must be closely related to the general research areas carried out by researchers at Microsoft as noted in the <em>Our research<\/em> tab above.<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Students must be in their fourth year or beyond of a PhD program as of March 22, 2021, the proposal deadline. Students must have started their PhD in September 2017 or earlier to be considered in their fourth year of the program having taken into account transfers, approved leaves of absence, etc.<\/li>\r\n \t<li>PhD students submitting a proposal for this grant must self-identify as a woman, African American, Black, Hispanic, Latinx, American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, LGBTQI+, and\/or person with a disability.<\/li>\r\n \t<li>PhD students must continue to be enrolled at the university in the fall of 2021 or forfeit the award. Grants are not available for extension. If you require time away for family or medical leave, this will be accommodated. If you are unsure if a particular need for time away will affect the award, you can contact us at Microsoft Research Grants (<a href=\"mailto:msrgrant@microsoft.com?subject=Microsoft%20Research%20Dissertation%20Grant\">msrgrant@microsoft.com<\/a>).<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Payment of the award, as described above, will be made directly to the university and dispersed according to the university\u2019s policies. Microsoft will have discretion as to how any remaining funds will be used if the student is no longer qualified to receive funding (e.g., if the student unenrolls from the program, graduates, or transfers to a different university).<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Funding is for use only during the recipient\u2019s time in the PhD program; it cannot be used for support in a role past graduation, such as a postdoc or faculty position. Those interested in receiving this grant will need to confirm their PhD program starting month and year, as well as their expected graduation month and year.<\/li>\r\n \t<li>A recipient of the Microsoft Research Dissertation Grant subject to disciplinary proceedings for inappropriate behavior, including but not limited to discrimination, harassment (including sexual harassment), or plagiarism will forfeit their funding.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\nIf you do not meet the above criteria, you may be eligible for other <a href=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/academic-programs\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Academic Programs<\/a>.\r\n\r\nMicrosoft actively seeks to foster greater levels of diversity in our workforce and in our pipeline of future researchers. We are always looking for the best and brightest talent and celebrate individuality. We invite candidates to come as they are and do what they love."},{"id":1,"name":"Proposal","content":"<h2>How to submit your grant proposal<\/h2>\r\nProposals and letters of recommendation for the 2021 Microsoft Research Dissertation Grant were accepted through Monday, March 22, 2021 at 12:00 PM (Noon) Pacific Daylight Time. The below outlines the information necessary to submit your proposal in our submission portal.\r\n\r\nYou will be asked to answer the below questions in a form:\r\n<ul>\r\n \t<li style=\"list-style-type: none\">\r\n<ul>\r\n \t<li>Your name, email, country, university, and department<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Primary and secondary research areas (click on the <em>Our research<\/em> at the top of the page for a full list)<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Working title of your dissertation<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Month and year you entered the PhD program and expected graduation date (you must be in your fourth year or beyond of the PhD program as of March 22, 2021, the proposal deadline)<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Attestation that you are a doctoral student who is underrepresented in the field of computing which include those who self-identify as a woman, African American, Black, Hispanic, Latinx, American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, LGBTQI+, and\/or person with a disability<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Total amount of funding requested up to $25,000 USD<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Three to six names of researchers at Microsoft identified as someone with topical expertise who may be asked to evaluate your grant proposal. You can identify researchers by selecting your primary research area from the <em>Our research<\/em> tab at the top of the page. Then provide keywords related to your research to filter. Do not contact the researchers for the purpose of listing them as a potential reviewer. Do not list researchers with a title like Corporate Vice President or Director.<\/li>\r\n \t<li>One to three conferences you are most likely to attend<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Self-assessment of the Statement of Good Standing: <em>\u201cI declare I have never been disciplined for inappropriate behavior, including, but not limited to discrimination, harassment (including sexual harassment), or plagiarism. If I am selected to receive funding under Microsoft\u2019s Grant program, during my funding time period, I agree to inform Microsoft should I be subjected to disciplinary proceedings for inappropriate behavior, including but not limited to discrimination, harassment (including sexual harassment), or plagiarism which would result in forfeiture of funding under Microsoft\u2019s Grant program.\u201d<\/em><\/li>\r\n \t<li>URL to your professional website (optional, but strongly recommended; you are encouraged to make certain it is up-to-date)<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Where and when you held any internships (optional, does not impact your ability to receive a grant)<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\nYou will be asked to upload 3 documents:\r\n\r\nYour curriculum vitae, thesis topic description, and one-page description of how the grant would be used will be uploaded separately. Accepted formats are docx, doc, and pdf. Email or hard-copy submissions will not be considered. Name the individual files using the convention indicated below. Include your first name and last name as part of your file name each separated by an underscore (e.g., Jane_Smith_cv.docx).\r\n<ul>\r\n \t<li style=\"list-style-type: none\">\r\n<ul>\r\n \t<li>Curriculum vitae \u2013 <strong>file name: cv<\/strong><\/li>\r\n \t<li>Thesis topic description (maximum two pages including references, font no smaller than 10-point) \u2013 <strong>file name: thesis<\/strong><\/li>\r\n \t<li>Description of how the grant would be used, including a budget (maximum one page) \u2013 <strong>file name: budget<\/strong>\r\n<ul>Funding can be requested to support items such as equipment, data, travel, tuition, and staff salary needed for research; the request is not limited to these examples<\/ul>\r\n<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\nYou will be asked to request 3 letters of recommendation via the submission portal:\r\n<ul>\r\n \t<li style=\"list-style-type: none\">\r\n<ul>\r\n \t<li>Add the contact information (name, affiliation, email) and send the email request through the submission portal to your three recommenders as soon as possible so they have ample time to provide a letter. Their deadline is the same as your proposal deadline on <strong>Monday, March 22, 2021 at 12:00 PM (Noon) Pacific Daylight Time<\/strong>. They should be established researchers familiar with your research (at least one letter must be from your primary academic advisor\/supervisor and only one letter can be from a current Microsoft employee). Once you send the request through the submission portal, they will receive a private link to upload a letter of recommendation for you. Please note that you and your recommenders may need to check your junk folders in order to find emails from our portal. As reference, here is a list of the <a href=\"https:\/\/support.zenginehq.com\/article\/873-not-receiving-emails-troubleshooting\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">various system email addresses<\/a> you can add to allowed emails.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\nProposals submitted to Microsoft will not be returned. Microsoft cannot assume responsibility for the confidentiality of information submitted in the proposal. Therefore, proposals should not contain information that is confidential, restricted, or sensitive. Microsoft reserves the right to make public the information on those proposals that receive awards, except those portions containing budgetary or personally identifiable information.\r\n\r\nIncomplete proposals will not be considered.\r\n\r\nDue to the volume of submissions, Microsoft Research cannot provide individual feedback on proposals.\r\n<div>[msr-button text=\"Submit a proposal\" url=\"https:\/\/webportalapp.com\/sp\/2021_msr_dissertation_grant\" new-window=\"true\" ]<\/div>"},{"id":2,"name":"FAQ","content":"Below are the answers to frequently asked questions about the 2021 Microsoft Research Dissertation Grant.\r\n<h3>Eligibility criteria<\/h3>\r\n[accordion]\r\n\r\n[panel header=\"Are international students (those who are not citizens of the United States or Canada) eligible?\"] Yes, if you are a full-time international student attending a school in the United States or Canada and meet the eligibility requirements. [\/panel]\r\n\r\n[panel header=\"What if I'm a student attending a university outside the United States and Canada?\"] This program includes only schools in the United States and Canada. If you are a student attending a school outside the United States and Canada, you are not eligible for this grant. You may be eligible for other academic research awards found on our <a href=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/academic-programs\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Academic Programs<\/a> page. [\/panel]\r\n\r\n[panel header=\"What if I will be completing my PhD before the fall of 2021?\"] Students must still be enrolled in their PhD program during the fall of 2021 in order to receive and use the grant. Grants are for completing dissertation research only, and cannot be used for support in a role past graduation, such as a postdoc or faculty position. [\/panel]\r\n\r\n[panel header=\"What if I am not in my fourth year or beyond during the submission period?\"] Students must be in their fourth year or beyond in a PhD program when they submit their grant proposal. Students must have started their PhD in September 2017 or earlier to be considered in their fourth year of the program, and must continue to be enrolled through the fall of 2021. If you do not meet this criteria, you may be eligible for other academic research awards found on our <a href=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/academic-programs\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Academic Programs<\/a> page. [\/panel]\r\n\r\n[panel header=\"Can Microsoft employees or their family members be nominated?\"] Employees and directors of Microsoft Corporation, and its subsidiaries and affiliates are not eligible, nor are persons involved in the execution or administration of this grant, or the family members of each above (parents, children, siblings, spouse\/domestic partners, or individuals residing in the same household). [\/panel]\r\n[\/accordion]\r\n<h3>Research areas<\/h3>\r\n[accordion]\r\n\r\n[panel header=\"You specify very broad focus areas of research. Are there any proposals or projects that you are more interested in than others or is it up to us to choose? Is it mostly software solutions or is there any hardware interest?\"] There are plenty of both hardware and software projects currently in Microsoft Research. The reason the areas of research are broad is that Microsoft Research is very broad, and there are a number of people reviewing the fellowship proposals across a wide range of areas. Look at the work, people in Microsoft Research are doing by clicking on the areas noted in the Our research tab above which will give you some idea of the focus areas within the broad areas to guide your focus area choice. In the end, propose the work you are interested in doing. [\/panel]\r\n\r\n[panel header=\"How do areas of interest factor into grant proposal evaluations? Are there areas of interest that Microsoft Research is more focused on this year?\"] It depends on the individuals involved in reviewing the proposal, and it is hard to say what is going to be of more interest. The trends of the industry are probably going to be reflected in what is interesting in general. Guiding question: Imagine you succeed. Tell us how someone\u2019s life changes as a result. [\/panel]\r\n\r\n[panel header=\"How do I determine my primary and secondary research areas? Where is the appropriate place to describe how they relate to my work (whether it's methodologically or theoretically)?