Microsoft Research Asia

Microsoft Research Asia
Name	Microsoft Research Asia
Founded	1998
Founder	Microsoft Corporation
Headquarters	Beijing, China
Fields	Computer science, Artificial intelligence, Systems, Graphics

Contents

Microsoft Research Asia is a research laboratory focused on advanced computing technologies. Founded in 1998, it has been a major center for work in Artificial intelligence, Computer vision, Natural language processing, Speech recognition and Computer graphics. The lab operates within the corporate research network of Microsoft Corporation and interacts with universities such as Tsinghua University, Peking University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University and research institutions including the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

History

Microsoft Research Asia was established during a period of expanding corporate laboratories following the creation of Microsoft Research and contemporaneous with other labs like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC. Early milestones included recruiting researchers from institutions such as Tsinghua University, Peking University, Fudan University, and collaborations with international centers like Carnegie Mellon University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The lab's development paralleled growth in regional initiatives including the rise of Zhongguancun as a technology hub and national programs connected to the 863 Program and 973 Program. Over time the lab contributed to breakthroughs recognized alongside awards such as the Turing Award and adopted trends visible in conferences like NeurIPS, ICCV, CVPR, and ACL.

The lab's research spans areas including Machine learning, Computer vision, Natural language processing, Speech recognition, Reinforcement learning, Robotics, Human–computer interaction, Computer graphics, Distributed systems, Security, Data mining, and Algorithms. Notable technical contributions have influenced products and standards through innovations adopted in platforms like Windows and Azure. Work from the lab has appeared in venues such as NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR, ACL, ICASSP, SIGGRAPH, SIGMOD, and OSDI. Specific advances include deep learning architectures for image recognition prominent at ImageNet challenges, end-to-end systems for speech synthesis reflected in progress at Interspeech, and language modeling techniques that align with research at EMNLP.

The organization is structured into research groups and labs led by senior scientists with academic ties to institutions such as Tsinghua University, Peking University, University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, University of Washington, and Stanford University. Leadership roles have been held by researchers who previously worked at or collaborated with groups from Microsoft Research Redmond, Microsoft Research Cambridge, and other corporate labs like Google Research and IBM Research. The lab maintains hiring pipelines linked to graduate programs at Tsinghua University, Zhejiang University, Nanyang Technological University, and exchanges with visiting scholars from University of Oxford and University of Toronto.

Research collaborations extend to industry partners and academic collaborators including Huawei, Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba Group, Xiaomi, Lenovo, and international entities such as Facebook AI Research and DeepMind. Joint projects and technology transfer have influenced commercial offerings on Azure, consumer features in Windows 10, and platforms used by firms in Baidu Research and Alibaba DAMO Academy. The lab's alumni have founded or joined startups and incubators in ecosystems around Zhongguancun, Shenzhen, and Silicon Valley, contributing to companies like SenseTime, Megvii, Cambricon, and Horizon Robotics.

Researchers publish extensively in conference proceedings from NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR, ACL, SIGGRAPH, SIGCOMM, SIGMOD, and CHI. The lab files patents in areas overlapping with machine translation and speech recognition while contributing code and datasets to open source ecosystems alongside projects from OpenAI, TensorFlow, PyTorch, and repositories used by GitHub. Public releases have included toolkits, benchmarks, and datasets that are used by groups at Carnegie Mellon University, University of Washington, University of Cambridge, and industrial labs like Google DeepMind.

Headquartered in Beijing, the lab maintains facilities in major Chinese technology centers and engages with campus environments at Tsinghua University and Peking University. Its location strategy connects research facilities to innovation zones such as Zhongguancun and technology clusters in Shenzhen and Shanghai. Visiting researcher programs and seminars involve exchanges with international centers including Microsoft Research Redmond, Microsoft Research Cambridge, ETH Zurich, and University of California, Berkeley.