[Techtaffy Newsdesk]

Microsoft has opened a new Microsoft Research lab in New York City, New York. The new lab, to be based in Manhattan, will be led by Jennifer Chayes, who becomes the managing director of both Microsoft Research New England, which she founded in July 2008, and Microsoft Research New York City.

Fifteen researchers form the lab’s initial team, including three founding members who used to be part of Yahoo Research previously. The three founding members are:

• David Pennock, who conducts research at the intersection of computer science and economics, is past chair of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Electronic Commerce, the academic organization dedicated to topics in that area. Pennock will serve as assistant managing director of the new lab.
• Duncan Watts, a former full professor of sociology at Columbia University and a pioneer of modern network science, focuses on computational and experimental social science. He is the author of three books, including “Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age” and, most recently, “Everything Is Obvious*: Once You Know the Answer.”
• John Langford, whose interests are in scalable interactive machine learning, learning reductions, and other irresistible research topics, is the program co-chair for this year’s International Conference on Machine Learning.

The New York City lab will investigate complementary research areas: computational and experimental social science, algorithmic economics, and machine learning, along with information retrieval. The new researchers will engage in large-scale machine learning, prediction, and online-market design. They also will develop new techniques in the fields of both computational and online experimental social science.

[Image Courtesy: Microsoft Research]