\"] Your choices of primary and secondary areas help us choose who reviews your proposal. Pick areas that align with conferences\/journals where you would publish. [\/panel]\r\n\r\n[panel header=\"How do I choose which area to pick for my research area if my research is very interdisciplinary?\"]\r\nMicrosoft Research is interdisciplinary, so it is something we understand. What you choose as a research area is a \"soft\" preference and will simply help us better route your proposal. Utilize the primary and secondary research area option to help capture and communicate your research area the best you can.\r\n\r\nHere are some suggestions and guiding questions to help you choose a research area:\r\n<ul>\r\n \t<li>Do you have a home conference? Are there one or two conferences you go to in a more specific area?<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Who do you want to be reading your proposal?<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Who would you want to network with? What area of research are they in?<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Who would be most excited about my topic? What area of research are they in?<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n[\/panel]\r\n\r\n[panel header=\"How related does my work need to be to Microsoft Research?\"] Your work should be of interest to researchers at Microsoft; however, it doesn\u2019t need to directly line up with an existing project or topic. It is important for your work to be related enough that researchers at Microsoft will be able to review it and have interest in supporting it. Microsoft Research is large and interdisciplinary, and covers a broad area \u2014 use the <em>Our research<\/em> tab above as a guideline for the areas we cover. When in doubt, we suggest you browse the webpages of researchers who look like they may be related to your area and see if they have papers in the similar topics or publish in conferences you publish in and\/or attend. If you find one or more such researchers that share these connections with you, then you can feel confident that your work is related enough to submit a proposal. [\/panel]\r\n\r\n[\/accordion]\r\n<h3>Proposal<\/h3>\r\n[accordion]\r\n\r\n[panel header=\"What are you looking for in a grant proposal?\"] Accomplishment, impact, and alignment with the work that we are doing at Microsoft Research. Highlight papers you have published and any awards you have received and describe the impact that your research will have on others and how the Dissertation Grant will enable your research. [\/panel]\r\n\r\n[\/accordion]\r\n<h3>Letters of recommendation<\/h3>\r\n[accordion]\r\n\r\n[panel header=\"Who should write my letters of recommendation?\"] Given you have three letters, it would be good to include a letter from one person who can speak about your current research and one person who has known you longer, even if it may not be in your current research area. The longer-term perspective is definitely important and valuable. The value of a letter is evaluating how you work, how you collaborate with people, and what your process is as a researcher. This transcends what your particular topic is. Keep in mind that one letter doesn\u2019t have to address all things; across all three letters, we want to get a full picture of who you are over a longer term, but also insight into your recent work. [\/panel]\r\n\r\n[panel header=\"Are you more interested in learning about technical and research specific aspects of my work, or are other things, such as outreach\/other university activities of interest as well?\"] The purpose of a letter of recommendation is to provide us with the bigger picture of what you are doing, how you work as a researcher, how you learn, how you approach projects, and how you collaborate with others. The letter will also provide us with insight from people who have been working with you and observing you for some amount of time. [\/panel]\r\n\r\n[panel header=\"It was suggested that letters of recommendation come from established researchers. Is this limited to faculty members or would the inclusion of collaborators be acceptable as well?\"] At least one recommendation needs to come from an advisor\/supervisor, but letters of recommendation from collaborators are allowed. We are looking for people who can speak to you, your work as a researcher, and your character. [\/panel]\r\n\r\n[panel header=\"For letters of recommendation, is it a system where you list the people and your system will ask those people?\"] Those you provided as references in our system will be sent an auto-generated email with instructions to upload their letters of recommendation. [\/panel]\r\n\r\n[\/accordion]\r\n<h3>Review process<\/h3>\r\n[accordion]\r\n\r\n[panel header=\"How will proposals be judged?\"] Reviewers will rate proposals based on the technical\/scientific quality and the potential impact of the proposed research. [\/panel]\r\n\r\n[panel header=\"Who will review the proposals?\"] Proposals will be reviewed by researchers at Microsoft with appropriate topical expertise. The three to six Microsoft researchers identified as someone with topical expertise to evaluate the grant proposal could be among those asked to review that individual\u2019s submission. You can identify researchers by selecting your primary research area from the <em>Our research<\/em> tab at the top of the page. Then provide keywords related to your research to filter. Do not contact the researchers for the purpose of listing them as a potential reviewer. We strongly suggest restricting your suggestions to people whose title is <em>Researcher<\/em>, <em>Senior Researcher<\/em>, <em>Principal Researcher<\/em>, or <em> Senior Principal Researcher<\/em> (i.e., if you list someone with a title like <em>Corporate Vice President<\/em> or <em>Director<\/em> it is very unlikely they would be available to review your proposal). Your choice of primary and (optional) secondary research area descriptors in the proposal will also help us select researchers at Microsoft to review your proposal (i.e., researchers whose own work falls under those research categories). [\/panel]\r\n\r\n[panel header=\"When will I know the outcome of the review process?\"] Selected proposals will receive notification no later than June 30, 2021. Due to the volume of submissions, Microsoft Research cannot provide individual feedback to those individuals who do not receive research grants. [\/panel]\r\n\r\n[panel header=\"How many proposals were there last year?\"] There were over 200 proposals submitted last year. [\/panel]\r\n\r\n[\/accordion]\r\n<h3>Award details<\/h3>\r\n[accordion]\r\n\r\n[panel header=\"If selected, when will I receive the grant funding?\"] Persons awarded a Microsoft Research Dissertation Grant in June will receive their financial awards by September of that year. Microsoft sends the payment directly to the university, who will disperse funds according to their guidelines. [\/panel]\r\n\r\n[panel header=\"Do I need to include university \u201coverhead\u201d charges in my grant budget?\"] No. This award will be provided as an unrestricted gift with no terms and restrictions applied to it. No portion of these funds should be applied to overhead or other indirect costs. [\/panel]\r\n\r\n[panel header=\"Are there any tax implications for me if I receive this research grant?\"] The tax implications for the research grant are based on the policy at the university and applicable tax laws. [\/panel]\r\n\r\n[panel header=\"Will intellectual property be an issue if I am awarded a research grant?\"] The Microsoft Research Dissertation Grant is not subject to any intellectual property (IP) restrictions. [\/panel]\r\n\r\n[panel header=\"Can I simultaneously receive fellowships from other companies?\"] If you accept a Microsoft Research Dissertation Grant, you may receive another fellowship from another company or institution during the same academic period. However, if your tuition and\/or stipend are being covered by a fellowship award, then you should not request tuition\/stipend funds from the grant as part of your budget. [\/panel]\r\n\r\n[panel header=\"Is childcare an approved use of grant funding?\"] Absolutely! There is no limit to the amount of grant funding that can be used for childcare. [\/panel]\r\n\r\n[\/accordion]"},{"id":3,"name":"Grant Recipients","content":"<h2>2021 Grant Recipients<\/h2>\r\n<div style=\"height: 25px\"><\/div>\r\n<img class=\"wp-image-746254 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/05\/Haley-Adams_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"2021 Dissertation Grant recipient: Haley Adams\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3><a href=\"http:\/\/haleyscommit.dev\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Haley Adams<\/a><\/h3>\r\nVanderbilt University\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Exposing Blind Spots in XR Accessibility With Simulated Vision Impairments\r\n\r\nOver fourteen million people in the United States of America have some form of vision disability in which vision cannot be corrected with glasses alone. Many people within this population are unable to use extended reality (XR) head-mounted displays due to their inaccessible designs. Worse yet, best practices for accessibility in immersive XR are still a nascent area of research. In my dissertation, I develop an immersive visual impairment simulation that is both eye-tracked and data-driven. Furthermore, this testbed is validated by analyzing behavioral responses across both visually impaired and normally sighted users. My testbed will allow normally sighted individuals to better understand and design for people with visual impairments by allowing them to experience visual impairments firsthand.\r\n\r\n<hr \/>\r\n\r\n<img class=\"wp-image-746266 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/05\/Stella-Arthur_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"2021 Dissertation Grant recipient: Stella Arthur\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3><a href=\"https:\/\/uwaterloo.ca\/interrai-canada\/about\/people\/snaawire\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Stella Arthur<\/a><\/h3>\r\nUniversity of Waterloo\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Predicting Adverse Outcomes Among Frail Surgical Patients in Acute Care Hospitals\r\n\r\nThe pace of global aging speaks to the urgency with which frailty must be addressed. Frailty is not an inevitable consequence of aging, but a preventable and even reversible vulnerable state. Multimodal approaches comprising early identification, risk prediction of pertinent outcomes, and targeted intervention protocols are needed. By bridging clinical expertise and AI, my research harnesses big data grounded in integrated information system to develop premorbid predictive risk algorithms that translate into meaningful standard practice. The algorithm predicts negative outcomes including delays in discharge or alternate level of care (ALC). Using Chi-squared automatic interaction detection (CHAID) and classification and regression tree (CART), results will be validated within home and community care and acute-care hospital cohorts. This lays the foundation for a collaborative framework involving real-time clinical exchange where decision support tools are seamlessly incorporated into routine workflows. This optimizes transitional care challenges like discharge planning and proactively tackles ALC and the woes of \u201challway medicine\u201d.\r\n\r\n<hr \/>\r\n\r\n<img class=\"wp-image-746251 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/05\/Dhruv-DJ-Jain_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"2021 Dissertation Grant recipient: Dhruv DJ Jain\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3><a href=\"https:\/\/homes.cs.washington.edu\/~djain\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Dhruv \"DJ\" Jain<\/a><\/h3>\r\nUniversity of Washington\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Sound Sensing and Feedback Techniques for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Users\r\n\r\nSound provides rich information about our world, ranging from actionable cues (e.g., a microwave beep) to safety related cues (e.g., a fire alarm) to cues that make one feel present (e.g., a bird chirp). However, sounds are not always accessible to people who are d\/Deaf and hard of hearing (DHH). In my work, I am leveraging advances in Human Computer Interaction, signal processing, and machine learning to sense and provide sound feedback to DHH people. Specifically, I am designing and evaluating three related systems: (1) a smarthome system, called HomeSound, to sense and visualize sounds in the home, (2) a smartwatch app, called SoundWatch, to notify about sounds in diverse contexts, and (3) an augmented reality head-mounted display system, called HoloSound, to display speech transcription and other conversation cues (e.g., speaker identification, location). All three systems are being deployed and tested with DHH users. My overarching vision is to transform how DHH people think about, experience, and engage with the sound.