This summer I have a great opportunity to have an internship with Microsoft Research. The purpose of my work will be to perform experiments about the navigation devices used in vehicles. The most valuable thing about having an internship at Microsoft is a hand-on experience with things that may actually be used commercially, since all the research is geared toward practical applications. This is also a great way to expand the collaboration of UNH and Microsoft, since in this research we will be using our Project54 driving simulator. My work will be supervised by Tim Paek, with whom Professor Kun and I published a paper last year at the Interspeech 2007 conference in Belgium.

One interesting fact is that Microsoft Research was founded in 1991, and at that time Microsoft was one of the first software companies to create its own computer science research organization. There are more than 800 researchers involved covering over 55 areas of research in computer science, engineering, and general science. Some more interesting facts can be found here.

In order to set everything up about the projects that we will be working on this summer, I spent a week at Microsoft in Redmond. Although I had a chance to visit Microsoft shortly last year, I finally realized how big their campus is. On one occasion I had to take care of some administrative things in a building that is located on the very end of the campus. At first it did not look that far, but after walking for about half an hour I realized that they don’t have shuttles for nothing! Everything is very neatly organized and modern looking, as can be seen on the pictures below.

Microsoft Research building in the background.

A cafe next to one of the canteens.

There are also many convenient things on campus that are organized for their employees, such as the bus and shuttle transportation, sports fields, canteens, library, professional lectures and seminars etc.

Microsoft Research really looks like a very nice place to work at, since their employees have lots of freedom about organizing their own work and research. I am looking forward to having a great internship this summer.

Zeljko Medenica

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