MSR Silicon Valley Systems Projects I Have Loved

19 Sep 2014

Microsoft confirmed yesterday that it’s shuttering its Silicon Valley lab, home to 75 brilliant Computer Science researchers including 2013 Turing Award winner Leslie Lamport. Others have more and wiser things to say about this decision. However, I want to highlight some of the fantastic work that’s come out of MSR Silicon Valley in the recent past in my research area of databases and distributed systems:

You’ve probably heard of many of the brilliant folks behind this work before: Doug Terry, Dahlia Malkhi, Martin Abadi, Michael Isard, Derek Murray, Frank McSherry, Marcos Aguilera, Yuan Yu, and the list goes on. And, as I’ve said, there have been many others and many other exciting projects (and entire groups outside distributed systems) at MSR Silicon Valley.

Fortunately, MSR still has other branches—for example, many of the researchers studying core database issues are in Redmond. However, the above projects help illustrate why MSR Silicon Valley was such a research powerhouse and a welcome industrial neighbor to the west.

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