Microsoft to host Research Faculty Summit 2016 in Rio de Janeiro on May 18-20

Microsoft has just announced that it will be hosting the tenth annual Microsoft Research Latin America Faculty Support in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil from May 18th- May 20th, 2016.

Overall, the event explores with researchers how innovations in computing, fueled by academic and industry research, can rise to meet the regional scale challenges of today. The three-day event will also be divided up into three sessions, with one for each day. The three sessions include Recent advances in Information Technology, Open source software and industry, and Microsoft Academic: new applications and research opportunities. The full details from each of these sessions, as described by Microsoft, can be seen below.

Recent advances in Information Technology: May 18, 08:30-09:30 PT

In this talk we present an overview of recent developments in information technology, especially in the areas of computer vision, speech and natural language processing, and new computer interfaces, in particular those developed at Microsoft Research. Many of these technologies are the result of the new developments in computer architecture, machine learning and deep neural networks, and big data.

Open source software and industry: exploring the reality: May 19, 04:30 – 05:30 PT

In this talk we shall survey this landscape, present statistics and examples of some of Microsoft Research’s OSS tools, explore the challenges, and make some predictions as to where the most exciting industry OSS developments will launch in the future.

Microsoft Academic: New applications and research opportunities: May 20, 4:30 – 9:30 PT

Microsoft Research is determined to change the way that research information is discovered, analyzed, and exploited. The Microsoft Academic Graph is a new entity graph of research publications, authors, venues, organizations, and topics which is now driving new features in Bing, Cortana, and Microsoft Academic. In addition, Microsoft Research has opened up this dataset to the community new APIs to support further research, experimentation, and development. This talk will highlight how Microsoft is surfacing this information in novel ways, and how the research community can take advantage of these data and APIs to fuel new research opportunities.

Speakers at the event include Paula Bellizia, General Manager of Microsoft Brazil, Rico Malvar, the chief scientist at Microsoft Research, and Judith Bishop, and Alex Wade of Microsoft Research. All the sessions will be streamed live on Channel 9, which can be accessed by clicking here or the links for each of the sessions above.