Visiting Eric Horvitz at Microsoft Research headquarters in Redmond, Wash., is a full-service experience. At the building’s first-floor bank of elevators, situated on a busy corridor, a “smart elevator” opens its doors, sensing that you need a ride. When you arrive on the third floor,…
Gaurav Sharma appeared relaxed but focused in his purple hoodie on January 16, 2014. Less than 20 seconds later, Sharma, a 15-year-old from Lakeside High School in Seattle, found himself the owner of a Guinness World Record® for fastest text message using a touch-screen mobile…
Springtime on the sun-drenched Amalfi Coast. A perfect little café perched high above the sea, the scent of jasmine and lemon blossoms wafting past. You open the menu, hungry for lunch. Oh, wait—you don’t know any Italian. Now what? Not to worry: Just whip out…
A robot comes up from the subway. How does it know where it is? To most people, this sounds like the opening line of a joke, but for Jamie Shotton, senior researcher in the Computer Vision Group at Microsoft Research Cambridge, the “lost robot” is…
From April 22 to 24, Microsoft Research will host the Machine Learning Summit 2013 at Microsoft’s Le Campus in Issy-les-Moulineaux, just outside of Paris. The event gathers thought leaders and researchers who will discuss key challenges posed by a new era of machine learning and…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research When Jeannette Wing joined Microsoft Research in January 2013 as a Microsoft vice president and head of Microsoft Research International, in charge of Microsoft Research’s non-U.S. labs, she brought with her a sterling set of credentials. She had…
By Douglas Gantenbein, Senior Writer, Microsoft News Center In December 2009, Sumit Gulwani, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research Redmond, was flying home from a seminar after presenting his work devising ways to synthesize complex pieces of code. Sitting next to him was a businesswoman.…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research It’s a presidential election year in the United States, and that, we’ve learned, means that pollsters are on the prowl. The electorate for the forthcoming balloting will be sampled, questioned, categorized, sliced, and diced a zillion different ways…
By Janie Chang, Writer, Microsoft Research Two conferences, same region, consecutive weeks—sounds like a perfect opportunity for a social. That’s certainly what sprang to mind for Meredith Ringel Morris, researcher in the Natural Interaction Research Group at Microsoft Research Redmond when she realized that the…
By Douglas Gantenbein, Senior Writer, Microsoft News Center To use a Kinect for Xbox 360 gaming device is to see something akin to magic. Different people move in and out of its view, and Kinect recognizes the change in a player and responds accordingly. It…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research You’ve got photos—lots and lots of photos. Everybody does these days, thanks to the digital-photography revolution. Hundreds, thousands, a veritable treasure trove of image-based memories. Sometimes, though, you don’t need thousands of photos. Sometimes, you just need that…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research Over the course of 15 years, Microsoft Research has gone from being a twinkle in the eyes of Bill Gates and his former chief technology officer, Nathan Myhrvold, to a model of industrial-research excellence. As the organization celebrates…