\r\n\r\n<hr \/>\r\n\r\n<img class=\"wp-image-746263 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/05\/Oscar-Lemus_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"2021 Dissertation Grant recipient: Oscar Lemus\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3><a href=\"https:\/\/oscarlemus.cargo.site\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Oscar A. Lemus<\/a><\/h3>\r\nIndiana University Bloomington\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Technology and Women Micro-Entrepreneurs in the Global South and North: Managing Economic and Home Life Boundaries with Digital Tools and Analog Artefacts\r\n\r\nSpaces and technologies are routinely and strategically used by women micro-business owners in the Global South and Global North to manage how they present themselves to the public, define and manage their family obligations, and turn a profit to make a living. To date, however, little research has focused on exactly how these ever-present yet somehow also invisible, overlooked workers do this. By noting the use, personalization, and integration of technologies, social practices, and spaces and time, this mixed-method dissertation examines how women micro-entrepreneurs in Guatemala and the U.S. manage their economic and home boundaries while shedding light on the general concept of \u201centrepreneur\u201d, the work it entails, and the tangible consequences of this classification on women\u2019s lives, tech and economic policies, and literature on work and computing. This dissertation will inform the design of digital technologies for women micro-entrepreneurs and the future of work-oriented policy.\r\n\r\n<hr \/>\r\n\r\n<img class=\"wp-image-746260 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/05\/Maria-Pacheco_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"2021 Dissertation Grant recipient: Maria Pacheco\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3><a href=\"https:\/\/mlpacheco.github.io\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Maria Leonor Pacheco<\/a><\/h3>\r\nPurdue University\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Neural-Symbolic Modeling for Natural Language Discourse\r\n\r\nModeling realistic natural language scenarios requires dealing with long, noisy inputs and accounting for complicated structural dependencies. Traditionally, there have been two approaches for doing this. Structured prediction methods combine symbolic representations of knowledge and probabilistic inference, while neural approaches learn distributed representations that capture the underlying dependencies in a latent high-dimensional space. In my dissertation, I motivate the integration of these two modeling paradigms for natural language discourse scenarios, and propose a neural-symbolic framework to model both the language input, and the context surrounding the language event. The content consists of the different chunks of language and the way they flow together to convey meaning. The context is the frame that surrounds the communicative event and provides resources for its interpretation. I identify four key challenges and opportunities in the space of neural-symbolic methods for discourse: declarative modeling, computational considerations, deriving explanations and learning with humans in the loop.\r\n\r\n<hr \/>\r\n\r\n<img class=\"wp-image-746242 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/05\/Chara-Podimata_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"2021 Dissertation Grant recipient: Chara Podimata\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3><a href=\"https:\/\/www.charapodimata.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Chara Podimata<\/a><\/h3>\r\nHarvard University\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Algorithms for Incentive-Compatible and Incentive-Aware Learning\r\n\r\nMy research addresses questions related to strategic behavior in Machine Learning (ML). These questions are of utmost importance nowadays, since ML algorithms are increasingly used in real-world, highly consequential decision-making that affects our everyday lives, ranging from online ad auctions guiding our purchasing behavior to complex algorithms deciding whether we should be approved for a loan or not. My dissertation serves as a building block towards establishing a theory of incentives for ML algorithms and studying their societal implications through the two paradigms of incentive-compatible and incentive-aware ML \u2013 two terms that are borrowed from the Game Theory literature while providing novel learning algorithms tailored to these strategic settings.\r\n\r\n<hr \/>\r\n\r\n<img class=\"wp-image-746248 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/05\/David-Porfirio_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"2021 Dissertation Grant recipient: David Porfirio\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3><a href=\"https:\/\/dporfirio.github.io\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">David Porfirio<\/a><\/h3>\r\nUniversity of Wisconsin\u2013Madison\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Authoring Social Interactions Between Humans and Robots\r\n\r\nAs robots are progressively used in the workplace, at home, and in public settings, design tools for creating social human-robot interactions become increasingly critical. Interaction designers and developers must coordinate individual behavioral modalities, such as speech and locomotion, to produce appropriate social behaviors, all while ensuring that the interaction logic, or how the robot responds to sensory input, produces a natural interaction flow. Furthermore, the success of a social human-robot interaction is defined by variable criteria, depending on the norms, constraints, and user preferences of the interaction context. The focus of my dissertation is on how human-robot interaction \u201cauthoring\u201d tools can mitigate these challenges. Specifically, I seek to answer how authoring tools can help designers and developers create robust interactions by (1) filling in gaps in designer knowledge and expertise and (2) eliciting knowledge already possessed by designers and assisting with the integration of this knowledge into interaction designs.\r\n\r\n<hr \/>\r\n\r\n<img class=\"wp-image-746245 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/05\/Chengcheng-Wan_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"2021 Dissertation Grant recipient: Chengcheng Wan\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3><a href=\"http:\/\/people.cs.uchicago.edu\/~cwan\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Chengcheng Wan<\/a><\/h3>\r\nUniversity of Chicago\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Accurate Anytime Learning for Energy and Timeliness in Software Systems\r\n\r\nMachine learning (ML) provides efficient solutions for a number of problems that were difficult to solve with traditional computing techniques. Deep neural networks have become a key workload for many computing systems due to their high inference accuracy. This accuracy, however, comes at a cost of long latency, high energy usage, or both. It also introduces many ML-specific bugs into software systems. My thesis aims to help developing accurate, efficient, and robust machine learning software systems. In the past few years, my work has focused on creating robust methods to incorporate neural networks into software systems to satisfy differing requirements and goals across a variety of users and applications. My past research has led to first-author papers published at ATC\u201920, ICML\u201920, and ICSE\u201921.\r\n\r\n<hr \/>\r\n\r\n<img class=\"wp-image-746269 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/05\/Yawen-Wang_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"2021 Dissertation Grant recipient: Yawen Wang\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3><a href=\"http:\/\/web.stanford.edu\/~yawenw\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Yawen Wang<\/a><\/h3>\r\nStanford University\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Improving Cloud Efficiency with Online Learning\r\n\r\nCloud computing has emerged as the dominant platform for computing due to its ease of use and scalability advantages. To maintain high-performance services in a cost-effective manner, cloud providers need to efficiently administer a large number of management tasks including resource scheduling, power management, maintenance planning and more. Recent works have shown promising results with machine learning assisted resource management policies. To account for more dynamic changes in the cloud environment, online learning becomes necessary where the model is continuously updated online with live data. My dissertation research focuses on facilitating the integration of online learning into cloud resource managers. I propose to build a general framework that guides developers to reason through agent-specific issues while automatically catching and handling common problems shared across learning-based management agents during deployment. Such a framework will help deploy more safe and robust online learning-based resource managers in the cloud to improve resource efficiency.\r\n\r\n<hr \/>\r\n\r\n<img class=\"wp-image-746257 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/05\/Ihudiya-Finda-Williams_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"2021 Dissertation Grant recipient: Ihudiya Finda Williams\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ihudiyaogburu.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Ihudiya Finda Williams<\/a><\/h3>\r\nUniversity of Michigan\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Using Participatory Research to Design Mobile Technology that Teaches Digital Literacy with Returning Citizens\r\n\r\nJob search today involves digital elements such as applying online or conducting an interview. Yet, inmates have very limited opportunities to learn digital skills \u2013 at least in the United States, prisons do not provide internet access, and digital literacy trainings if offered at all are limited. My research focuses on understanding what mobile phone-based interventions could build on existing social support to improve formerly incarcerated individuals\u2019 digital literacy skills? To explore this question, I will run a participatory design workshop where formerly incarcerated individuals and their support systems will design the elements of a mobile phone-based set of tools that can be used to learn digital literacy skills for job search. Next, I will develop a prototype and evaluate it by conducting a usability study. My empirical research will contribute to the much-needed conversation of how to support formerly incarcerated individuals in a world that increasingly relies on digital technology.\r\n\r\n<hr \/>\r\n\r\n[accordion]\r\n[panel header=\"2020 Grant Recipients\"]\r\n<img class=\"wp-image-663039 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/05\/Rogerio-Bonatti_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"2020 Dissertation Grant: Rogerio Bonatti\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3>Rogerio Bonatti<\/h3>\r\nCarnegie Mellon University\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Active Vision: Autonomous Aerial Cinematography with Learned Artistic Decision-Making\r\n\r\nAerial cinematography is revolutionizing industries that require live and dynamic camera viewpoints, such as entertainment, sports, and security. Fundamentally, it is a tool with immense potential to improve human creativity, expressiveness, and sharing of experiences. However, safely piloting a drone while filming a moving target in the presence of obstacles is immensely taxing, often requiring multiple highly trained human operators to safely control a single vehicle. My dissertation focuses on building autonomous systems that can empower any individual with the full artistic capabilities of aerial cameras. I am developing intelligent cameras that actively reason about the cinematographic quality of viewpoints, and safely generate sequences of shots that avoid collisions and occlusions with obstacles. The theory and systems developed in this work can impact video generation for both real-world and simulated environments, such as professional and amateur movie-making, videogames, and virtual reality.\r\n\r\n<hr \/>\r\n\r\n<img class=\"wp-image-663033 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/05\/Kiante-Brantley_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"2020 Dissertation Grant: Kiante Brantley\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3>Kiant\u00e9 Brantley<\/h3>\r\nUniversity of Maryland, College Park\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Practical Techniques for Leveraging Experts for Sequential Decisions and Predictions\r\n\r\nMy research addresses practical and theoretical sample complexity issues which arise in reinforcement learning by leveraging knowledge from experts, specified in the form of \"Annotations.