A talk summary of "Professional Research Opportunities for Ph.D. Students in MSR"

Summary 

This is a talk summary of [1], the speaker mentioned:

1. It is a new era of Microsoft research with new CEO and board member. The research lab now more follows and support the three pillars of the new company agenda, compare to the time of bill gate. There are three pillars of MSR (Microsoft Research Lab): Productivity, Smart cloud and Personal computing, e.g. health care. The mission statement is, like academics to pursue knowledge, looking for new ideas and innovation from MSR to the corporation. 
2. Two constraint of applying a funding for researcher: the budget from the Congress is shrinking, also the current political situation in Congress: more young assistant that might lack of the passion on sciences and more focus on sweet issues, e.g. education bills and subsidy. 
3. The difference between the research lab and academia: in MSR, you don't need to worry about the research funding for graduate students, you have colleagues and interns. You will get 12 months salary and the research lab inspires the fundamental research questions. It is a bottom up style; In academia, you will need more writing proposals, sometimes it is hard to get money to support your research. 
4. MSR cares the career professional development. Their own career. Welcome to co-work with other teams. Seek to impact to the world. Get your knowledge or innovation on the Microsoft product. Get things into practical products. 
5. In big-data era, there is an advantage to work in research lab: the massive data inside the company that cannot share outside of the world. This would be benefited with the research that doing speech, translation, machine learning and some more research subjects. 
6. Microsoft also puts things out of open source. Not like IBM, who much more value patents, but MSR respects more to academic value. When you interview a position, what is the cultural difference in there? This is a question worth to ask. 
7. MSR evaluated the research by their impact. They expected you as the expert in some fields, also bring value to companies. Change the peer-review rule two years ago, not to only counting your publication. No tenure track. 
8. MSR also encourage to deliver the research to start up. Welcome that kind of people to bring in more different genes. 
9. No matter you are in industry or academia, you will learn how to expose your work in confidence.  Who does your audience you focus on? E.g. how to explain your work to WSJ reporter? This is a story telling absolute you need to learn. Also, to get funding is important in academic, good to know who control the faucet (money). 

Thoughts

I feel the goal of Microsoft from the new board of directors is clear: productivity. All the products and services from MS will be around this core. The MSR would not be an exception. The vice-president speech clearly points out the three pillars of the mission statement. It is hard to avoid the demanding from boards about delivery the research, innovation to the value of the company. In another way, this might be a chance to bring the research into a real world products or services. However, is the mission goal of company will crowd out the support of fundamental researches? This might be an another question worth to ask. Besides, to leverage the huge dataset from the MS products and services would really be a beneficial for researchers, e.g. the social network from Hotmail, the behavior patterns from Office 365 or the user generated data from Windows. All the data is valuable for researcher to proceed the experiments. This might be also a disadvantage and challenging for data sciences researchers in academia. Any thoughts?

Reference

1. Professional Research Opportunities for Ph.D. Students, Jeannette M. Wing, http://halley.exp.sis.pitt.edu/comet/presentColloquium.do?col_id=8982