Posted by George Thomas Jr. In today’s high-productivity computing environments that process dizzying amounts of data each millisecond, a research project named for “a trillion events per day” may seem relatively ordinary. But when you understand that Trill, a new high-performance streaming analytics engine developed…
When it comes to research, the concept of “head-banging” most likely conjures images of researchers banging their heads against walls or dry-erase boards. But for Microsoft researcher Andrew Fitzgibbon, it’s about inspiration. “I was on a 10-hour flight recently,” he says with a grin. “I…
It seems that everybody today wants to employ machine learning in their research. And why not? Machine learning promises to transform our ability to understand, model, and predict the world around us. It is pushing boundaries in areas as diverse as image recognition, cardiac patient…
In recent months, we’ve heard a lot about deep neural networks and deep learning—take Project Adam, for example—and the sometimes eye-popping results they can have in addressing longstanding computing problems. The field of image recognition also is benefiting rapidly from the use of such networks,…
This week, Microsoft researcher Hrvoje Benko (@hrvojebenko) is in Hawaii, but not on one of the islands’ beautiful beaches. As conference chair for UIST 2014—the 27th Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology—Benko will be busy ensuring that the event,…
“Scottish independence: polls show it’s too close to call.” “Scotland’s vote likely to be a nail-biter.” “Scottish independence vote on a knife edge as polls put both Yes AND No ahead.” If there was any consensus in the days running up to the momentous Sept.…
“The way we design computers today,” Microsoft researcher Hong Tan says, “it would seem that people only use their eyes.” Sure, we tap on our device screens, slide our fingertips across the glass, and type on on-screen keyboards. Sometimes, we give voice commands and listen…
Can you tell the difference between the two breeds of corgis? If you’re like many, you probably are barely even aware that such dogs exist, let alone the fact that there are two—and only two—kinds of corgis. Add the detail that those two breeds are…
Posted by Rob Knies A couple of years ago, a few Microsoft researchers published a couple of interesting papers on storage efficiencies. Now, with breathtaking speed, the concepts in those papers have been embraced across the cloud-computing world. Technological change can occur at lightning speed.…
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…
Sometimes, a dream needs but a nudge to propel it toward reality. That is exactly what Eric Rudder and Peter Lee delivered to Microsoft’s Machine Translation team about a year ago. Rudder, then Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, and Lee, head of Microsoft Research,…
When violence related to Mexico’s drug war erupted in 2006, Andrés Monroy-Hernández kept in close touch with friends and relatives in the north of the country, where he is from and where much of the violence was concentrated. He soon learned that the local news…