\u201d As the impact of machine learning on all aspects of our lives continues to grow, having systems that can learn through interaction with users and the world becomes more pressing. Unfortunately, today\u2019s approaches\u2014typically driven by reinforcement learning algorithms\u2014require a large number of interactions, which is feasible only for systems we can fully simulate. But for many real-world systems, simulators do not already exist. This means we need to develop algorithms that can interact with real systems and have very low sample complexity so that they can learn in a reasonable amount of time. I propose that for many such systems, we can leverage certain forms of expert knowledge, which I call \u201cAnnotations\u201d, to reduce sample complexity and lead to more practical algorithms in real-world settings.\r\n\r\n<hr \/>\r\n\r\n<img class=\"wp-image-663036 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/05\/Mayara-Figueiredo_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"2020 Dissertation Grant: Mayara Figueiredo\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3>Mayara Costa Figueiredo<\/h3>\r\nUniversity of California, Irvine\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Self-Tracking for Fertility Care: A Holistic Approach\r\n\r\nWith the recent popularity of self-tracking technologies, individuals are increasingly using and interacting with their personal data. Fertility is a health matter that has been progressively assisted by consumer health technologies, which aim to support people in tracking diverse data potentially associated with their fertility cycles. However, fertility is a complex context for self-tracking, presenting many challenges, involving diverse goals and transitions, and entangled with social factors and taboos. My dissertation research combines multiple studies to investigate self-tracking for fertility care, focusing on understanding individuals\u2019 data practices, how technology influences these practices, and the consequences of using such data. Based on these studies, I explore how design and technology can be used to reinforce positive experiences, avoid negative emotional burden, and support holistic tracking for fertility.\r\n\r\n<hr \/>\r\n\r\n<img class=\"wp-image-663042 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/05\/Sami-Davies_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"2020 Dissertation Grant: Sami Davies\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3>Sami Davies<\/h3>\r\nUniversity of Washington\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Complex Analysis, Hierarchies, and Matroids\u2014Improving Algorithms via a Mathematical Perspective\r\n\r\nAs a theoretical computer scientist, my goal is to design algorithms with provable guarantees for practically motivated problems. Some of the main topics in my thesis work are fair allocation, scheduling, and statistical reconstruction. These problems are united by the need to understand some underlying mathematical structure. In fair allocation, we discover a connection to matroids allowing for a simpler, more general, and more efficient approximation algorithm. Additionally, we make major progress on a scheduling problem using linear programming hierarchies and a partitioning algorithm for metric spaces. I also use tools from complex analysis and probability theory to study generating functions arising from various statistical reconstruction problems.\r\n\r\n<hr \/>\r\n\r\n<img class=\"wp-image-663030 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/05\/Farah-Deeba_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"2020 Dissertation Grant: Farah Deeba\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3>Farah Deeba<\/h3>\r\nThe University of British Columbia\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Placenta: Towards an Objective Pregnancy Screening System\r\n\r\nThe placenta forms the critical interface between the fetus and the mother. Placental insufficiency has adverse effects on the neonatal outcome and life-long health of the offspring as well as the mother. The current clinical practice of ultrasound-based pregnancy monitoring relies heavily on user interpretation. Additionally, conventional ultrasound suffers from low sensitivity to detect the underlying pathophysiological change resulting from placental insufficiency. There is a need to develop effective parameters that would be the predictor of the underlying pathophysiology, and therefore, would serve as potential biomarkers of placenta-mediated diseases. The objective of my dissertation research is to develop a system and user-independent pregnancy screening system that will provide a quantifiable measure of placental health. The quantitative ultrasound (QUS) based multiparametric screening will allow the identification of the early symptoms of the placental abnormalities with an opportunity of intervention to prevent clinical manifestation and long-term effects.\r\n\r\n<hr \/>\r\n\r\n<img class=\"wp-image-663024 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/05\/Anna-Fariha_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"2020 Dissertation Grant: Anna Fariha\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3>Anna Fariha<\/h3>\r\nUniversity of Massachusetts Amherst\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Enhancing Usability and Explainability of Data Systems\r\n\r\nThe growth of data science and its reach to an ever-growing user base of non-experts require data systems to be democratized and offer more transparency. Democratization entails a system that can be used by people with different skills and backgrounds alike, and transparency requires explanation mechanism for the users to understand the system behavior, especially when unexpected behavior occurs. Unfortunately, most data systems are usable only by the expert users. Furthermore, they lack explainability, making them unreliable for even the most expert users. The first aim of my work is to enhance usability of complex data systems for non-experts where I focus on example-driven techniques that complement traditional task-specification mechanisms. The second aim of my work is to provide causality-guided explanation frameworks to enable understanding of certain outcomes of complex data systems. Finally, my work aims at developing data profiling techniques for achieving trust and fairness in data-driven machine learning.\r\n\r\n<hr \/>\r\n\r\n<img class=\"wp-image-663027 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/05\/Diego-Gomez-Zara_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"2020 Dissertation Grant: Diego Gomez-Zara\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3>Diego G\u00f3mez-Zar\u00e1<\/h3>\r\nNorthwestern University\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Using Online Team Recommender Systems to Form Diverse Teams\r\n\r\nEmbracing diversity can yield measurable benefits for teams and organizations. Although society extols the benefits of diversity, particularly to teams, assembling diverse teams is not a simple task. Online team recommender systems may facilitate diverse team formation by enabling people to filter, curate, and review recommendations for prospective teammates from a wider pool and based on deep-level information. My dissertation sheds light on how team recommender systems shape users' motivations and actions to assemble diverse teams. My goals are threefold: (i) characterize the diversity of teams assembled online, (ii) understand the basis of users\u2019 decisions when they are forming teams online, and (iii) evaluate a team recommender system with regard to diversity. By tracking users\u2019 prior actions and interactions, team recommender systems can leverage a combination of digital trace data, network information, and individual characteristics to assemble diverse teams in organizations.\r\n\r\n<hr \/>\r\n\r\n<img class=\"wp-image-663021 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/05\/Zerina-Kapetanovic_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"2020 Dissertation Grant: Zerina Kapetanovic\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3>Zerina Kapetanovic<\/h3>\r\nUniversity of Washington\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Low-power Communication for Environmental Sensing Systems\r\n\r\nOver the last decade the Internet of Things (IoT) has been changing the world, from enabling connected electronics, smart homes, to smart agriculture. I am deeply passionate about the role that IoT plays when it comes to environmental monitoring, which is now increasingly relevant in the times of the climate change crisis and the need to achieve biodiversity conservation. My thesis focuses on enabling low-power communication for environmental sensing systems. In particular dealing with two major challenges: resources constraints and scale. For example, devices deployed in remote locations often lack power and Internet connectivity. This becomes even more challenging when considering the size of forest, farms, and oceans all requiring large-scale sensing systems. My past and ongoing research focuses on addressing these challenges by developing systems like <a href=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/project\/farmbeats-iot-agriculture\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">FarmBeats<\/a> to enable data-driven agriculture, enabling low-power communication using backscatter techniques, and using machine learning to improve the performance of mainstream IoT solutions.\r\n\r\n<hr \/>\r\n\r\n<img class=\"wp-image-663048 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/05\/Urvashi-Khandelwal_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"2020 Dissertation Grant: Urvashi Khandelwal\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3>Urvashi Khandelwal<\/h3>\r\nStanford University\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Understanding and Exploiting the Use of Linguistic Context by Neural Language Models\r\n\r\nThe meaning of any piece of text is determined by the words contained in it. Proper use of this linguistic context is an extremely important part of every task in the field of natural language processing (NLP). Yet, the black-box nature of neural networks makes it extremely unclear what contextual information is captured and how it can be used to further improve existing models. In my dissertation, I address this problem for neural language models\u2014the basis of modern language understanding and generation tasks. First, I use analysis techniques to shed light on how these models use linguistic context and what features are learned from it. Then, using the knowledge gained from the analysis, I show how pre-trained neural language models can be improved and adapted to larger datasets and different domains without any additional training, by simply relying on the high-dimensional representations learned from linguistic context.\r\n\r\n<hr \/>\r\n\r\n<img class=\"wp-image-663045 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/05\/Sannon_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"2020 Dissertation Grant: Shruti Sannon\" width=\"150\" height=\"207\" \/><h3>Shruti Sannon<\/h3>\r\nCornell University\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Towards a More Inclusive Gig Economy: Examining Privacy, Security, and Safety Risks for Workers with Chronic Illnesses and\/or Disabilities\r\n\r\nWorkers in the gig economy do not receive traditional labor protections, and the precarity of their work can lead them to prioritize financial incentives over protecting themselves from risk. Even more problematically, workers with chronic illnesses and\/or disabilities may face disproportionate risks in terms of their privacy, security, and safety during the course of their work, in addition to navigating the economic precarity of gig work. Through a large qualitative study, my dissertation will develop a comprehensive account of the risks and opportunities posed by a range of gig platforms for this group of workers. Ultimately, this work aims to inform how gig platforms can be more inclusive for workers with chronic illnesses and\/or disabilities while mitigating the risks they encounter during their work.