By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research People all over the world use the Internet every day, to purchase goods or services, to search for information, to find diversions. But is the World Wide Web truly worldwide? It’s difficult to make the case. Estimates claim…
Ken Hinckley always thought that searching for information on his computer was like going on a fishing expedition. Every so often, he’d even catch whatever it was he wanted. Hinckley, a senior researcher in the Adaptive Systems and Interaction group at Microsoft Research Redmond, has…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research The breathtaking ascendance of Internet search over the past decade has tended to obscure the limitations of the underlying technology. So quickly has search been embraced by hundreds of millions worldwide that it is entirely natural for people…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research Who knows you better than anybody? Your friends and family, of course. Who is best-positioned to understand your wants and needs? Your closest acquaintances, naturally. Doesn’t it make sense, therefore, to take the opinions of your dearest companions…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research It’s fair to assume that anyone who knows anything about the Web—anyone reading these words—is comfortably familiar with text search. It has become perhaps the pre-eminent way to extract information from the Internet, and it is extremely simple…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research Battling search spam. Streamlining Web-page monitoring. Helping protect online privacy. Enabling the illiterate to use computers. These are just a few of the ways Microsoft Research is demonstrating its commitment to making the Internet a more secure, easily…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research The research and academic community is rife with conferences. Just about any subject or discipline you can name has its own annual gathering, where the learned and the innovative come together to discuss their work, review the work…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research Many people are accustomed to donning headphones to enjoy music at a desired volume without inflicting their tunes on others nearby. But there are tradeoffs inherent in the headphones experience. For one, you’re generally physically tethered to the…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research Xuedong Huang has a mantra: Act fast, ponder less, and learn. Those precepts are not common in research circles, where careful deliberation is generally a necessary precondition to productive work, but there’s little doubt that they have served…
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…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research Kids of all ages love cartoons. They appeal because of their vivid colors, their fluid motion, their whimsical world view, their idealized parallel universe. In a cartoon, a coyote that falls off a cliff and gets flattened by…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research Have you seen the one about …? From time immemorial, mankind has maximized its ability to share information orally. Whether it is passing along a recounting of a movie, recapping last night’s sporting event, or simply telling a…
