By Janie Chang, Writer, Microsoft Research Since 2003, Microsoft Research’s Faculty Summit Design Expo program has promoted interdisciplinary collaboration between the design and computer-science academic communities, while fostering closer ties between Microsoft and design schools. Each year, Microsoft Research invites some of the top interaction-design…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research How can you achieve the impossible? Easy—as long as you have the right people and the right tools. The Terapixel project from Microsoft Research Redmond is proof positive. The effort—to create the largest, seamless spherical image ever made…
By Janie Chang, Writer, Microsoft Research One glance at the list of topics featured in the CHI 2010 Technical Program is all it takes to understand the diversity of research disciplines that contribute to the field of human-computer interaction (HCI). CHI 2010, the Association for…
By Janie Chang, Writer, Microsoft Research In disaster relief, every hour makes a difference, and communication is essential. When aid efforts began after the recent Haiti earthquake, a request came to the Machine Translation team within Microsoft Research’s Natural Language Processing (NLP) group from Microsoft…
By Janie Chang, Writer, Microsoft Research Emre Kıcıman was online browsing the business news when he noticed a box around the name of a startup company in an article about its acquisition by an industry giant. When he moved his cursor over the box, a…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research You’re steering with your left hand while your right is punching car-stereo buttons in eager search of that amazing new Lady Gaga song. Your mobile phone rings, and as you adjust your headset—hands-free, naturally—the driver in front of…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research In September, pioneering computer-science researcher Gordon Bell and his Microsoft Research colleague Jim Gemmell published Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything, a book that summarizes nearly a decade of an effort to record digitally everything…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research These days, more than ever, it’s important for computing to be energy-efficient. Particularly in data centers, energy requirements represent a significant portion of operational costs, and power and cooling needs help dictate where data centers can be located,…
By Janie Chang, Writer, Microsoft Research With its New Orleans location and a schedule that includes team competitions, an animation festival, musical performances, and a gallery of interactive art, the 36th annual International Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Technologies (SIGGRAPH 2009) might…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research Organizing threaded discussions. Using reasoning to rank answers on community sites. Predicting click-through rates for news queries. Assessing how crawl policies affect the effectiveness of Web search. Taking context into consideration when classifying queries and predicting user interests.…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research George Robertson is taking this meeting seriously. He focuses intently on other participants in the room, making eye contact, noting posture and visual cues, interjecting comments when appropriate. He studies diagrams scrawled onto a whiteboard, and, on occasion,…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research Leonardo da Vinci and Filippo Brunelleschi resound through history as two of the guiding lights of the Italian Renaissance. Leonardo, of course, gifted us with the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, but he also excelled at mathematics,…
