Microsoft steps up research efforts at Beijing lab

Microsoft Corp. plans to expand its research lab in Beijing with the addition of an Advanced Technology Center (ATC), according to a company statement released on Monday.

The addition of the ATC to Microsoft Research Asia’s (MSRA’s) activities in Beijing will expand the number of Microsoft researchers in China to 250 from 170 within one year, the statement said. These researchers will focus on developing products for Asian users that make the interaction between computers and users more natural, it said.

The main focus of MSRA is basic research. The ATC will complement these efforts by focusing on developing these technologies into products and accelerating the transfer of technology from MSRA’s labs to Microsoft product groups, the statement said.

MSRA was established in Beijing in 1998. Since the lab’s inception, it has made 70 “key contributions” to Microsoft products, including digital ink parsing and rendering technologies used in Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, advanced graphics used in Xbox, an English Writing Wizard used in the Chinese version of Microsoft Office and the AutoMovie feature in Windows XP Movie Maker 2, the statement said.

Technologies developed at the MSRA lab in Beijing have also been adopted as part of international standards, such as error-resilient video transmission technology in MPEG4, TCP/IP header compression adopted by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and video compression technology adopted by the International Telecommunication Union’s (ITU’s) International Organization for Standardization (ISO), according to the lab’s Web site.