In July 1997, Microsoft established its first research group outside the United States, with three researchers working in a small facility near Cambridge University. Working closely with the academic community in the region and with some of the country’s best computer scientists, the lab today is home to over 60 researchers from 13 different countries, doing cutting-edge work in programming languages, security, information retrieval, machine learning, computer vision, operating systems and networking. On the occasion of the lab’s fifth anniversary, Roger Needham, director of the Cambridge facility, and Rick Rashid, Microsoft’s senior vice president of research, discuss the exceptional contributions the lab has made to Microsoft products and the diverse, collaborative culture that made it possible.
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