Microsoft Research Asia Puts Focus on IT Education

By Rob Knies

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) is everywhere: That was the message MIT’s Eric Grimson delivered during Microsoft Research Asia’s seventh annual Faculty Summit.

The next presenter, Ed Lazowska, chose to clarify.

“My message,” he said, “is that EECS is everywhere, but, increasingly, it’s moving to the Pacific Rim, to the West Coast of the United States and to Asia.”

East met West Coast at Beijing’s Beihang University on Oct. 23, as university presidents, deans, and professors from China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Southeast Asia gathered to hear luminaries from academia and Microsoft discuss issues relating to computer-science education, in the Asia Pacific region and beyond.

The droll riposte from Lazowska, Bill and Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, distilled the essential nature of the summit, which provided a freewheeling exchange designed to foster innovative IT talent in Asia.

The Faculty Summit, the latest in a series of events commemorating the 15th anniversary of Microsoft Research, also featured remarks from Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research; Harry Shum, managing director of Microsoft Research Asia; and Craig Mundie, Microsoft chief research and strategy officer.

After Lolan Song, director of University Relations for Microsoft Research Asia, greeted the attendees by outlining the academic outreach her group is sponsoring, Wei Li, president of Beihang University, provided a short summary of the explosive growth of computer science at the undergraduate and graduate levels in China—and what comes next.

“We should shift,” Li said, “from expansion in quantity to enhancement in quality.”

Microsoft Research, Rashid said, can help.

“Our role, as we see it,” he said, “in working with the academic community, is not just to do research with you, but also to be a catalyst, to work with universities to explore new areas, to open up new opportunities.”

Shum, having discussed his lab’s vibrant intern program, the fellowships it has awarded, the joint labs it has established, and some of its future directions, underscored Microsoft Research Asia’s desire for continued partnership with academe.

“We would really like to work very closely with all the academia in Asia Pacific and work together with our colleagues in Europe and America,” he said, “and together, we can make a difference.”

Grimson, department head of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Lazowska talked about their respective institutions and how they are working across disciplines and in partnership with industry to further educational initiatives. The former stressed the need for new curricula that focus more on depth than breadth, the latter outlining a series of collaborations with Microsoft Research that include joint work with Beihang University.

Jian Wang, principal researcher and research manager for Microsoft Research Asia, addressed emerging computing trends among youths and those trends’ implications for education. Noting that students’ use of technology, as well as the nature of the technology at their disposal, is changing rapidly, the challenge for universities, he said, is to ensure that computer-science instruction dovetails with students’ expectations for their learning experience and their digital lifestyles.

The event also featured brief talks by a pair of Asian professors about challenges encountered by young researchers and professors in the region.

Takeo Igarashi, associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Tokyo who received the 2006 Significant New Researcher Award during the Association for Computing Machinery’s SIGGRAPH 2006 conference and who won the IBM Japan Science Award in 2004, discussed the effects departmental organization, funding, and internships can have early in a researcher’s career.

Zhi-Hua Zhou, who became a full professor of the Department of Computer Science and Technology at Nanjing University two years ago, at age 29, cited China’s great advantage in human resources stemming from its huge population but also traced the challenges stemming from faculty shortcomings and economic issues that limit access to academic publications and international conferences.

One of the highlights of the day was a panel discussion on Fostering High-Quality Ph.D. Students, moderated by Vijay Varadharajan, Microsoft Chair and professor of Computing at Australia’s Macquarie University. Panel members included:

Andrew Yao, professor with the Center for Advanced Study at Tsinghua University.
Ke Gong, president of Tianjin University.
Myung-Soo Kim, professor and chair of Computer Science and Engineering at Seoul National University.
Noriko Kando, professor in the Software Research Division of Japan’s National Institute of Informatics.
Pat Hanrahan, Canon USA professor at Stanford University.
Wei-Ying Ma, principal researcher and research manager of Microsoft Research Asia’s Web Search and Data Mining Group.
“You don’t have to follow the paradigm of the great Western research universities,” said Yao, winner of the 2000 Turing Award. “There are quite a number of very excellent small universities that don’t have strength in numbers. But they can produce very good students by picking the right people.”

Kim noted that China’s growth in computer-science interest is not uniform over the region, saying that as the quality of faculty in his nation has increased, the number of students has decreased. He and Kando both emphasized the need to collaborate internationally.

“We need to more communicate more between industry and academia,” Ma concluded. “We do see a very exciting future for computer science. We need to make the students realize that over the next 10 years, this is the best, most exciting, highly relevant field that we have.”

Mundie concluded by challenging the faculty members in attendance to retool their approaches to address the significant issues computing will encounter in the near future.

“I think we need to go back and start to think about the science of computing,” he said. “and we need to get a class of Ph.D.s and a group of professors who are willing to start again to think about a way to solve some of these fundamental problems—perhaps, ultimately, to think completely differently about how computing will be done in the future.

“I don’t think that, without a fundamental change in the way we educate our computer-science students, both at the undergraduate and graduate level, we’re going to find the breakthroughs necessary to address these problems.”