Posted by Rob Knies

A few months ago, I got a chance to talk with Thore Graepel of Microsoft Research Cambridge about Project Waterloo, a Facebook game that is part of the Research Games project exploring behavioral game theory at a global scale.

Now, Graepel and his teammates are at it again, this time with Doubloon Dash, another game available on Facebook. While Project Waterloo enables players to allocate troops efficiently over a collection of battlefields, Doubloon Dash—a nautical scramble for a pirate’s buried treasure —offers a competition in which a pair of players have to invest, but only one can win.

Posted by Jennifer Chayes, Microsoft distinguished scientist and managing director of Microsoft Research New England

We’re thrilled to announce that three leading researchers will be joining danah boyd and the social-media research team at Microsoft Research New England, based in Cambridge, Mass.

Microsoft Research produces some of the strongest computer-science research extant. As the world changes and our business expands, there’s a much broader range of research questions we need to address beyond technology itself, including how we use that technology, why we want to use that technology, and how different cultural norms within the United States and other countries affect how we approach future technology development.

Posted by Rob Knies

For Moshe Tennenholtz, just named the winner of the 2012 Autonomous Agents Research Award by the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence (SIGART), things just keep getting better.

“I think we are living in an exciting time,” says Tennenholtz, Sondheimer Technion Academic Chair and a principal researcher for Microsoft Research New England who is based at the Microsoft Israel R&D Center. “Social and economic structures are reshaped and/or need to be reconsidered due to the use of a variety of what can be called ‘online multi-agent services and interactions,’ both current and emerging.

“The understanding and design of these is what I would love to do.”