The University of Colorado at Boulder's ATLAS information technology center today announced a $100,000 pledge from Microsoft Research of Redmond, Wash., to enhance the center's leading-edge research efforts, according to Chancellor Richard Byyny.
The multi-year pledge will be used to fund group project spaces in the new ATLAS Center and will include use of Microsoft Research software in that area. ATLAS, the Alliance for Technology, Learning and Society, is CU-Boulder's campus-wide initiative that prepares students and faculty for lives and leadership careers in the networked information age.
"This relationship with Microsoft Research will allow us to fund not only a portion of the new center, but also it will augment our curriculum and offer guest instruction in areas that are the most leading-edge imaginable," according to Bobby Schnabel, associate vice chancellor for academic and campus technology and the ATLAS faculty director.
"Technologies such as artificial intelligence, multimedia, speech recognition and image processing are some of the projects that Microsoft Research develops, and those are topics that could be addressed in a Microsoft Research project area," Schnabel said.
"The ATLAS initiative at CU is unique because its interdisciplinary approach to technology attracts talent from a variety of very diverse disciplines," said Rob Reed, Microsoft Research's University Relations Manager. "That meshes well with the diversity of our own research efforts because they extend beyond technology to many areas such as the arts and literature."
Established in 1991, Microsoft Research is dedicated to conducting both basic and applied research in computer science and software engineering. Its goal is to develop new technologies to simplify and enhance the user's computing experience, reduce the cost of writing and maintaining software and facilitate the creation of new types of software.
Today, Microsoft Research has a staff of more than 600 researchers in four laboratories located in Redmond, San Francisco, Cambridge, England, and Beijing.Ìý
The ATLAS initiative at CU-Boulder has been in operation for two years and will break ground on the new ATLAS Center when state appropriations allow. That center is a $29 million, 65,000-square-foot complex funded with public, corporate and private monies.
For more information on support for the ATLAS initiative at CU-Boulder contact Scott Carter, ATLAS Development Director for the University of Colorado Foundation, Inc., at (303) 735-2358, or send e-mail to Scott.carter@cufund.colorado.edu.