Microsoft’s Swiss Joint Research Center kicks off new projects

Microsoft’s Joint Research Center (JRC) program works closely with institutions globally to invest in the future of computer science. Today, the Swiss JRC announced ten new projects that they are kicking off the year with.

Established in June 2013, the Swiss JRC works closely with the two universities of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technolgy: the German-speaking ETH in Zürich and the French-speaking EFPL in Lausanne, Switzerland.

There were at least 20 proposals according to the recent blog post, but ten of them have been decided on to continue at full blast. Including a couple of drone micro-aerial vehicle (MAV) projects and a few data-oriented ones that will improve how information is processed in data centers.

Here’s the list of projects and their principal investigators:

Data Science with FPGAs in the Data Center
Gustavo Alonso, ETH Zurich
Ken Eguro, Microsoft Research, Redmond lab

Human-Centric Flight II: End-user Design of High-level Robotic Behavior
Otmar Hilliges, ETH Zurich
Marc Pollefeys, Microsoft Analog Research & Development

Tractable by Design
Thomas Hofmann and Aurelien Lucchi, ETH Zurich
Sebastian Nowozin, Microsoft Research, Cambridge lab

Enabling Practical, Efficient and Large-Scale Computation Near Data to Improve the Performance and Efficiency of Data Center and Consumer Systems
Onur Mutlu and Luca Benini, ETH Zurich
Derek Chiou, Microsoft Relevance and Intent, Research &Development

Towards Resource-Efficient Data Centers
Florin Dinu, EPFL
Christos Gkantsidis and Sergey Legtchenko, Microsoft Research, Cambridge lab

Near-Memory System Services
Babak Falsafi, EPFL
Stavros Volos, Microsoft Research, Redmond lab

Coltrain: Co-located Deep Learning Training and Inference
Babak Falsafi and Martin Jaggi, EPFL
Eric Chung, Microsoft Research, Redmond lab

From Companion Drones to Personal Trainers
Pascal Fua and Mathieu Salzmann, EPFL
Debadeepta Dey, Ashish Kapoor, and Sudipta Sinha, Microsoft Research, Redmond lab

Revisiting Transactional Computing on Modern Hardware
Rachid Guerraoui and Georgios Chatzopoulos, EPFL
Aleksandar Dragojevic, Microsoft Research, Cambridge lab

Fast and Accurate Algorithms for Clustering
Michael Kapralov and Ola Svensson, EPFL
Yuval Peres, Nikhil Devanur and Sebastien Bubeck, Microsoft Research, Redmond lab

It will be interesting to see the fruits of these projects’ labors. Particularly those of the drones that follow users around to analyze, provide personal training, basically be a much more expensive version of the Fitbit. let us know what you could expect from these projects by dropping us a comment below!