2016 Microsoft Research PhD Scholarship Projects Announced

Published February 12, 2016

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By Daron Green, Director, Microsoft Research

Every year since 2004, the Microsoft Research PhD Scholarship Programme has awarded scholarships to fund PhD students’ work on selected projects in the Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) region. We are pleased to announce the selected PhD projects for 2016.

This year we received 40 eligible project proposals, which we assessed via a two-stage review process. During Stage 1, a panel of Microsoft Researchers determined whether the proposed project met the basic selection criteria, including relevance to topics that are being researched at Microsoft Research Cambridge. Those proposals that advanced to Stage 2 were then evaluated by a board of 89 researchers from Microsoft Research Laboratories, who provided detailed feedback.

Ultimately, we selected seventeen projects to receive funding through Microsoft Research starting in the academic year 2016–2017. These include six proposals that relate to the Joint Initiative with University College London and the Joint Initiative in Informatics with Edinburgh University.

The seventeen projects are located in six countries across Europe (Austria, Germany, Sweden and the United Kingdom) and represent a variety of research areas, including computational biology, machine learning, health science, geo and environmental science, and computer science. Applicants, who are PhD supervisors, collaborate with an assigned Microsoft Research co-supervisor to support a PhD student for up to three years as he or she carries out the proposed research project. Supervisors are actively recruiting graduate students for these PhD projects; candidate selection should be complete by March 2017.

Below is a list of the selected projects, including the PhD supervisor and the institution:

Bit-level Accurate Reasoning and Interpolation
Georg Weissenbacher, TU Wien, Austria
Continuous Listening Services: Leveraging Sociological Understandings of Talk for Continuous Agent Input
Barry Brown, University of Stockholm, Sweden
Computational Design of Nonlinear Functions using Nucleic Acids
Vishwesh Kulkarni, University of Warwick, UK
Data-Efficient Reinforcement Learning from Image Pixels
Marc Deisenroth, Imperial College London, UK
Learning to Infer in Graphical Models and Probabilistic Programmes
Yee Whye The, University of Oxford
Lightweight Concurrency Modelling
Mike Dodds, University of York, UK
Meaningful Metadata: The Things I Wish I Knew
Wendy Moncur, University of Dundee, UK
Medical Image Analysis in the Cloud: Application to Early Stage Cancer Detection
Ben Glocker, Imperial College London, UK
Modelling the Survival and Proliferation of Cancer Cells in Metastasis
Benjamin Hall, University of Cambridge, UK
Smart Molecular Biosensors: Design Principles and Foundational Technologies
James Ajioka, University of Cambridge, UK
Towards total Immersion: Accurate Reconstruction of Lights, Materials and 3D Geometry from RGB, Depth and Motion
Andreas Geiger, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Tübingen, Germany

Joint Initiative with University College London:

Conversational Search: Mathematical modelling and Applications
Jun Wang
Estimating the Credibility of Health Information on the Web
Ingemar Cox
A Highly Scalable Optical Switch Fabric for Data Centre Networks
Benn Thomsen

Joint Initiative with Informatics with University of Edinburgh:

Dense Visual Tracking for Active Manipulation
Maurice Fallon
Rack-Scale Interconnect Fabrics for Disaggregated Memory
Boris Grot
Reducing the Annotation Tax of Programming Language Types using Machine Learning and Big Code
Charles Sutton

Thank you to all who applied this year.

We look forward to receiving equally stimulating project proposals for next year’s PhD scholarships. Mark your calendar for September 1, 2016, when the submission tool for the 2017 applications will open.

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