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.”

Posted by Peter Lee, managing director of Microsoft Research Redmond

The last in a series of posts from the directors of Microsoft Research’s labs worldwide, this one from Peter Lee of Microsoft Research Redmond.

Given that this was my first full calendar year at the Redmond lab of Microsoft Research, it took quite an effort to comprehend fully the breathtaking scope of ideas and projects carried out by the lab’s more than 300 researchers and engineers. What a hoot! It’s a great pleasure now to reflect a bit on the past year.

Posted by Surajit Chaudhuri, managing director of the eXtreme Computing Group

The latest in a series of posts from the directors of Microsoft Research’s labs worldwide, this one from Surajit Chaudhuri of the eXtreme Computing Group (XCG).

It has been just more than six months since I joined XCG as its lab director. XCG is a unique Microsoft Research lab that consists of not only great researchers and program managers, as in other Microsoft Research labs, but also a relatively large and experienced engineering team. This combination of talent has created a culture in XCG to focus on big bets, as we also have the ability to make significant engineering investments

Posted by Lili Cheng, managing director of FUSE Labs

The latest in a series of posts from the directors of Microsoft Research’s labs worldwide, this one from Lili Cheng of FUSE Labs.

We just launched So.cl, our latest research experiment, which blends search and social networking. For the last 12 days, it has been a thrill to be amid a network of students and to learn how human and unpredictable and beautiful it is to build and interact with a new community.