Microsoft Research and Zombie-Based Learning @ SXSWedu I can’t believe how much has happened in just one year. This time last year, we had just released the beta version of ChronoZoom, and the content and development community had created two mini-releases on their own. Key…
Tweet Posted by Rob Knies It’s mid-February, and the nominations for the 86th Academy Awards have been public for a month. Fans are scrambling to watch all the nominated films they can find. Film buffs debate the talents of Blanchett and Bullock until closing time.…
We hear a lot these days about “data science,” but what is it, exactly? Data collection, data management, data wrangling, big data, broad data—these are all pieces of the data-science puzzle. One view is that data science is all about telling stories—with data. However, the…
Tweet Posted by Rob Knies Some people, it seems, are simply born to be computer-science researchers.Take Youssef Hamadi, for example. Earlier this week, he was asked a question about challenges he had encountered during a research project. His response began by sharing this revealing nugget:“As…
As many of you know—especially if you’ve been reading my blog posts—the participation of women in computer science continues to decline. Last year, women accounted for only 14 percent of computer science college graduates in the United States, according to the Computing Research Association. That’s…
Posted by Rob Knies It’s a mouthful. The citation for the A.M. Turing Award presented to Butler Lampson 22 years ago reads as follows: For contributions to the development of distributed, personal computing environments and the technology for their implementation: workstations, networks, operating systems, programming…
Posted by Rob Knies  Each year, SIGCHI, the international society for professionals, academics, and students interested in human technology and human-computer interaction (HCI), announces a short list of individuals who have been elected to the CHI Academy. You might wonder: How are the recipients notified?…
As regular readers of this blog know, the Windows Azure for Research program recurrently solicits proposals on the use of Windows Azure, Microsoft’s cloud-computing platform, in scholarly research. Winning projects receive a one-year allocation of Windows Azure storage and compute resources. We review these proposals…
Tweet Posted by Rob Knies “3-D printing’s been around for years and years and years. That was called milling machines and, later on, stereolithography, but the cost has changed by orders of magnitude, which makes it possible—just as lower cost made personal computers become accessible.…
In my previous blogs, I talked about the Lab of Things (LoT), which is a flexible platform for conducting experimental research using connected devices in homes and beyond. Since LoT’s beta release in July 2013, we have made a lot of progress on two fronts.…
Last September, as part of our global Windows Azure for Research program, we announced our cloud training classes that we designed to show academics how Windows Azure can accelerate their research. Now that we’re almost a month into the new year, we would like to…
The past decade has witnessed an incredible boom in Chinese academic research—a boom fueled in large measure by talented young researchers. Over the past three years, I’ve had the privilege of supporting the Joint PhD Program, in which Microsoft Research Asia collaborates with leading Chinese…
