MS Commits to $6 Million in Research Grants

Microsoft has committed $6 million worth of research grant to a number of colleges and universities in certain areas of break through research during the company's eighth-annual research faculty summit recently held at Microsoft's headquarters.

Funding in six key areas of research will be awarded $5 million from the company's external research and programs group, according to Microsoft. The remaining $1 million will go to several facilities through the newly created  A. Richard Newton Breakthrough Research Award program.

The areas of research from the $5 million pool include:
  • The use of cell phones to better health care;
  • Computing tools for Genome wide association studies;
  • More human-centric way to access information on the Internet;
  • Multi-core computing for operating systems and runtimes to create concurrent programming;
  • Sustainable computing for innovative approaches toward system architectures; and
  • Practical applications in human-robot interaction for commercial applications in the near future.
The A. Richard Newton Award program will provide funding for "breakthrough academic research in computational and multidisciplinary areas," according to Microsoft. A. Richard Newton was the former dean of the College of Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, who died in January 2007.

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