More than 400 thought leaders from academia and research labs around the world convened at the Microsoft Corp. headquarters recently for the eighth annual Microsoft Research Faculty Summit, where the company announced it will dedicate more than $6 million (U.S.) in research grants to colleges and universities. under these initiatives:
• Cell phones as a platform for healthcare ($1 million). Encourages the development of new prototypes and tools that utilize cell phones to enable better healthcare services in rural and urban communities.
• Biomedical computing for genome wide association studies ($700,000). Encourages researchers to develop tools that can facilitate better data usage and analysis for genomewide association studies to provide a stronger framework for enabling personalized treatment methods.
• Intelligent Web 3.0 ($500,000). Encourages research to help find, discover, extract, publish, and share information, at a desk or on the go, safely, making the Web meaningful (from string manipulation to meaning computation) and enabling a human-centric, context-aware model of information access.
• Mechanisms for safe and scalable multicore computing ($500,000). Encourages research in how operating systems and runtimes can evolve to enable safe and scalable concurrent programs.
• Sustainable computing ($500,000). Encourages research in innovative approaches toward power-optimized system architectures, and adaptive power management solutions for maximizing the energy efficiency of computing infrastructure.
• Human-robot interaction ($500,000). Encourages research to take human-robot interaction to the next level through development of tools and methods that lead to practical applications with realistic commercial potential within five to 10 years.
Microsoft also announced a $750,000 donation over three years to launch the Center for Collaborative Technologies at University of Washington (UW) ss part of Microsoft’s ongoing commitment to using technology to improve education.
This is the latest of 11 centers Microsoft has helped to establish to allow university researchers to focus deeply on extending the state of the art in computing.
Curiously, MS does not mention Tablet PCs, Ultra-Mobile PCs, or other mobile PCs in this announcement. Hmmm.
PK12 teachers may find the vocabulary in this announcement useful for talking with students about upcoming technologies and how students might prepare to take part in future developments.
Sidebar: A high school science teacher who brought to class one day “junk” (obsolete)electronic components stimulated what lead to one of three first autonomous vehicles, a wheelchair for an eight year old boy: total cost $2,000. The other two vehicles were military equipment with costs requiring moving the decimal point many times to the right.