Microsoft Corporation continues its program of major support for the University of Washington Department of Computer Science & Engineering. Recent initiatives include:

• In July 1997, Microsoft sponsored the University of Washington / Microsoft Summer Research Institute in Data Mining, which brought 75 leading researchers from fields such as statistics, artificial intelligence, visualization, databases, computer systems, and learning to Seattle for 7 days to discuss a multi-disciplinary research agenda in Data Mining.

• Beginning with the 1996-97 academic year, Microsoft has made its software available free of charge to all undergraduate majors, graduate students, staff, faculty, and laboratory systems in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering.

• During the 1996-97 academic year, Microsoft participated in several major educational initiatives jointly with UW CSE:

  • Dennis Canady, a Microsoft developer, worked with UW CSE Professor John Zahorjan to design and teach a senior-level "capstone" course in which three teams of CSE undergraduates learned commercial software development methodology and synthesized knowledge from a variety of previous courses by designing, implementing, documenting, and demonstrating 3-D multi-player distributed videogames built using VC++, Visual SourceSafe, and DirectX. See a video in Microsoft NetShow format.

  • Internationally-known Microsoft database and transaction processing expert Phil Bernstein taught a course on Transaction Processing Systems in UW CSE's new Professional Masters Program. Bernstein's course, like others in this program, was taught simultaneously to students at UW and on Microsoft's Redmond campus using Internet and videoconferencing technology, as well as being archived for on-demand access via the web. Microsoft was a major supporter of the UW CSE Professional Masters Program.

• Microsoft provides directed support to specific research programs, such as Brian Bershad's work on Java security and David Salesin's work on computer graphics.

• Microsoft provides multiple undergraduate and graduate scholarships and fellowships annually to students in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering.

• Microsoft is working closely with UW CSE to facilitate the conversion of major portions of our research, education, and infrastructure activities to Windows NT.

• Mike Jones from Microsoft Research and Ed Lazowska from UW CSE co-chaired the USENIX Windows NT Research Workshop, which brought to Seattle in August 1997 more than 300 academic and industrial computer science researchers who are moving to Windows NT as a platform.