Microsoft is dedicated to pushing the boundaries in digital advertising through continuous innovation in algorithms, systems, and services. To that end, in January 2006, Microsoft adCenter Labs was established as a one-of-a-kind advertising research organization.

Our mission is to serve current and future customer needs through innovative digital advertising technologies, using state-of-the-art-research, breakthrough design, rapid prototyping, and large-scale system integration. Our goal is to help advertisers deliver more relevant and interesting ads, while demonstrating Microsoft's expertise, innovation, and dedication to improving and changing the online advertising industry.

Microsoft adCenter Labs' primary research facility is located in Redmond, Washington, with approximately 40 researchers and analysts. As a truly global research institution, we have an additional 45 researchers and staff members located in China, Israel, U.K., and New York City. Together with other affiliated researchers and our supporting engineering teams located around the globe, adCenter Labs has over 300 members.

Our research spans many areas, including machine learning, data and text mining, computer vision, auction theory, social network analysis, distributed computing, devices, platforms, and more. The algorithms designed by our team operate in the engines of Microsoft adCenter products such as Paid Search, Content Ads, and Behavioral Targeting. Furthermore, the adCenter labs team is currently working on an estimated 60 ad-related products in the area of keyword and content technologies, ad selection and relevance, audience intelligence, social networking, and video and interactive media. Some of these technologies are demonstrated on our Web site, which is widely regarded as an inventive and innovative research tool for digital advertising.

We work very closely with Microsoft's other research and development labs to take advantage of our intellectual power and expertise in many advanced research areas. In addition, we continue to develop creative partnership programs through which we enjoy a synergistic relationship with our customers. Customers participating in such programs have exclusive access to some of our newest advertising technologies, and are provided a unique opportunity to influence adCenter labs technologies before products are released to the market. In return, adCenter Labs researchers amass valuable insights that help us focus our research and development on areas that best serve our customers.

Furthermore, researchers at adCenter Labs actively participate and contribute to academic research communities, attending numerous conferences including SIGKDD, WWW, ICDM, SES, AdTech, and SIGIR. Many of our research results and prototypes were presented at these conferences. Microsoft adCenter Labs is the Platinum Sponsor for KDD 2008, KDD 2007, and KDD 2006 (ACM SIG conferences on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining), and is the organizer of the International Workshop on Data Mining and Audience Intelligence for Advertising 2008 (ADKDD 2008).