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 By any standard, Kinect for Xbox 360 has proved to be a technological sensation. Kinect, the controller-free interface that enables users to interact with the Xbox 360 with the wave of your hand or the sound of your…
By Janie Chang, Writer, Microsoft Research During Interspeech 2011, the 12th annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association being held in Florence, Italy, from Aug. 28 to 31, researchers from Microsoft Research will present work that dramatically improves the potential of real-time, speaker-independent, automatic speech…
By Janie Chang, Writer, Microsoft Research Each summer, Microsoft Research facilities from around the world welcome a fresh crop of interns. Microsoft Research considers the intern program a vital part of its interactions with the academic world, with some facilities increasing their head count by…
By Douglas Gantenbein, Senior Writer, Microsoft News Center The human face is a complicated thing—powered by 52 muscles; contoured by the nose, eyebrows, and other features; and capable of an almost infinite range of expressions, from joy to anger to sorrow to puzzlement. Perhaps that…
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 Janie Chang, Writer, Microsoft Research The Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2011), being held May 7-12 in Vancouver, British Columbia, provides a showcase of the latest advances in human-computer interaction (HCI). “The ongoing challenge,” says Desney S.…
By Rob Knies, Senior Editor, Microsoft Research It always helps to be prepared. Just ask Ivan Tashev. A principal software architect in the Speech group at Microsoft Research Redmond, Tashev played an integral role in developing the audio technology that enabled Kinect for Xbox 360…
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…
By Janie Chang, Writer, Microsoft Research Hallway conversations at UIST 2010 can sound like planning discussions for science-fiction-movie special effects, buzzing with terms such as “wearable computing,” “augmented reality,” and “smart rooms.” UIST, the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM’s) Symposium on User Interface Software and…
By Gary Alt, Writer, Microsoft Imagine mining the web to learn a language. No, not the jargon of webspeak, where IMHO means “in my humble opinion” or F2F is “face to face,” but real, spoken languages, such as Spanish, Hindi, or Japanese. That’s the notion…
By Janie Chang, Writer, Microsoft Research When the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM’s) Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR) holds a conference, it must be difficult for participants to decide which sessions to attend, because creating easy, effective search experiences these days involves challenges…
