First week as a Microsoft Research intern

My first week as a Microsoft Research intern has been a lot of fun! Here are a few highlights:

MSR Intern Technology Connections: I attended a fascinating series of talks by the team leaders of Microsoft's various dev tools on Tuesday morning. Some of the best ones:

• A behind-the-scenes look at how LINQ works in C# by Eric Lippert.
• A demo of some of Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate's cool features by Justin Marks. (It costs $11,899 :O)
• IntelliTrace, a way to step backwards through a program's execution history
• Architecture Explorer, a neat visualization of program flow and dependencies.

MSR lectures: Interns can sign up for a stream of invitations to Microsoft Research lunches with notable researchers. In the next two weeks, I'm going to attend "brown-bag" lunches with Dan Reed (the leader of the eXtreme Computing Group) and Leslie Lamport (the creator of LaTeX). Super cool! :)

What I'll be working on: Building a dynamically scalable, fault-tolerant distributed k-means algorithm on Windows Azure.

The environment: I'm the only high school intern in XCG, and they don't generally take college interns, so I'm surrounded by PhD interns. It's a great learning opportunity :)