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It’s been quite a year, not least because it was my first full year as managing director of Microsoft Research Cambridge. I have to say that it’s been great fun so far, getting to know the lab and the people here a lot better. Until this year, my understanding has been rather skewed toward certain quarters of the lab’s work, and it has been very interesting, not to say challenging, to try to get to know other areas a bit more closely.
When it comes to awards, this has been a great year. Let’s see: Tony Hoare (opens in new tab) won the prestigious IEEE John von Neumann Medal (opens in new tab); Simon Peyton-Jones (opens in new tab) and Simon Marlow (opens in new tab) won the ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Software Award (opens in new tab); Abi Sellen (opens in new tab) was elected to the ACM SIGCHI Academy and as a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (opens in new tab); the Rooke Medal (opens in new tab) went to Chris Bishop (opens in new tab); the computer-vision team that invented the machine learning for Kinect (opens in new tab) human-motion capture—Andrew Fitzgibbon (opens in new tab), Jamie Shotton (opens in new tab), Toby Sharp (opens in new tab), Mat Cook, and me—won the MacRobert Award (opens in new tab), the premier annual award of the Royal Academy of Engineering; Georges Gonthier (opens in new tab) won the EADS Foundation Prize (opens in new tab); and Andrew Phillips (opens in new tab) was named to the TR35 (opens in new tab), the annual list of MIT Technology Review’s 35 innovators under 35.
I can’t help but be impressed by the extensive network of relationships our researchers and engineers have forged within the company. And with that comes a rich transfer of knowledge and technology, including, during the year: .NET Gadgeteer (opens in new tab), the modular rapid prototyping system for hardware; F# 3.0 (opens in new tab) for information-rich programming; components for the Kinect for Windows SDK (opens in new tab); the Gesture Recognition Tool Kit, so far shipped with Kinect Sports: Season Two (opens in new tab); the Microsoft Touch Mouse, invented and engineered in collaboration with Microsoft Research Cambridge staff; Project Emporia (opens in new tab) on Windows Phone 7; organ recognition in medical imaging (opens in new tab) for Microsoft Amalga; Safer C++ (/guard option in Visual C++ (opens in new tab)), which improves the security and reliability of C/C++ programs; and asynchronous programming in C# 5.0 (opens in new tab), Visual Basic 11 (opens in new tab), and .NET Framework 4.5 (opens in new tab).
Finally, we welcomed many new faces to Cambridge, including about 100 interns, post-docs, visiting researchers, and full time researchers. It was also a year in which we bid retirement best wishes to a visionary leader, my predecessor, Andrew Herbert.
Already, there is so much to look forward to next year and many interesting challenges that lie ahead, including our move to a new lab building, by the railway station in central Cambridge. Here’s to an even more spectacular 2012!