Example Internships: Microsoft

Here are some example recent internships, and a couple of future possibilities. Not all would necessarily be relevant to our student population. This list, however, will give you a feel for the types of internships Microsoft offers. (Thanks to Mike Calcagno for providing this information.)

Recent

• MT system: Student designed end-to-end statistical MT system for English to German, and included Greek in the mix to test the technology.

• How may I help you system: Student developed an authoring tool for developing "How may I help you?" systems.

• MT toolkit: Student started off by comparing different semi-supervised classifier systems. Adapted the best of each into a toolkit for cross-lingual named entity recognition, replicating results from this community.

Possibles

• Query log analysis, query log clustering: design system to deal with the large volume of queries, and cluster these by topic, language, etc.

• Help doc. classification: learn language models from help documents and classify them by language (assumption: route to correct team)

Hints/advice

• Topic/tasks: It's up to the manager for any particular group to decide what projects a student might work on. However, students are generally asked what they would like to do, and management trys to tailor tasks to that student.

• IP issues: Generally try to avoid them. More sensitive issues in MSN Search than the NLP group.

• Budget: Internships are very limited, and dependent on budgetary issues. Last year, 9 slots were available (in NLP).

• Employment: About 50 percent of summer interns find their way into full-time Microsoft employment.

-- WilliamLewis - 07 Nov 2005