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 The web, search, and social networking are changing the way students collaborate. To bring these elements together, Microsoft Research’s FUSE Labs is launching a site designed to give students the ability to network with peers, share useful…
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 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…
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 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 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 What’s the most powerful, untapped information repository on the Web today? If you said Wikipedia, please go stand in the corner. Actually, it’s people, the billion or so of you who are tapping your keyboards and clicking your…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research Considering the ubiquitous use of search engines to guide users through the Internet, one might be excused for thinking that search functionality has been perfected and there is nothing yet to refine. Far from it. Consider a few…
