Microsoft Research is the research division of Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

 created in 1991 for developing various computer science

Computer science

Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...

 ideas and integrating them into Microsoft products. It currently employs Turing Award

Turing Award

The Turing Award, in full The ACM A.M. Turing Award, is an annual award given by the Association for Computing Machinery to "an individual selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community. The contributions should be of lasting and major technical importance to the...

 winners C.A.R. Hoare, Butler Lampson

Butler Lampson

Butler W. Lampson is a renowned computer scientist.After graduating from the Lawrenceville School , Lampson received his Bachelor's degree in Physics from Harvard University in 1964, and his Ph.D...

, and Charles P. Thacker

Charles P. Thacker

Charles P. Thacker is an American pioneer computer designer.-Biography:Thacker was born in Pasadena, California on February 26, 1943.He received his B.S...

, Fields Medal

Fields Medal

The Fields Medal, officially known as International Medal for Outstanding Discoveries in Mathematics, is a prize awarded to two, three, or four mathematicians not over 40 years of age at each International Congress of the International Mathematical Union , a meeting that takes place every four...

 winner Michael Freedman

Michael Freedman

Michael Hartley Freedman is a mathematician at Microsoft Station Q, a research group at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 1986, he was awarded a Fields Medal for his work on the Poincaré conjecture. Freedman and Robion Kirby showed that an exotic R4 manifold exists.Freedman was born...

, MacArthur Fellow Jim Blinn

Jim Blinn

James F. Blinn is a computer scientist who first became widely known for his work as a computer graphics expert at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory , particularly his work on the pre-encounter animations for the Voyager project, his work on the Carl Sagan Cosmos documentary series and the research...

, Dijkstra Prize

Dijkstra Prize

The Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing is given for outstanding papers on the principles of distributed computing, whose significance and impact on the theory and/or practice of distributed computing has been evident for at least a decade...

 winner Leslie Lamport

Leslie Lamport

Leslie Lamport is an American computer scientist. A graduate of the Bronx High School of Science, he received a B.S. in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1960, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in mathematics from Brandeis University, respectively in 1963 and 1972...

 and many other highly recognized experts in computer science, physics, and mathematics, including Turing Award

Turing Award

The Turing Award, in full The ACM A.M. Turing Award, is an annual award given by the Association for Computing Machinery to "an individual selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community. The contributions should be of lasting and major technical importance to the...

 winner Jim Gray up until his highly publicized disappearance while sailing.
Microsoft research is categorized into the following broad areas:

1. Algorithms and theory
2. Hardware development
3. Human–computer interaction
   Human–computer interaction
   Human–computer Interaction is the study, planning, and design of the interaction between people and computers. It is often regarded as the intersection of computer science, behavioral sciences, design and several other fields of study...
   
   
4. Machine learning
   Machine learning
   Machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence, is a scientific discipline concerned with the design and development of algorithms that allow computers to evolve behaviors based on empirical data, such as from sensor data or databases...
   
   , adaptation, and intelligence
5. Multimedia and graphics
6. Search, retrieval, and knowledge management
   Knowledge management
   Knowledge management comprises a range of strategies and practices used in an organization to identify, create, represent, distribute, and enable adoption of insights and experiences...
   
   
7. Security and cryptography
   Cryptography
   Cryptography is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of third parties...
   
   
8. Social computing
   Social computing
   Social computing is a general term for an area of computer science that is concerned with the intersection of social behavior and computational systems. It has become an important concept for use in business. It is used in two ways as detailed below....
   
   
9. Software development
   Software engineering
   Software Engineering is the application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation, and maintenance of software, and the study of these approaches; that is, the application of engineering to software...
   
   
10. Systems, architectures, mobility, and networking
11. Computational and Systems Biology

One of the stated goals of Microsoft Research is to "support long-term computer science research that is not bound by product cycles." MSR sponsors the Microsoft Research Fellowship for graduate students and the New Faculty Fellowship for new faculty members.
There are laboratories around the world in Aachen

Aachen

Aachen has historically been a spa town in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. Aachen was a favoured residence of Charlemagne, and the place of coronation of the Kings of Germany. Geographically, Aachen is the westernmost town of Germany, located along its borders with Belgium and the Netherlands, ...

, Bangalore

Bangalore

Bengaluru , formerly called Bengaluru is the capital of the Indian state of Karnataka. Bangalore is nicknamed the Garden City and was once called a pensioner's paradise. Located on the Deccan Plateau in the south-eastern part of Karnataka, Bangalore is India's third most populous city and...

, Beijing

Beijing

Beijing , also known as Peking , is the capital of the People's Republic of China and one of the most populous cities in the world, with a population of 19,612,368 as of 2010. The city is the country's political, cultural, and educational center, and home to the headquarters for most of China's...

, Cambridge (United Kingdom)

Cambridge

The city of Cambridge is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia about north of London. Cambridge is at the heart of the high-technology centre known as Silicon Fen – a play on Silicon Valley and the fens surrounding the...

, Cairo

Cairo

Cairo , is the capital of Egypt and the largest city in the Arab world and Africa, and the 16th largest metropolitan area in the world. Nicknamed "The City of a Thousand Minarets" for its preponderance of Islamic architecture, Cairo has long been a centre of the region's political and cultural life...

, Cambridge (Massachusetts)

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Cambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, an important center of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Cambridge is home to two of the world's most prominent...

, Mountain View

Mountain View, California

-Downtown:Mountain View has a pedestrian-friendly downtown centered on Castro Street. The downtown area consists of the seven blocks of Castro Street from the Downtown Mountain View Station transit center in the north to the intersection with El Camino Real in the south...

, Redmond

Redmond, Washington

Redmond is a city in King County, Washington, United States, located east of Seattle. The population was 54,144 at the 2010 census,up from 45,256 in 2000....

, and San Francisco

San Francisco, California

San Francisco , officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the financial, cultural, and transportation center of the San Francisco Bay Area, a region of 7.15 million people which includes San Jose and Oakland...

.

• Microsoft Research Redmond was founded on the Microsoft Redmond campus in 1991 working in buildings 112 and 113 and has now moved to their own facility in building 99.