\r\n\r\n[\/panel]\r\n\r\n[panel header=\"2019 Grant Recipients\"]\r\n<img class=\"wp-image-667296 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Larwan-Berke_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Larwan Berke\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3>Larwan Berke<\/h3>\r\nRochester Institute of Technology\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Automatic Speech Recognition as a Captioning Tool: Enabling Greater Accessibility for Users who are Deaf or Hard-of-Hearing\r\n\r\nAs the accuracy of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology improves over time, it may become a viable method for transcribing audio input in real-time. Such technology can provide access to spoken language for people who are Deaf or Hard-of-Hearing (DHH). However, ASR is imperfect and will remain so for a while, thus there is a need for users to cope with errors in the output. Our proposed solution is to add markup to the captioning so the DHH viewer is able to discern when the ASR may be erroneous by utilizing the confidence values in the ASR output. My goal is to empower the DHH individual with greater autonomy in scenarios such as one-on-one meetings with hearing people when in-person interpreters are not available.\r\n\r\n<hr \/>\r\n\r\n<img class=\"wp-image-667284 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Alexander-Gamero-Garrido_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Alexander Gamero-Garrido\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3>Alexander Gamero-Garrido<\/h3>\r\nUniversity of California, San Diego\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Inferring Country-Level Transit Influence of Autonomous Systems\r\n\r\nOur work explores the country-level influence exerted by transit providers, a set of networking organizations that often have less direct contact with users, but who are nonetheless responsible for delivering an important fraction of transnational traffic into and out of many countries, and who may have the capability to observe, manipulate, or disrupt some of that traffic. For instance, an accidental misconfiguration or a state-ordered disconnection implemented by one of these operators may render popular services delivered on the Internet (such as email or social media) unreachable in entire regions. These concerns are not abstract, as previous instances of state-ordered disconnections have propagated to other countries and temporarily disabled some of the world's most popular services there. By studying the ways in which these operators (Autonomous Systems) connect to one another and to the rest of the Internet, we aim to highlight each country's relative risk exposure.\r\n\r\n<hr \/>\r\n\r\n<img class=\"wp-image-667308 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Sumegha-Garg_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Sumegha Garg\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3>Sumegha Garg<\/h3>\r\nPrinceton University\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Understanding the Limits of Computational Models and Learning Algorithms\r\n\r\nThe primary aim of my research has been studying the computation limits of and the role of randomness in space-bounded computational models. In particular, my work has focused on proving for a large class of learning problems the following: a low-memory learning algorithm requires an exponential number of samples to learn. These also give cryptographic protocols with unconditional security against low-space adversaries. The second aim of my research has been algorithmic fairness and investigating the sources of unfairness in classification algorithms. Machine learning algorithms are increasingly being used for making decisions about humans, which raises concerns that these might inadvertently discriminate against certain groups of society. In particular, my work has focused on understanding the role of information in fairness and exploring the mechanisms\/incentives that lead to fair predictions.\r\n\r\n<hr \/>\r\n\r\n<img class=\"wp-image-667299 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Megh-Marathe_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Megh Marathe\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3>Megh Marathe<\/h3>\r\nUniversity of Michigan, Ann Arbor\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Was That a Seizure? Understanding Everyday Ambiguity in the Clinical Diagnosis and Lived Experience of Epilepsy\r\n\r\nEpilepsy is a chronic illness characterized by recurrent and unpredictable seizures, during which people lose voluntary control over body-mind function. Seizure symptoms often resemble bodily sensations such as muscle spasms and dizziness; but seizures require medical care whereas common muscle spasms require hydration or rest. This ambiguity between seizure-like symptoms and seizures troubles people with epilepsy (PWE), confounding the decision between three courses of action: report to ER, schedule a doctor\u2019s appointment, or rest. This ambiguity also arises in clinical diagnosis, where neurologists must distinguish social and environmental factors from seizures: being patted on the back, for instance, resembles seizures. My dissertation addresses this ambiguity through comparative ethnographic fieldwork and machine learning to design a wearable interface that combines clinical expertise with experiential knowledge to detect seizures. In doing so, I problematize the gap between the subjective experience of seizures and objective representations thereof in clinical diagnosis.\r\n\r\n<hr \/>\r\n\r\n<img class=\"wp-image-667293 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Julian-Ramos-Rojas_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Julian Ramos Rojas\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3>Julian A. Ramos Rojas<\/h3>\r\nCarnegie Mellon University\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Personalized and Context-Aware Behavioral Interventions using Artificial-Intelligence\r\n\r\nIn traditional behavioral interventions, a clinician personalizes a treatment to foster positive behaviors and replace unhealthy habits (eg., drinking, or smoking). Behavioral interventions are, however, limited to the number of available clinicians and their brief interactions with patients. For my PhD dissertation, I want to leverage the power of computing to scale behavioral interventions by creating a computational approach that fulfills the clinician\u2019s role of personalization: finding a treatment that aligns with the patient\u2019s goal, preferences, and desired outcomes. I will be using Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods and mobile sensors to personalize health interventions. As part of this work, I\u2019m currently piloting an android app that gives advice on how to improve sleep based on Fitbit data and user feedback using AI.\r\n\r\n<hr \/>\r\n\r\n<img class=\"wp-image-667305 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Sonia-Jawaid-Shaikh_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Sonia Jawaid Shaikh\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3>Sonia Jawaid Shaikh<\/h3>\r\nUniversity of Southern California\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Bounded Technological Rationality: How Human-AI Collaboration Impacts Prosocial and Antisocial Behaviors\r\n\r\nAI-enabled technologies such as intelligent assistants are increasingly being developed and deployed to make decisions that were previously made by humans alone. The widening use of intelligent assistants across physical and virtual spaces offers a unique opportunity to explore various issues pertaining to individual and group information exchange. This project empirically tests how and when intelligent assistants can serve as an intervention and nudge decision-makers to increase prosocial and decrease antisocial informational behaviors within various kinds of competitive and resource environments. The major goals of this project are: a) to unpack socio-psychological processes and behavioral outcomes in human-AI collaboration, b) to understand human rationality from a technological perspective, and c) to help develop AI-enabled technology for social good.\r\n\r\n<hr \/>\r\n\r\n<img class=\"wp-image-667287 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Alexa-Siu_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Alexa Siu\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3>Alexa Siu<\/h3>\r\nStanford University\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Advancing Accessible 3D Design for the Blind and Visually Impaired via 2.5D Tactile Shape Displays\r\n\r\nPeople with blindness and visual impairments (BVI) are experienced makers having to adapt the technology available to solve accessibility problems they face. This spirit of creative problem solving and tinkering has existed in parallel to the mainstream Maker Movement because most maker tools are inaccessible. Accessibility in making can not only provide access points for contextualized learning of STEM concepts but can also give the BVI community the tools to participate in the vibrant maker culture as designers themselves. My dissertation seeks to bridge this gap by increasing access to 3D design. It aims to create an accessible 3D design and printing workflow for BVI people through the use of 2.5D tactile displays, and to understand how BVI people use the workflow in the context of perception, interaction, and learning. At a broader level, it seeks to increase access to STEM concepts and give BVI people, a new medium for creative expression that others across the world already engage in.\r\n\r\n<hr \/>\r\n\r\n<img class=\"wp-image-667290 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Angelique-Taylor_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Angelique Taylor\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3>Angelique Taylor<\/h3>\r\nUniversity of California, San Diego\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Group Perception Methods to Support Human-Robot Teaming\r\n\r\nThe field of robotics is growing at a vast pace with robot deployments in everyday environments. In many of these environments, people are often in groups; therefore, robots need a high-level understanding of groups in order to fluently assist and interact with them. Yet much prior work in human-robot interaction (HRI) focuses on dyadic interaction. To address this gap, my research focuses on designing perception methods to enable robots to work seamlessly in a group. My research contributes novel perception methods that enable robots to effectively identify groups, track them over time, infer their future motion trajectories, and navigate and interact among them in real-world settings. Furthermore, it will enable robots to join and participate in group interactions, which will enable the next generation of artificially intelligent systems. My dissertation will enable more robust, realistic HRI, and support the safe operation of mobile robots in human-centered environments.\r\n\r\n<hr \/>\r\n\r\n<img class=\"wp-image-667311 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Troi-Williams_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Troi Williams\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3>Troi Williams<\/h3>\r\nUniversity of South Florida\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Hunting Mosquito Breeding Habitats using Drones and State-Dependent Measurement Models\r\n\r\nTo search for mosquito breeding habitats (MBHs) in forest-like areas, an autonomous robot such as a drone relies on sensor measurements to estimate its state and the state of the surrounding world; such states include the locations of the drone, tree trunks, branches, and MBHs. However, since measurements contain error (bias and uncertainty), state estimates are often inaccurate. My dissertation alleviates measurement error by modeling the errors using a novel concept called state-dependent measurement models, which estimate a measurement error probability distribution for each sensor measurement. While navigating in forest-like areas, drones can use such models to determine how confident they are about their state and the state of the world, which can help a drone safely maneuver amongst trees and competently perform tasks. My dissertation validates this concept by using it to build uncertainty-aware maps, autonomously navigate, and detect MBHs in dense forest-like areas with simulated and real drones.\r\n\r\n<hr \/>\r\n\r\n<img class=\"wp-image-667302 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Qian-Yang_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Qian Yang\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3>Qian Yang<\/h3>\r\nCarnegie Mellon University\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Understanding AI as an HCI Design Material: Providing Methods and Tools for Sketching and Prototyping Human-AI Interaction\r\n\r\nMy work focuses on understanding and addressing the human-computer interaction (HCI) challenges brought by the advances of AI. I worked to articulate why and where human-AI interaction seems particularly difficult to design, in comparison to many other complex interactive technologies. I identified effective methods for sketching and prototyping human-AI interactions. I distill these methods into a Designing AI toolkit, helping more AI designers and teams to translate the technical advances of AI into human-centered, thoughtful, and creative real world applications.