Happy New Year! Would anyone like to come to Microsoft Research Cambridge for an internship? For the first time, this year we have put together a list of all the open internship slotshttps://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/opportunity/internships-msr-cambrid..., with brief descriptions and closing dates. This is in part due to our efforts to reach more people, and attract a broader, more diverse range of applicants. There are lots of projects on that page, but I'd like to highlight one group in particular. I'm personally involved in a project with four intern slots, in which we are using insights from functional programming got improve the experience of using spreadsheets - the world's most widely used functional programming languages. This focus on end-user programming means that we need interns with wide interests and skills. More details are below (copy/pasted from the web page). The application deadline is 31 January 2018. (NB: other slots have other deadlines.) Thanks Simon Functional programming and spreadsheets Supervisors: Simon Peyton Joneshttps://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/simonpj/, Andy Gordonhttps://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/adg/, Claudio Russohttps://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/crusso/, Neil Toronto, Advait Sarkarhttps://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/advait/ Start Date: June/July 2018 Applications close January 31 2018 Reference #: MSRC226 We hope to hire four interns during 2018 with a focus on using insights from functional programming to improve the experience of using spreadsheets. The exact internship project will be chosen to fit the expertise of successful applicants, but we are interested in a broad range of areas including: * Improving the experience of authoring formulae in a spreadsheet * Compiling spreadsheets for faster execution * Using insights from type systems to catch programming errors sooner * Generalisation and program synthesis * Demonstrating radical improvements in the range of applications that can be tackled with spreadsheets. We are looking for three interns with programming-language expertise, and one with a strong background in HCI and user experience. You would be working with leaders in both functional programming (Andy Gordon, Simon Peyton Jones) and user experience (Advait Sarkar, Kenton O'Hara). There is a genuine possibility that your work could have real-world impact. By way of general background, you may want to read Simon Peyton Jones et al's papers "A user-centred approach to functions in Excelhttps://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=944721" and "Champagne Prototyping: A Research Technique for Early Evaluation of Complex End-User Programming Systemshttp://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1372297/#full-text-section".