Summer 2007 The RIPS-Beijing program was a fantastic experience. The basic setup was UCLA sent 10 American students to Beijing to work at Microsoft Research Asia for 2 months with 10 Chinese students. We were split up into 5 teams of 4, each team consisting of 2 American and 2 Chinese students. Each team was assigned a different research problem by industrial mentors who were Microsoft employees. My team was assigned a machine learning problem, more specifically we wanted to use machine learning techniques to identify relations in some written work. For example if a news paper article mentions that Bill Gates works at Microsoft, we would want to be able to extract the relation of “works at” between Bill Gates and Microsoft. This is a very important problem in information retrieval. Other than the work, the atmosphere at the Microsoft campus was great. The facilities were nice, and there were lounges on each floor where one could play pool, foosball, ping pong, or use one of the massage chairs. Most of the American students did not know any Chinese, but luckily we all became close friends with the Chinese students, and they were able to help us get around and explore the city. My personal favorite part of the program was the cultural interaction, with both the Chinese students and the city. China is obviously very different from the US, and during these two months I was able to experience many new things. I would strongly recommend this program to anyone who wants to research exciting math and computer science problems in a new environment. Justin Gilmer, Class of 2008