Birmingham University in the United Kingdom is in the green and leafy suburb of Edgbaston—and opposite King Edward’s School, which I attended for seven years as a boy. I was back in Birmingham recently to give the keynote address at the sixth annual Computing at…
Posted by Rob Knies Microsoft researchers will present a broad spectrum of new research at SIGGRAPH 2014, the 41st International Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, which starts today in Vancouver, British Columbia. Sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery, SIGGRAPH is…
Posted by Rob Knies Now, here’s an interesting one: The latest video in Channel 9’s Microsoft Research Luminaries series features John Platt (@johnplattml) and explores his work in the resurgent research area of artificial intelligence (AI), its close cousin, machine learning, and the impact of…
Call it the invasion of the computer literati: on the last day of June, 78 PhD students converged on Cambridge, England, to begin five days of networking and knowledge exchanges during the Microsoft Research Cambridge 2014 PhD Summer School, our ninth edition of this annual…
Posted by Rob Knies People need food, regularly and often. That’s such an obvious truth that’s it’s easy to lose sight of it—easy, that is, until calamity strikes and the food supply is endangered, as it could be in the wake of ongoing changes to…
It’s no easy question to answer, but prudence demands that we try. Thus, Microsoft and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) have teamed up to tackle “food resilience,” one of several themes that make up the White House’s Climate Data Initiative. “Through his Climate…
The fifteenth annual Microsoft Faculty Summit is over, but you can still experience much of it on demand. I was really inspired and energized by the keynotes, session topics, and discussions—especially meeting, talking to, and hearing from researchers in other areas who I don’t normally…
Posted by Jennifer Warnick Station Q, headquarters of potentially world-changing quantum-computing research, is located just past where the Pacific Ocean meets the sand, up through a grove of palm trees and across a bike path. (Do mind the shirtless college student zipping past on a…
Posted by Rob Knies Perhaps you’ve heard about Project Adam over the last few days. That work, which shows that large-scale, commodity distributed systems are able to train extra-large deep neural networks efficiently, has received its share of attention in the tech media this week…
When we released the Lab of Things a year ago, we knew that it would benefit researchers experimenting with connected devices in various domains. It has been very gratifying to see how the Lab of Things has helped to accelerate research on helping people with…
Posted by Rob Knies Software development is not for the faint-hearted. Programmers often work long hours, typing code while staring at computer monitors. Computer software can include millions of lines of code, so given the nature and the volume of the work involved, mistakes are…
We’re here at the Microsoft Conference Center in Redmond, Washington, where the first day of the 2014 Microsoft Research Faculty Summit is underway. The event kicked off with an opening keynote from Harry Shum, executive vice president of Microsoft’s Development and Research group, during which…
