Whether it’s a computer with more memory, a cluster with thousands of cores, a big data platform, an internet of things solution, or open-source machine learning at scale, you can achieve more using the cloud. Microsoft Azure provides an open, flexible, global platform that supports multiple programming languages, tools, and frameworks.
Currently open special requests for proposals
We do not currently have any open calls for proposals for the use of Azure for research at this time. Please check back on this page for future RFPs and monitor Microsoft Research’s social media channels for future RFP announcements.
Azure in action
Researchers around the world are using Microsoft Azure to enable them to accelerate their research. Find out more:
Measuring human happiness and frustration using data science in the cloud Read more…
WorldPop
Counting every person on Earth to eradicate poverty and empower women Read more…
Smart Cities
Creating intelligent water systems to unlock the potential of Smart Cities Read more…
ATLAS project
Research scientist uses Microsoft Cloud technology for high-energy physics computing Read more…
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
University of Cambridge
From cancer to crop genomics — using Research as a Service at the intersection of computers and biology Read more…
University College London
Democratizing AI to improve citizen health Read more…
University of California, Berkeley
A new understanding of the world through grassroots Data Science education at UC Berkeley Read more…
University of Rochester
Overcoming the fear of public speaking using cloud-based technology Read more…
University of Texas at Austin
University of Alaska Fairbanks
Predicting floods and improving public safety through Cortana Intelligence Suite Read more…
University of Oxford
Intelligent cloud computing lifts villages out of water poverty Read more…
University of Stirling
University of Nottingham
Untangling airports using open source tools on Microsoft Azure Read more…
University of Washington
Saving shellfish harvest by predicting ocean chemistry using Microsoft Azure Read more…
University of Washington Tacoma
Using machine learning and AI to reduce hospital readmissions Read more…
If you are using Microsoft Azure for a cloud-based research project and would like to share your story, please let us know and we will share your great work with the community. Email us at azurerfp@microsoft.com.
Learn
Azure for Research hands-on labs
Hands-on labs are intended to familiarize researchers and data scientists with the services Azure offers to aid them in their research, especially with regard to high-performance computing, big-data analysis, and analyzing data streaming from Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. There are detailed walk-throughs and what’s more you can download the material and work through it yourself. The labs are available under an open license on the online learning portal. Feel free to re-use this material for your own courses. All we ask is that you please let us know if you are using it.
On-demand videos
Watch the online training videos developed to provide a core curriculum for scientists interested in using Microsoft Azure for research. We recommend watching them in sequence from 1 to 6.
The one-hour, interactive online sessions on Microsoft Azure have been turned into a great webinar video series. The webinars were designed to help you understand the value and capabilities of cloud computing and how you can use it for your research in practical ways.
Interested in Azure Machine Learning? Access tutorials that’ll help with everything from setting up your first predictive analytics experiment, to publishing results, to creating a complete machine learning solution.
Technical papers
Choose from a selection of technical papers made for researchers to help you to quickly start working with Azure. The papers cover a range of topics from ‘Getting started with Azure’ to ‘Azure Virtual Machines’ to ‘Azure Cloud Services’. Some prior technical computing skills are assumed. Read the technical papers with instructions on using Azure features.
Learn Microsoft Azure from the experts—and at no financial cost to you. These Microsoft Azure infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) training courses cover key technical topics for IT pros and developers, including Azure Virtual Machines and virtual networks. In addition, IT pros can gain insight into platform-as-a-service (PaaS) implementation, including using PowerShell for automation and management, using Active Directory, migrating from on-premises to cloud infrastructure, and important licensing information. Enroll in our Azure training courses and discover the advantages of cloud computing with Microsoft Azure.
Alan Turing asked the question “can machines think?” in 1950 and it still intrigues us today. At The Alan Turing Institute, the United Kingdom’s national institute for data science in London, more than 150 researchers are pursuing this question by bringing their thinking to fundamental and real-world problems to push the boundaries of data science. One year ago, The Turing first opened its doors to 37 PhD students, 117 Turing Fellows and visiting researchers, 6 research software engineers and more than 5,000…
Emotions make us human. Researchers at The Alan Turing Institute in the United Kingdom are using artificial intelligence and machine learning to push the state of the art in data science to better understand what makes us happy, angry and frustrated. “Our research seeks to try and measure aspects of the world that we, as humans, are hugely aware of but that traditionally we’ve had near to no numbers on…
The number one United Nations Sustainable Development Goal is to eliminate poverty, leaving nobody behind. Researchers in the United Kingdom are harnessing the large-scale data-processing power of Microsoft Azure to map the location of every person on Earth to provide the accurate population statistics needed to achieve this international humanitarian goal. “There are about 2 billion people in the world today…
Randall Sobie is the HEP Computing Group Leader at the University of Victoria. He works on ATLAS project, a collaboration of 3,000 international physicists. The project has collected hundreds of petabytes of data and Randall’s team faced the challenge of storing and accessing information on-premise. With the help of Microsoft Azure, Randall created a flexible cloud…
The newspaper headlines about “Bangalore’s looming water crisis” have been ominous, with one urban planning expert proclaiming that Bangalore will become “unlivable” in a few years because of water scarcity. This is a critical issue that threatens the future of one of India’s fastest-growing cities. In fact, water availability is a cause for worry in the entire country. According to an estimate by The Asian Development…
