As do other recreational pilots, Ashish Kapoor learned during flight training that he shouldn’t count on the accuracy of wind forecasts. The best available forecasts in the United States—from the federal government’s Winds Aloft program—have been based largely on data from instrumented weather balloons released…
Last June, U.S. President Barack Obama announced a Climate Action Plan to help predict and address the impacts of climate change. To further this important effort, Microsoft Research is pleased to launch a special Climate Data award program, which offers scientists and decision-makers 12 months…
“Makes HDTV look low-res.” “Wow, how did they make this?” “Hyper-detailed and actually looks 3-D.” These are just some of the words reviewers have used to describe the new Photosynth. A technical preview, launched December 10, enables photography enthusiasts to create even more realistic 3-D…
https://youtu.be/Pwtpseb9fOM Starting in the tenth century, during the Medieval Warm Period, Greenland was a fraction of a degree warmer than today. Norse settlers raised livestock and cultivated small farms. Later, in the fifteenth century, a colder climate and conflicts with the Inuit caused them to…
As I listened to U.S. President Barack Obama’s second inaugural address in January, I was struck by the emphasis he placed on addressing global climate change and the need for clean energy. “The path toward sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult,” the…
Antibiotics, antivirals, NSAIDs—the list of modern “wonder drugs” goes on and on. And yet many diseases remain resistant to drug therapy, and in other instances, the side effects of drug treatment are as bad as or worse than the disorder. Why, the public wonders, aren’t…
When wildfires strike, all eyes turn to the clouds, hoping for a downpour that will quench the flames. Now, wildfire prevention teams on the Greek island of Lesvos are looking to a different kind of cloud for help, thanks to the VENUS-C Fire application and…
Think about supercomputers of the recent past. Just 15 years ago, supercomputers were rare and exotic machines. Government laboratories in the United States and Japan spent hundreds of millions of dollars on custom computing rigs and specialized facilities to house them, in a bid to…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research In an era of rising temperatures, shrinking ice caps, and widespread drought, the world’s attention is focused on environmental concerns. It seems like every business, every organization, every government has plans to “go green,” and information-technology firms are no…
By Douglas Gantenbein, Senior Writer, Microsoft News Center These days, nearly everyone stores things in the “cloud”—business-critical documents, personal photos, e-mail accounts … everything. Microsoft introduced Windows Azure Storage in 2008. Since then, that cloud offering has gained widespread use, not only within Microsoft, but…
By Janie Chang, Writer, Microsoft Research Not long ago, Internet content was mostly text-based, with search tools supporting the need to index text efficiently and browsers providing the ability to search within a document for every instance of a keyword or phrase. Now, multimedia content…
By Douglas Gantenbein, Senior Writer, Microsoft News Center Wikipedia has become one of the world’s largest and perhaps most powerful information repositories. But it is heavily English-centric. Making Wikipedia more multilingual inspired a Microsoft Research India team to develop a tool called WikiBhasha, which was…
