What's Happening at Microsoft Research in Silicon Valley?

Microsoft Research's Silicon Valley Center focuses on the theory and practice of distributed systems, with particular interest in their interplay. The lab has been in existence just over a year and has a number of projects underway that are representative of the breadth and unique focus of our interests.

In this talk, I will present an overview of the role and mission of Microsoft Research, then turn to the particular projects of the Silicon Valley Center.

Roy Levin joined Microsoft in August, 2001, to found the Silicon Valley
Research lab. From 1996 until he joined Microsoft, Roy was Director of the
Compaqs Systems Research Center in Palo Alto, California. Previously, he was a senior researcher in the Center since its founding in 1984 by Digital Equipment Corporation. During those years, he was a primary contributor and project leader for the Topaz programming environment and its micro-kernel operating system, the first to provide high-performance, light-weight process scheduling and inter-process communication on a multiprocessor workstation.

He also was project leader and a primary contributor for Vesta, a software configuration management system embodying novel technology and tools for source control, version management, and building of large software systems.

Before joining Digital, Roy was a Principal Scientist at Xerox's Palo Alto
Research Center. He was project co-leader and a principal developer of Cedar, an experimental programming environment for high-performance workstations.
Cedar set the standard (c. 1982) for integrated programming environments for
algol-tradition languages, incorporating significant advances in language technology, file systems, network communication (rpc), and user interfaces. Roy also was a co-developer of Grapevine, a landmark electronic mail system.