Ever since Nicola Bonzanni was a little boy playing in the tiny Italian village of Bonate Sotto, just north of Milan, he was fascinated by nature and by building things. As he grew up, he wondered how computing and nature might be intertwined. “While I was studying computer science I was inspired by nature in…
Doctors make life-saving — and life-changing — decisions every day. But how do they know that they are making the best decisions? Can artificial intelligence (AI) help? “Before evidence-based medicine, decision-making in health care was heavily reliant on the expertise and knowledge of the health professional, usually a doctor. What has happened in the last 20, 30 years is that the health…
While some may regard data science as an easy passport to a job for the tech savvy, Luis Macias has different ideas. The fourth-year undergraduate student, who is majoring in American Studies at University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), wants to turn the hype of data science into hope for low-income…
People often rank public speaking as the number one fear that they face. New cloud-based technology from researchers at the University of Rochester lets speakers polish and practice at home in front of their computer camera, while the analysis provides instant feedback about improvement. Leading this effort known as ROC Speak is M. Ehsan Hoque, an assistant professor of…
On October 31, 2013, the city of Austin, Texas, faced a destructive flood. At the time, I was visiting David Maidment, Chaired Professor of the Civil Engineering Center for Research in Water Resources on site at the University of Texas at Austin. The day before the flood, we had been discussing research and analytics around the long-standing drought conditions across western Texas. Overnight…
Jacob Katuva used to get up at dawn to cycle 12 miles from his village to collect water with his uncles and cousins when he was growing up in Kenya. Now he is part of a research team at the University of Oxford using cloud computing and mobile sensors to monitor water wells and help ensure that thousands of villages in rural Africa and Asia have a safe, secure supply of water. Millions of people across the world fear not having…
Nobody likes a delay at the airport. Many of us have spent time buckled up, ready for takeoff, wondering why our plane is stuck on its way between the gate and the runway. Scientists in the United Kingdom are working hard to help untangle these airport operations, to help save fuel, money, and impact on the environment…
Shellfish farmer Bill Dewey remembers the first year he heard of ocean acidification, a phrase that means a change in chemistry for ocean water. It was around 2008, and Dewey worked for Taylor Shellfish, a company that farms oysters in ocean waters off the coast of Washington. That year, thousands of tiny “seed” oysters died off suddenly. Today, a cloud-based predictive system from the University of Washington…
Stuart, a 66-year-old man with diabetes, felt lousy—constantly fatigued, nauseated, and short of breath after just the slightest exertion. His daughter, worried by his increasing frailty, took him to the emergency room at the local hospital. Her concern was amply justified: Stuart was suffering from heart failure. Like 5.1 million other…
More than half of the world’s population now lives in cities and suburbs, and as just about any of these billions of people can tell you, urban traffic can be a nightmare. Cars stack up bumper-to-bumper, clogging our highways, jangling our nerves, taxing our patience, polluting our air, and taking a toll on our productivity. In short, traffic jams impair on our emotional, physical, and economic…
The forests that surround Campos do Jordao are among the foggiest places on Earth. With a canopy shrouded in mist much of time, these are the renowned cloud forests of the Brazilian state of São Paulo. It is here that researchers from the São Paulo Research Foundation—better known by its Portuguese acronym, FAPESP—have partnered with Rafael Olivier, professor of ecology…
Aug. 1, 2017 – If you need to run lots of computations, either as a large supercomputer simulation, or hundreds of smaller runs for a parameter sweep calculation, then cloud computing can really help speed up your research.
June 20, 2017 – Cloud computing can provide almost every piece of computing and data capability that you may require for your research. Whether it is a virtual machine with tons of memory; large clusters for high-performance computing, Hadoop or Spark; Stream processing for Internet of Things devices, or sharing your research data and methods with others.
June 7, 2017 – Randall Sobie is the HEP Computing Group Leader at the University of Victoria. He works on ATLAS project, a collaboration of 3,000 international physicists. The project has collected hundreds of petabytes of data and Randall’s team faced the challenge of storing and accessing information on-premise.
April 27, 2017 – When you need to go from running on your laptop or desktop computer, to run dozens, or hundreds, of computations, then cloud computing can literally be like a time machine. Azure Batch makes it easy to create many machines to simultaneously run your jobs, so you can get your results in few hours or days, rather than waiting weeks or months.
Feb. 6, 2017 – Citizen scientists all over the world have been helping the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to collect bird observations for 15 years using eBird. This real-time, online checklist program enables birders to record birds they see, keep track of lists, explore maps and graphs, share with the eBird community and contribute to ornithological science and bird conservation.
Jan. 31, 2017 – Using sensors in a busy environment, such as a sports stadium, can unveil deep insights to provide a better experience for visitors to a game, the local community, and tourists wanting to enjoy the venue.
Nov. 9, 2016 – Microsoft Azure can help with almost any research computing task, due to its huge range of capabilities. It can, however, be hard to know where to start. This short guide will show you the ropes in about an hour, after which you’ll be all set to explore further.
Oct. 18, 2016 – Wouldn’t it be great if you had a time machine for your research? Or more realistically, access to all the computing and data capabilities you could ever wish for, right now? That’s exactly what cloud computing can give you and it’s a lot easier than you think. This blog series explains how cloud computing can help you do faster, better and more reproducible research, in any discipline, anywhere around the world.
