Microsoft Research does have multiple excellent researchers working on probabilistic programming. Infer.NET in particular is a highly advanced piece of technology for models in which you would use message passing algorithms to perform inference:
Just to clear up further confusion: Frank was indeed at Oxford previously – he moved to UBC this Spring. The tutorial actually took place at NIPS 2015 in Montreal.
Last I saw him (last year) he was still a prof at Oxford, pushing for a startup called « invrea » (that does try to use PP [1]). I think UBC was before that.
http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~fwood/index.html
Microsoft Research does have multiple excellent researchers working on probabilistic programming. Infer.NET in particular is a highly advanced piece of technology for models in which you would use message passing algorithms to perform inference:
http://infernet.azurewebsites.net