\r\n\r\n<hr \/>\r\n\r\n<img class=\"wp-image-667314 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Yixue-Zhao_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Yixue Zhao\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3>Yixue Zhao<\/h3>\r\nUniversity of Southern California\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Reducing User-Perceived Latency in Mobile Apps via Prefetching and Caching\r\n\r\nMobile devices have become the dominant computing platform and this trend is reflected in the billions of mobile devices and millions of mobile apps today. At the same time, user-perceived latency caused by network transfers remains a significant problem since mobile apps fetch data from the Internet constantly via unreliable wireless network. To tackle the network latency problem in mobile apps, my research focuses on prefetching and caching techniques as they can bypass the performance bottleneck and enable immediate response from a local store. However, such fundamental techniques are largely overlooked in the emerging mobile-app domain. Thus, my dissertation aims to establish the foundation for prefetching and caching techniques in the mobile-app domain by exploring the prefetching and caching opportunities in practice, and proposing a set of novel techniques that are suitable for mobile apps in order to reduce user-perceived latency.\r\n\r\n[\/panel]\r\n\r\n[panel header=\"2018 Grant Recipients\"]\r\n<img class=\"wp-image-667392 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Cynthia-Bennett_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Cynthia Bennett\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3>Cynthia Bennett<\/h3>\r\nUniversity of Washington\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong> Toward Disability-Informed Human-Centered Design\r\n\r\nExperience shows us that people with disabilities can positively impact interaction design for everyone. However, publishers of interaction design rubrics--such as Human-Centered Design--have tended to focus on supporting the design process for people with disabilities, rather than by them. My research focuses on developing an inclusive toolkit that augments current Human-Centered Design activities to be accessible to people with disabilities. Drawing from this toolkit, I will offer new ways to connect disability with design, all based on the life experiences of people with disabilities.\r\n\r\n<hr \/>\r\n\r\n<img class=\"wp-image-667395 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Eric-Corbett_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Eric Corbett\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3>Eric Corbett<\/h3>\r\nGeorgia Institute of Technology\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title: <\/strong>Trust, Technology and Community Engagement\r\n\r\nThe work of community engagement performed by public officials in local government provides valuable opportunities for city residents to participate in governance. Technology stands to play an increasingly important role in mediating community engagement; however, the practices and relationships that constitute community engagement are currently understudied in human-computer interaction (HCI). Of particular importance is the role that trust plays in the success of community engagements\u2014either establishing trust, or more frequently, overcoming distrust between public officials and city residents. To address this challenge, my research seeks to understand how trust could inform the design of technology to support the work of community engagement performed by public officials in local government. My research will culminate in a design framework that will inform development of technology for trust-based community engagement.\r\n\r\n<hr \/>\r\n\r\n<img class=\"wp-image-667416 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Ryan-MCorey_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Ryan M. Corey\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3>Ryan M. Corey<\/h3>\r\nUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title: <\/strong>Array Signal Processing for Augmented Listening\r\n\r\nAugmented listening technologies, such as hearing aids, smart headphones, and audio augmented- reality platforms, promise to enhance human hearing by processing the sound we hear to reduce unwanted noise and improve understanding. State-of-the-art listening devices perform poorly, however, in noisy environments that have many competing sound sources. Large microphone arrays with dozens or hundreds of sensors could allow listening devices to separate, process, and enhance multiple sound sources in real time while sounding natural to the user. My dissertation addresses several unique challenges of array processing for real-time listening applications, such as tracking human movement, preserving the user\u2019s spatial awareness, estimating the dynamics of multiple simultaneous sound sources, and maintaining an imperceptible input-to-output delay. I am also developing first-of-their-kind wearable microphone array prototypes and data sets to help other researchers develop ambitious new augmented listening algorithms and applications.\r\n\r\n<hr \/>\r\n\r\n<img class=\"wp-image-667407 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Maria-De-Arteaga_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Maria De-Arteaga\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3>Maria De-Arteaga<\/h3>\r\nCarnegie Mellon University\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title: <\/strong>Quantifying and Mitigating Risks of Algorithmic Decision Support\r\n\r\nMachine learning is increasingly being used for decision support in critical settings, where predictions have potentially grave implications over human lives. Examples of such applications include child welfare, criminal justice, and healthcare. In these settings, the characteristics of available data and of deployment contexts give rise to challenges that have not been sufficiently addressed in the machine learning literature, including the presence of selective labels, unobservables, and the effects of omitted payoff bias. When left unaddressed, these challenges may lead to systemic biases, self-fulfilling prophecies, and loss of human trust in the systems. My research is focused on quantifying the performance and fairness risks of algorithmic learning in these settings, and on reducing these risks by developing novel algorithms.\r\n\r\n<hr \/>\r\n\r\n<img class=\"wp-image-667401 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Jane-E_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Jane E\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3>Jane E<\/h3>\r\nStanford University\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title: <\/strong>Artistic Vision: Providing Context for Capture-Time Decisions\r\n\r\nAs cameras become smarter and more pervasive, more people want to learn to be better content creators. People are willing to invest in expensive cameras as a medium for their artistic expression, but few have easy ways to improve their skills. Inspired by critique sessions common in in-person art practice classes, my dissertation research focuses on designing new interfaces and interactions that help people become better photo takers. Using contextual in-camera feedback, users can capture photos and videos in a way that is more informed and intentional, while still allowing for their aesthetic and creative decisions.\r\n\r\n<hr \/>\r\n\r\n<img class=\"wp-image-667386 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Sahar-Hashemgeloogerdi_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Sahar Hashemgeloogerdi\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3>Sahar Hashemgeloogerdi<\/h3>\r\nUniversity of Rochester\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title: <\/strong>Computationally Efficient Modeling and Audio Enhancement Algorithms for Reverberant Acoustic Systems using Orthonormal Basis Functions\r\n\r\nHighly interactive modeling methods and audio enhancement algorithms underlie the operation of modern acoustic systems. The capability of a system to produce lifelike acoustic experiences significantly depends on the accuracy and computational efficiency of the modeling and audio processing algorithms employed. Accordingly, my research has focused on the development of methods and algorithms that accurately model highly reverberant acoustic systems and process acoustic signals using as few parameters as possible. Such accurate yet computationally efficient modeling and processing algorithms are of essential interest in a wide variety of applications ranging from virtual acoustics to healthcare. My main contribution is the development of algorithms, which rely on orthonormal basis functions and time-frequency representation of an acoustic system, that provide high accuracy over a wide range of frequencies in real-time. As an early demonstration, I propose an efficient solution to adaptive feedback cancellation problems.\r\n\r\n<hr \/>\r\n\r\n<img class=\"wp-image-667398 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Francesco-Pittaluga_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Francesco Pittaluga\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3>Francesco Pittaluga<\/h3>\r\nUniversity of Florida\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title: <\/strong>Privacy Preserving Computational Cameras\r\n\r\nMajor advances in computer vision and mobile technologies have set the stage for widespread deployment of connected cameras, spurring increased concerns about privacy and security. To address these concerns, I'm building novel computational cameras that perform privacy processing, at the camera level, via optical filtering of the incident light-field and\/or sensor-level electronics, and developing a data-driven framework to learn privacy-preserving encoding functions through adversarial optimization. Moving forward, I aim to leverage this framework to build low-power privacy-preserving computational cameras with camera-level implementations of learned encoding functions.\r\n\r\n<hr \/>\r\n\r\n<img class=\"wp-image-667413 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Ramya-Ramakrishnan_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Ramya Ramakrishnan\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3>Ramya Ramakrishnan<\/h3>\r\nMassachusetts Institute of Technology\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title: <\/strong>Human-Guided Reinforcement Learning in Real-World Environments\r\n\r\nDeploying AI systems safely in the real world is challenging. The rich and complex nature of the open world makes it difficult for machines trained on limited data to adapt and generalize well. The errors that can result from an imperfect model can be extremely costly (e.g., car accidents, incorrect diagnoses). My research focuses on using human feedback to help reinforcement learning agents better adapt to the real world, leading to safer deployment of these systems. This involves developing robust models that can accurately predict uncertainty in the world, use different forms of human input to learn, and adapt quickly in real-time to new changes in the environment. Developing such systems that learn from humans intelligently will move us closer towards more generalizable robots that perform a variety of tasks in such applications as assistive robotics, healthcare, and disaster response.\r\n\r\n<hr \/>\r\n\r\n<img class=\"wp-image-667404 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Jo\u00e3o-Sedoc_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Jo\u00e3o Sedoc\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3>Jo\u00e3o Sedoc<\/h3>\r\nUniversity of Pennsylvania\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title: <\/strong>Hierarchical Approaches to Improve the Flow, Style, and Coherence of Conversational Agents\r\n\r\nThere has been a renewed focus on dialog systems, including non-task driven conversational agents (i.e. \"chit-chat bots\"). Dialog is a challenging problem since it spans multiple conversational turns. To further complicate the problem, there are many contextual cues and valid possible utterances. We propose that dialog is fundamentally a multiscale process, given that context is carried from previous utterances in the conversation. Neural dialog models, which are based on recurrent neural network (RNN) encoder-decoder sequence-to-sequence models, lack the ability to create temporal and stylistic coherence in conversations. My thesis focuses on novel hierarchical approaches to improve the responses of neural chatbots.