Microsoft funds 10 projects for “breakthrough research” at US universities

Microsoft funds 10 projects for “breakthrough research” at US universities

Microsoft Research recently announced that it will award $1 million to fund projects at 10 universities. The focus of the Request for Proposals was identification of promising new avenues of research for solving today’s most important problems. The company received more than 200 applications for the A. Richard Newton Breakthrough Research Awards. The intent is to support projects that leverage innovative computational techniques and advantages at the heart of the research, and integrate approaches from a number of disciplines. Breakthrough projects are those that demonstrate potentially high impact by solving problems of great importance.

The winning projects included interdisciplinary research in geology, chemistry, parallell computing and synthetic biology. The A. Richard Newton Breakthrough Research recipients are:

Visualizing Voice – Karrie Karahalios, University of Illinois
Non-inductive Methodologies for Learning with Sparse Heterogeneous Data – Vladimir Cherkassky, University of Minnesota
Exploring the Uncanny Valley – Jessica Hodgins, et al., Carnegie Mellon University
The Stochastic Model Builder Applied to Single Cell Kinetics – Eric Klavins, University of Washinton
Multi-scale Simulations of the Soft Elasticity of Stem Cells and Cytoskeleton/Focal-adhesion Contact – Shaofan Li, University of California, Berkeley
A Computational Model to Characterize the Effects of Brain Damage and to Plan Rehabilitation – Stephen Kosslyn, Harvard University
Faults, Bugs, IP Protection, and Secure Hardware – Igor Markov, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Parallel Large-scale Semi-definite Programming for Molecular Electronic Structure – David Mazziotti, The University of Chicago
How to Build a Habitable Planet: Estimating the Physics of Plate-tectonic Convection on Earth – Jun Korenaga, Yale University
Integrated Probabilistic Models of Regulatory and Metabolic Networks for Bio-fuels Research – Yuan Qi, Purdue University

For more information, including abstracts of the winning projects, visit the Microsoft Research web site.