One of Microsoft UK's most prominent researchers has moved to the Advanced Research + Invention Agency (AIRA), a government initiative that hopes to mimic the US' DARPA.

Antony Rowstron has been named the first chief technology officer at AIRA, which was initially launched in 2023.

Rowstron spent some 26 years at Microsoft, including as deputy director of the company's Cambridge research effort.

"I was a distinguished engineer at Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK, leading a team looking at future technologies for the cloud," Rowstron said in a LinkedIn post.

"Many of the projects I ran in the team were focused on creating and exploring new optical-based technologies for the cloud across storage, networking, and compute. Examples of the sort of projects the lab did are Project Silica, which was looking at how to store data in Fused Silica (basically glass) as a replacement for tape for long-term archival storage."

Last year, DCD profiled Silica, with the feature itself stored on the medium as the first publication with a 10,000-year storage plan.

Rowstron continued: "As a systems researcher, I have spent most of my career working at the intersection of storage, networking, and distributed systems. More recently, I have been learning a lot about optical systems and robotics."

The Cambridge team developed a crab-like robot for Silica, and is also part of the 'zero touch' effort at Microsoft to integrate robotics into the data center. Rowstron and others detailed their latest research in November.

ARIA, which in 2024 had a research budget of £800m ($1.08bn), is working on a number of research efforts, some of which are related to digital infrastructure.

Last year, the agency put out a call for researchers to help scale AI at a thousandth of current costs, as well as develop new compute benchmarks. Another project aims to develop nature-based computing.

There are also several robotics efforts alongside carbon capture and geoengineering research projects.