\r\n\r\n<hr \/>\r\n\r\n<img class=\"wp-image-667410 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Mina-Tahmasbi-Arashloo_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Mina Tahmasbi Arashloo\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3>Mina Tahmasbi Arashloo<\/h3>\r\nPrinceton University\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title: <\/strong>Programmable Network Monitoring and Control\r\n\r\nReal-time and fine-grained network monitoring and control is crucial for operating networks that match the security and performance requirements of today\u2019s online services. To that end, modern network devices offer programming interfaces for fine-grained specification of what information to maintain across packets, and how to process packets based on it. These interfaces, however, are quite low-level and suitable only for programming a single device, making them cumbersome to use in today\u2019s large-scale networks. My thesis focuses on designing programming platforms that facilitate the use of programmable network devices for large-scale and real-time network monitoring and control. More specifically, these platforms consist of (i) domain-specific languages that are expressive enough for high-level specification of policies for end-to-end network transport, network-wide state-aware monitoring and control, and path-based network monitoring, and (ii) compilers that use efficient intermediate data structures to automatically distribute and implement these specifications on programmable network devices.\r\n\r\n<hr \/>\r\n\r\n<img class=\"wp-image-667389 size-full alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Sarah-Tan_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Sarah Tan\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3>Sarah Tan<\/h3>\r\nCornell University\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title: <\/strong>Methods in Interpretability and Causal Inference for Better Understanding of Machine Learning Models\r\n\r\nI aim to develop methods to help users of machine learning models increase both the trust in and understanding of their models. My dissertation is in the two fields of interpretability and causal inference. The two fields, seemingly disparate, actually share the common goals of revealing and adjusting for biases that can arise when building machine learning models. In interpretability, I am developing methods to probe tree ensembles and audit black-box risk scoring models such as COMPAS. In causal inference, I have worked on methods that use machine learning to more flexibly estimate treatment effects from observational data. To complete my dissertation, I plan to probe the definition of interpretability -- still a subject of debate in machine learning -- by conducting a large-scale comparison of different models claimed to be interpretable and augment this quantitative evaluation with human subject experiments using domain experts.\r\n\r\n[\/panel]\r\n\r\n[panel header=\"2017 Grant Recipients\"]\r\n<img class=\"size-full wp-image-667518 alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Ebuka-Arinze_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Ebuka Arinze\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3>Ebuka Arinze<\/h3>\r\nJohns Hopkins University\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title:<\/strong>\u00a0Nanoengineering for Tunable Energy-Efficient Optoelectronics\r\n\r\nColloidal nanomaterials, such as semiconductor quantum dots, are of interest for various optoelectronic applications due to their size-tunable optical properties, distinctive electronic structure, and low-cost fabrication. Color-tuned and semi-transparent photovoltaics, devices with controlled and tunable reflection and transmission spectra, are of significant interest due to their potential applications in building-integrated photovoltaics, vehicular heat and power management, and multijunction photovoltaics. High-performance computing technologies coupled with advanced optimization methods have made it possible to rapidly and efficiently design and predict new device structures without having to rely on costly, time- and resource-intensive \u201ctrial-and-error\u201d lab-based experiments in the field of optoelectronics. My project focuses on using nanoengineering techniques, including multi-objective optimization algorithms, plasmonic nanoparticle enhancements, and hybrid-materials-based surface modifications, to design and build colloidal quantum dot-based devices with controlled optical and electrical properties for the next generation of inexpensive and ubiquitous light harvesting, detection, and emission technologies.\r\n\r\n<hr \/>\r\n\r\n<img class=\"size-full wp-image-667530 alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Juan-Camilo-Gamboa-Higuera_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Juan Camilo Gamboa Higuera\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3>Juan Camilo Gamboa Higuera<\/h3>\r\nMcGill University\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title:\u00a0<\/strong>Transfer of Robot Motor Behaviors from Low-Fidelity Domains\r\n\r\nI've been working on algorithms for synthesizing controllers for a six-legged underwater autonomous vehicle, to perform a variety of navigation and pose control tasks. These algorithms allow us to specify data collection tasks, e.g. coral reef monitoring, from high level objectives encoded as numerical cost functions. To reduce the amount of data needed for each task, and since models of underwater dynamics are computationally expensive, we use model-based reinforcement learning techniques where the models are data-driven. A problem with these approaches is that, even if they are data efficient, collecting new data is expensive. I'm investigating techniques that mitigate this cost by re-using prior knowledge, from simulation or similar environments. Our current\u00a0approach, which we call policy adjustments, allows us to transfer previously learned controllers by reasoning about the discrepancies between the source of the knowledge (a simulator) and the deployment environment (a physical robot in the ocean).\r\n\r\n<hr \/>\r\n\r\n<img class=\"size-full wp-image-667521 alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Esha-Ghosh_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Esha Ghosh\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3>Esha Ghosh<\/h3>\r\nBrown University\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title:\u00a0<\/strong>Efficient, Privacy-Preserving, Secure Cloud Computation and Storage\r\n\r\nAdopting cloud services to reduce operational, maintenance and storage costs, is becoming increasingly common. However, outsourcing data and computations, is opening up new challenges in terms of integrity and privacy of the data and the computations on them. Along with such important security and privacy concerns, availability, and scalability are major factors in such settings. My thesis addresses various problems in this space of secure storage and computation outsourcing. In summary, the main contributions of my thesis are the following.\r\n<ol>\r\n \t<li>Designing models and protocols for outsourced queries on structured dynamic data with efficiency, integrity and privacy guarantees along with prototype implementations.<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Designing efficient (general) verifiable computation primitives for data-intense applications along with prototype implementations.<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Developing an expressive framework for efficient graph queries on encrypted networks along with prototype implementations.<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Designing efficient protocols to facilitate secure storage of encrypted data in the cloud while enabling deduplication.<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n\r\n<hr \/>\r\n\r\n<img class=\"size-full wp-image-667533 alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Kavita-Krishnaswamy_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Kavita Krishnaswamy\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3>Kavita Krishnaswamy<\/h3>\r\nUniversity of Maryland, Baltimore County\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title:\u00a0<\/strong>Smart Algorithms via Knowledge Management of Safe Physical Human-Robotic Care\r\n\r\nThe beginning of a new era in safe assistive robotics will occur when people with disabilities and seniors let intelligent software control a mobile robotic manipulator to safely reposition their body and limbs. Our goal is to explore the intersection between providing physical care and robotics, and how it is possible to translate safe patient handling and mobility guidelines into smart human-robotic interaction (HRI) algorithms. For a mobile manipulator with knowledge-managed algorithms. we propose to create an accessible low fidelity 3D Web interface for manipulating a high degree-of-freedom robot to safely reposition the human body and limbs. Our efforts seek to standardize protocols and regulations for how artificial intelligence agents related to physical HRI can achieve body and limb repositioning tasks. As assistive robotics become more mainstream, these best practices can improve safety in direct physical care in the process of repositioning the human body with a mobile robotic arm.\r\n\r\n<hr \/>\r\n\r\n<img class=\"size-full wp-image-667524 alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Himabind-Lakkaraju_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Himabind Lakkaraju\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3>Himabindu Lakkaraju<\/h3>\r\nStanford University\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title:\u00a0<\/strong>Interpretable Machine Learning for Human Decision Making\r\n\r\nMy research primarily focuses on exploring how machine learning can help improve real world decision making in domains such as health care and criminal justice. To this end, my thesis addresses various challenges involved in developing and evaluating interpretable machine learning frameworks which can complement and provide insights into human decision making. More specifically, my thesis focuses on the following diverse yet related research directions: developing frameworks which can be used to compare the effectiveness of algorithmic and human decision making, building models for obtaining interpretable and diagnostic insights into the patterns of mistakes made by human decision makers, learning accurate and interpretable models (or approximations to existing machine learning models) which can complement human decision making. The main contribution of my thesis is to address these problems under realistic assumptions which hold in real world decision making such as presence of unmeasured confounders and limited availability of labeled data.\r\n\r\n<hr \/>\r\n\r\n<img class=\"size-full wp-image-667539 alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Paula-Mate_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Paula Mate\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3>Paula Mate<\/h3>\r\nIndiana University, Bloomington\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title:\u00a0<\/strong>Examining the Implementation of the Health Information System in Mozambique: Understanding the Experiences of Health Care Workers with ICTs\r\n\r\nMy study examines the implementation of the health information system (HIS) in Mozambique and the roletechnologies play in educating health professionals for better delivery of care. Through a comprehensive examination of the HIS, from development to roll-out, I analyze the relationship between colonial and (post)colonial governmental top-down policies and compare them to the on-the-ground reality of using information and communications technology (ICTs) to provide health education given social, economic, and political realities in Mozambique. Part of the problem with studies of technologies in poor parts of the world is that they are often conducted by highly educated researchers and are conducted in English. However, majority of the population in poor nations does not speak English. Such studies become irrelevant to the life experiences of those being studied. I will disseminate findings from this study in Portuguese and English through talks and publications in U.S., Mozambique, and other international venues.\r\n\r\n<hr \/>\r\n\r\n<img class=\"size-full wp-image-667536 alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Martez-Edward-Mott_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Martez Edward Mott\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3>Martez Edward Mott<\/h3>\r\nUniversity of Washington\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title:\u00a0<\/strong>Accessible Touch Input for People with Motor Impairments\r\n\r\nTouch-enabled devices such as smartphones, tablets, and interactive kiosks are some of the most pervasive technologies in the world today. As a result, touch has emerged as one of the most dominant forms of input for computing devices. Despite the overwhelming popularity of touch input, it presents significant accessibility challenges for millions of people with motor impairing conditions such as cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy, and Parkinson\u2019s disease. My dissertation research takes an ability-based design approach toward improving the accessibility of touch-enabled devices for people with motor impairments. I intend to create intelligent interaction techniques that allow people with motor impairments to touch in whichever ways are most comfortable and natural for them, and for the system to react as if it was touched precisely.