Tweet Posted by Rob Knies Even in this awesome, hyperbolic age, the words “extraordinary achievement” don’t get tossed around all that much. And when they come from the IEEE, the world’s largest professional association for the advancement of technology, they retain the distinction of…
The world is becoming more urban. The movement of populations from rural to city life is nothing new in the developed countries of Europe and North America, but it has greatly accelerated in the rapidly developing countries of Asia. In China, for example, the percentage…
Tweet Posted by Steve Wiens Microsoft researcher David Rothschild is legendary for his ability to predict the future using a unique, rigorous approach to data analysis. He correctly called the results of the 2012 U.S. presidential election in every state but one. He nailed 19 of…
A diagnosis of cancer can be particularly foreboding for any patient. However, new treatments become possible as we learn more about the disease, and the application of research techniques more commonly found in the social sciences are now providing new insights.Although medical investigators have been…
Posted by Rob Knies Over the past several years, Microsoft Research Cambridge has established its bona fides as a serious player in the area of computational ecology, so it’s no great surprise that work from that lab caught the attention of Prince William during a…
Preserving biodiversity, understanding animals’ social interactions, and predicting droughts: these are all key research areas for ecologists and environmental scientists. And like so many areas of research these days, they are all data intensive and thus potential beneficiaries of cloud computing. With that in mind,…
Cloud computing offers tremendous advantages in terms of scale and compute power—not to mention costs—to those grappling with today’s data-intensive research. The Windows Azure for Research program is designed to help scientists reap these cloud-computing benefits in their research work. As part of the program,…
Tweet Posted by Rob Knies Socl lets you create, collect and share stuff you love. From rich visual collages to short animated media and memes, express yourself through posts that take seconds to create, collect, and share on Socl, as well as on Facebook, Pinterest,…
It’s time to revise the traditional “three Rs” of education in the United States. In addition to “reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic,” we need to add computer science. Yeah, I know it doesn’t even contain an “r,” but computer science is just as important as those…
Tweet Posted by Athima Chansanchai Four days a week, Frank Martinez teaches students at south Seattle’s Rainier Beach High School how to turn coding into real-world projects. On Thursdays, he educates people vulnerable to homelessness on the fundamentals of computer science. But none of this…
Every December I get together with 20,000 like-minded researchers in San Francisco to discuss how to preserve the habitat of Homo sapiens. I concede it’s a self-serving goal, but I’m okay with standing to benefit. Our conversation invariably burrows into subtopics of how the Earth…
I feel especially fortunate to be here in Melbourne, Australia, to participate in the launch of the Microsoft Research Centre for Social Natural User Interfaces. This is a joint research center between the University of Melbourne and Microsoft Research, in partnership with the state government…
