Standing atop the tallest educational edifice in the world—the 240-meter (787-foot) tower of Lomonosov Moscow State University (MSU)—really makes you think about the impact of education and research. This is home to some of the brightest minds in the world, including 11 Nobel Prize and six Field Medal winners. So it’s no surprise that we created the Microsoft Research–Lomonosov MSU Joint Research Center in May 2014, to build on our years of close collaboration. To celebrate the center’s first anniversary, Microsoft Research sponsored two research workshops at MSU.
Lomonosov Moscow State University
(photo courtesy of Sergey Norin under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license (opens in new tab))
Cloud computing for research
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The first event, on May 19, focused on showing researchers how to take advantage of cloud computing in virtually every domain. I described many amazing Microsoft Azure for Research projects (see my slides (opens in new tab)), before we heard from Sergey Bartunov of MSU, who explained how Azure enabled him to train his advanced machine learning model (see his slides (opens in new tab)). “I first ran the algorithm on my laptop, but after three days of computing, I found it fried,” he said. “At some point you just cannot do everything on your laptop—you either have a powerful enough server at hand or you go to the cloud. On Azure’s powerful D14 machine, I could run our algorithm on the whole English Wikipedia and get the results in 16 hours. On my laptop, it would take about six days.”
Ivan Klimov, director of the Center for the Study of New Media and Society (CNMS), discussed how his team can now study VK, Europe’s largest social network, by using the scale and power of Azure. Sergey Berezin, who leads the computational science tools effort at the Microsoft Research–Lomonosov MSU Joint Research Center, detailed how he is collaborating with Microsoft Research to bring new tools, such as Biomodel Analyzer (opens in new tab) and FetchClimate (opens in new tab), to fruition.
During the workshop, we launched our Azure for Research Russia Initiative (opens in new tab) for Russian researchers who want more power and storage than their desktop computers can provide for running simulations, doing data science, developing the Internet of Things and taking advantage of our open and flexible Azure Machine Learning service (opens in new tab).
Research tips for graduate students
Amidst all the intellectual horsepower at MSU, it can be easy to forget that most research careers—even those of Nobel laureates—start in graduate school. These early years can be daunting, so with this in mind we offered the Microsoft Research–Moscow State University Graduate Workshop 2015, held on May 20, designed to help graduate research students expand their thinking and increase the impact of their work.
Drew Purves (opens in new tab) from Microsoft Research Cambridge (UK) opened by describing how he went from being a teenager hooked on Conway’s Game of Life to a researcher who has created the world’s first truly global Game of Life: the Madingley Model (opens in new tab), which includes every organism on Earth. MSU-alumnus Konstantin Makarychev (opens in new tab) of the Theory Group at Microsoft Research Redmond was delighted to be back at his alma mater, where he provided tips and tricks on writing better research papers. I wrapped up the morning with a talk on how to give a good talk, which is always a daunting prospect!
Drew Purves (left) and Konstantin Makarychev (right) share their experiences with the graduate students. (photos courtesy of Elena Pavlova and Alexander Popovkin)
During the afternoon, we took the attendees outside of their comfort zone, working in teams to apply what they had learned from the morning sessions. They did a fantastic job of giving a three-minute pitch of research proposals, coming up with big ideas such as science-as-a-service in the cloud and revolutionary video streaming.
The close of the workshop marked the end of our two-day celebration of the joint research center’s first anniversary, but everyone agreed that it was just the beginning of what promises to be a long and fruitful collaboration between Microsoft Research and some of the brightest minds in Russia. We can’t wait to see what researchers propose to do with Microsoft Azure, and we look forward to receiving many proposals before our deadline of August 15, 2015 (opens in new tab).
—Kenji Takeda (opens in new tab), Solutions Architect and Technical Manager, Microsoft Research
Learn more
- Russian researchers can apply for an Azure Award as part of our Microsoft Azure for Research Russia Initiative (opens in new tab)
- Microsoft Azure for Research program (opens in new tab)
- Azure Machine Learning (opens in new tab)
- Microsoft Research Computational Science Lab (opens in new tab)
- Microsoft Research Theory Group (opens in new tab)
- Computational Modelling Tools Lab, Moscow State University (opens in new tab)
- Bayesian Methods Research Group, Moscow State University (opens in new tab)
- European joint research centers (opens in new tab)