The Microsoft Research - IMDEA Software Institute Joint Research Center started operations in late 2013 with the objective of framing and boosting the significant research collaborations between Microsoft Research and the IMDEA Software Institute in software science and technology.
The Joint Research Center was presented officially on April 3, 2014, on the occasion of the first Microsoft Research and IMDEA Software Institute Workshop (MICW 2014), which took took place on April 2–4, 2014, at the IMDEA Software building in Madrid.
This was the first in a series of annual workshops aimed at reinforcing the collaboration between these two institutions, with researchers from both sides working together on several research topics. It was organized by Judith Bishop and Georges Gonthier from Microsoft Research and by Gilles Barthe and Manuel Hermenegildo from the IMDEA Software Institute.
These workshops bring together researchers and students to discuss their collaborative work on hot topics in software in order to advance the state of the art and, where possible, to bring those advances to market. The focus of the first workshop was on verification (coordinated by Alexey Gotsman and Francesco Logozzo), programming languages (coordinated by Pierre-Yves Strub and Georges Gonthier), and security (coordinated by Juan Caballero and Ben Livshits).
The collaborations between IMDEA Software and Microsoft involve around 30 researchers from both sides and have resulted in more than 25 publications in top-level venues to date, including for example four joint papers at the top-ranked ACM Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL), in 2014.
