According to Dr. Gary William Flake's "Live Labs Manifesto," the Internet operates in a manner fundamentally unlike anything that has ever preceded it. It is a world where "something small and intangible - a better algorithm - can massively increase global utility and welfare."
Microsoft Live Labs is a partnership between MSN and Microsoft Research that takes a holistic approach toward applied research for Internet-enabled products and services. The partnership brings together people with a variety of skills and perspectives to foster research programs, incubate entirely new inventions, and improve and accelerate new Web-based technologies.
This week Flake - head of Live Labs and a Microsoft technical fellow - and his team are announcing 12 winners of a new Live Labs request for proposals (RFP) entitled "Accelerated Search for Academic Research." The RFP aims to identify bold, innovative and new approaches to information retrieval, data mining, machine learning and human/computer interactions, with the ultimate goal of creating new technologies that can drastically change the way we interact with the Web and its vast array of resources.
Recipients of the Live Labs grants are posing some of the most compelling questions in search technology today. Even if the user gets relevant results, can he or she trust that information? How can a search tool get the best data from the Web? What's happening on that part of the Web that's "below the surface," that's not being crawled today? How can user behavior help predict economic or social changes?
Although winners will receive cash grants of between US$35,000 and $50,000, according to Dr. Evelyne Viegas, program manager for External Research & Programs at Microsoft Research, most applicants say what drew them to the RFP was not the cash, but the promise of a wealth of real-world user query and click-through data from MSN. Awardees will gain access to extensive data logs from MSN to aid in their research, as well as an increased quota of queries to the MSN software development kit that enables programmatic access to real-world search results. (The data being used by the awardees contains no personally identifiable user information.)
"We've been hearing a lot from academia that they need this kind of data," Viegas says. "That's what's really unique about this RFP. We're giving them access to more than 15 million real-user queries, with click-through information. The academic community is hungry for this kind of resource, and we're excited to see what they can do with it."
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