• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, December 7, 2015

Microsoft may be "all in" for Bing Ads and search advertising under the guidance of Search Advertising Corporate VP Rik van der Kooi, but the company only alludes to advancements in the 16 predictions for 2016 made by its research engineers.

Many of the technology advancements that some of the more than 1,000 scientists and engineers predict for 2016 and beyond -- although not cited in direct references -- will benefit search both in terms of organic listings and paid-search advertising. After all, Microsoft integrated Bing technology into the Windows 10 operating system.

The research team's predictions are far-reaching, from new processor tech to Big Data. Some tech predictions already have begun to take shape in Microsoft's hardware -- Surface Pro 4, and the debut of the company's first laptop/tablet, Surface Book.

Technology advancements will move advertising, video and broadcast TV into a new era in 2016. "The fusion of atoms and bits, as envisioned with HoloLens, will become commonplace so that people can have digitally augmented experiences in education, shopping, traveling and interactions with people and things," predicts Hsiao-Wuen Hon, corporate VP at Microsoft Research Asia, and Microsoft's Asia-Pacific R&D Group.

Development editions of HoloLens, which Microsoft describes as the first untethered holographic computer, will become available early in 2016. Advertising agencies like Havas Digital already have singed up for a kit. The technology is "super sick," Rob Griffin, EVP of media futures and innovation at Havas Media Group told Search Marketing Daily in November. He emphasized that augmented reality and virtual reality will become the new technology for advertising.

Chris Bishop, managing director in Cambridge, U.K., predicts next year that the industry will see the emergence of new silicon architectures to support intensive workloads of machine learning, offering major performance beyond GPUs.

Doug Burger, director of hardware, devices and experience at Microsoft Research NExT, forecasts faster computing sequences in the cloud that will enable major gains in big data workloads, bioinformatics, and high-performance computing.

Deep learning breakthroughs will dominate 2016. Li Deng, partner research manager at Microsoft Research NExT, predicts advancements in natural language processing based on deep learning methods and machine translation performance.

"Deep learning is making inroads into business applications including predictive analytics, which will excite new interest in deep learning technology beyond its commonly accepted successes in speech, image and natural language processing," Deng writes.