Embedded Systems at Microsoft Research

I was looking for what kind of work is being done in the areas of Embedded Systems at Microsoft, and I found one group specifically working in the areas of Embedded Systems and Reconfigurable computing.

Research overview at Embedded Systems group at MSR;

Overview

Our work in Embedded Systems covers both the system software and the hardware platform issues.

System software is long lived and hard to develop.

• How can we make computers and consumer electronic devices less helpless and needy of detailed instruction?
• How can we build predictable systems out of a mix of real-time and non-real-time entities?
• How can we trust the computers and how can they trust us? But keep our privacy, lifestyle, safety, and convenience?
• What are the programming paradigms that simplify the programmer's tasks without undue overheads?
• How can we verify that software behaves as expected and adapts to a changing environment?
• How do we structure software for resource-constrained environments, while maximizing portability, reuse, and sharing?

Embedded hardware is diverse and forever changing.

• How can we realize more stable platforms without raising costs and complexity?
• What can we do to increase ease-of-use, especially for verification, debugging and performance tuning?
• How can we shorten the development and testing time for new systems?
• How can we best use reconfigurable hardware to execute software more efficiently?
• What are the best ways to exploit the functionality and the efficiency of reconfigurable computing?

Link: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/groups/embeddedsystems/