\r\n\r\n<hr \/>\r\n\r\n<img class=\"size-full wp-image-667542 alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/ShadiA-Noghabi_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Shadi A. Noghabi\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3>Shadi A. Noghabi<\/h3>\r\nUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title:\u00a0<\/strong>Building Large-scale Production Systems for Latency-sensitive Applications\r\n\r\nIn this era of increased engagement with technology, many latency-sensitive applications processing large amounts of data have emerged. For example, we expect social networks to show hashtag trends within minutes, data from IoT to be processed within seconds, and online gaming to react within milliseconds. In all these diverse areas, handling large scale data in a real-time fashion is crucial. At scale, providing low latency becomes increasingly challenging with many complexities in distribution, scaling, fault-tolerance, and load-balancing.\u00a0My research has focused on developing techniques that broadly explore these issues with particular attention to end-to-end latency and building massive-scale solutions. Most of my work is deployed in large-scale production systems with hundreds of millions of users. My research contributions span a wide range of frameworks including: Ambry (LinkedIn\u2019s mainstream geo-distributed media store), Apache Samza (a stream processing engine used by LinkedIn, Uber, TripAdvisor, etc.), and Freeflow (a high-performance container networking solution).\r\n\r\n<hr \/>\r\n\r\n<img class=\"size-full wp-image-667527 alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/JohnR-Porter_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"John R. Porter\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3>John R. Porter<\/h3>\r\nUniversity of Washington\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title:\u00a0<\/strong>Understanding and Improving Real-World Video Game Accessibility\r\n\r\nMy dissertation work attends to the intersection of accessible human-computer interaction and video game design. Games continually grow more complex, pervasive, and significant in 21st century life. However, due to\u00a0inaccessibility, games are often actively disabling experiences for many gamers with impairments, systematically excluding them from full participation in an increasingly important activity. Therefore, my work proposes to understand the play experiences of gamers with impairments and offer novel design solutions for mitigating the accessibility barriers they face. My proposed investigations seek to understand how accessibility barriers manifest in mainstream games, to empower gamers with impairments to better navigate the landscape of game accessibility through novel information design, and to address underlying institutional concerns that perpetuate systemic accessibility issues in the game development industry through education interventions.\r\n\r\n<hr \/>\r\n\r\n<img class=\"size-full wp-image-667512 alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Andrew-S-Stamps_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Andrew S. Stamps\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3>Andrew S. Stamps<\/h3>\r\nMississippi State University\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title:\u00a0<\/strong>Applications of Heterodox Rendering Methods to Visualization\r\n\r\nInformation visualization is an illustrative method to depict data, and the structure of this data is not necessarily known beforehand. The classic rendering via rasterization of visualization primitives tends to minimize extraneous details; every drawn pixel or glyph has a tight correspondence to the data on which it is based. A simple line chart for example. It is thought that a more expressive or artistic rendering of data might harness additional insight through abstraction, or even an emotional connection. These expressive methods which I have classified as Heterodox Visualization (HV) methods, include non-photorealistic rendering (NPR), stylized rendering processes like pixelization, and other rendering approaches, like those that mimic natural media e.g. painting or sketching. To date there has been little systematic guidance covering how these HV methods could be applied to information visualization. My research will help determine, through experiment, which techniques pose a benefit to different types of visualizations.\r\n\r\n<hr \/>\r\n\r\n<img class=\"size-full wp-image-667509 alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Vasuki-Narasimha-Swamy_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Vasuki Narasimha Swamy\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3>Vasuki Narasimha Swamy<\/h3>\r\nUniversity of California, Berkeley\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title:\u00a0<\/strong>Real-time Ultra-reliable Wireless Communication\r\n\r\nMy research focuses on designing wireless communication protocols for Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications that require low-latency and high-reliability. This can enable exciting new interactive and immersive applications such as exoskeletons, inter-vehicle communication for self-driving cars, robotics &amp; factory automation, virtual &amp; augmented reality, high-performance gaming, and the smart grid. I am developing wireless communication protocols that employ simultaneous relaying by all radios in the network. This allows us to overcome bad channels and guarantee the latency requirements. My early work dealt with understanding the fundamental limits of using cooperative communication for high-performance applications. Currently, I am exploring the key physical layer requirements that are needed to implement these protocols. I am modeling how synchronization and channel estimation impacts the performance of these protocols. Ultimately, understanding the fundamental limits of high-reliability and low-latency wireless will enable us to engineer exciting applications.\r\n\r\n<hr \/>\r\n\r\n<img class=\"size-full wp-image-667515 alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/06\/Cesar-Torres_150x208.jpg\" alt=\"Cesar Torres\" width=\"150\" height=\"208\" \/><h3>C\u00e9sar Torres<\/h3>\r\nUniversity of California, Berkeley\r\n\r\n<strong>Dissertation title:\u00a0<\/strong>Hybrid Aesthetics - A New Media Framework for the Computational Design of Creative Materials, Tools, and Practices within Digital Fabrication\r\n\r\nTechnology plays an important role in both constraining and guiding how users explore, express, and innovate in a variety of creative tasks. Practices are emerging which blend both physical and computational techniques and materials providing new opportunities to expand the aesthetic repertoire available to creative practitioners. This thesis contributes a framework for understanding how to create these hybrid elements and develop materials, tools, and practices that stimulate the imagination to explore a wider gamut of creative expressions. Through a series of design tools, the thesis introduces data structures that break constrictive digital modes of practice, conceptual framings for guiding aesthetic exploration, and design principles for the adoption, sharing, and teaching of hybrid techniques. This work serves as a bridge between art and technology and challenges the narrative of who can participate and use digital fabrication technologies to include traditional artists, designers, and the broader community of creative practitioners.\r\n\r\n[\/panel]\r\n[\/accordion]"},{"id":4,"name":"Microsoft Blog","content":"[row] <span style=\"float: none;background-color: #ffffff;color: #333333;cursor: text;font-size: 16px;font-style: normal;font-variant: normal;font-weight: 400;letter-spacing: normal;text-align: left;text-decoration: none;text-indent: 0px;text-transform: none\">[card title=\"2019 Dissertation Grant recipients embarking on diverse paths to scientific and societal impact\" url=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/blog\/2019-dissertation-grant-recipients-embarking-on-diverse-paths-to-scientific-and-societal-impact\/\"]I\u2019m pleased to announce the winners of the 2019 Microsoft Research Dissertation Grants. Each dissertation grant provides up to $25,000 in funding to doctoral students at North American universities who are underrepresented in the field of computing. This is the third year Microsoft Research has offered these research grants...&lt;div style=\"height: 7px;\"&gt;&lt;\/div&gt;&lt;br&gt;June 2019[\/card]<\/span> [card title=\"Microsoft Research Dissertation Grants: Broadening the PhD pipeline to increase innovation\" url=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/blog\/microsoft-research-dissertation-grants-broadening-the-phd-pipeline-to-increase-innovation\/\"]Research shows that diverse teams are more productive teams. Diversity, particularly in the area of computing research, means including unique perspectives that otherwise might not have a voice, fueling innovation. These are some of the key reasons that Microsoft is committed to diversity. One aspect of demonstrating that...&lt;div style=\"height: 7px;\"&gt;&lt;\/div&gt;&lt;br&gt;June 2018[\/card] [card title=\"Give your dissertation a boost with a grant from Microsoft Research\" url=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/blog\/give-dissertation-boost-grant-microsoft-research\/\"]Need funding to clear a hurdle in the final stages of your dissertation research? Microsoft Research is offering grants of up to US $25,000 to help a select group of doctoral students cross the finish line and enter the workforce. The Microsoft Research Dissertation Grant is for PhD students at U.S. and Canadian universities from underrepresented groups in computing, including...&lt;div style=\"height: 7px;\"&gt;&lt;\/div&gt;&lt;br&gt;February 2018[\/card] [\/row][row][card title=\"Dissertation Grant Winners Announced\" url=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/blog\/dissertation-grant-program-winners\/\" ]The Microsoft Research Dissertation Grant program offers financial support to selected doctoral students from groups that are under-represented in the field of computing in the form of grants to complete their dissertations. The grants were announced today, so I sat down with Dr. Meredith (Merrie) Ringel Morris, chair of the Microsoft Research Dissertation Grant program and a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, to find out more about the recipients...&lt;div style=\"height: 7px;\"&gt;&lt;\/div&gt;&lt;br&gt;June 2017[\/card] [card title=\"New Dissertation Grant provides support to under-represented groups in computing\" url=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/blog\/microsoft-research-dissertation-grant-support-underrepresented-groups-computing\/\" ]Microsoft Research is funding a new academic program, the Microsoft Research Dissertation Grant, offering selected doctoral students doing computing research at U.S. and Canadian universities up to US $20,000 to fund their dissertation work. This program is open to students currently under-represented in the technology sector, including women, people with disabilities...&lt;div style=\"height: 7px;\"&gt;&lt;\/div&gt;&lt;br&gt;March 2017[\/card] [\/row]"}],"msr_impact_theme":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-academic-program\/363722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-academic-program"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/msr-academic-program"}],"version-history":[{"count":46,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-academic-program\/363722\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1007838,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-academic-program\/363722\/revisions\/1007838"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/369419"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=363722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"msr-opportunity-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-opportunity-type?post=363722"},{"taxonomy":"msr-region","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-region?post=363722"},{"taxonomy":"msr-locale","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-locale?post=363722"},{"taxonomy":"msr-program-audience","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-program-audience?post=363722"},{"taxonomy":"msr-post-option","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-post-option?post=363722"},{"taxonomy":"msr-impact-theme","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-impact-theme?post=363722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}