The long tail: sure, it’s a well-known concept in business and marketing, but there’s a very important “hidden” long tail in the sciences, too. So, what is this hidden long tail of science? It consists of the millions of datasets that are not stored in…
Posted by Rob Knies At 1 p.m. today, as it has almost every day for the past 179 years, the red time ball at the Royal Observatory Greenwich dropped from its Flamsteed House perch atop the prime meridian and adjacent to the River Thames. In…
As a researcher, I know the value of having the right tools for the job. The right tool makes working easier and more efficient—well, that’s the definition of a tool, isn’t it? So if you’re like me, always looking for programming tools that help bring…
The warm, sunny days of late August in Saint Petersburg, Russia’s “northern capital,” were made even brighter by the 2012 Microsoft Research Russian Summer School. An annual Microsoft Research event, the Russian Summer School is intended for doctoral and master’s students, as well as young…
I’ve done numerous public presentations of WorldWide Telescope (WWT) since 2008, but last month’s demos at the International Astronomical Union’s 2012 General Assembly (IAU2012) in Beijing were by far the most satisfying. Why? Because they were conducted primarily by student volunteers, eager to showcase the…
Well, not literally, but many of our interns did spend a lot of their own time probing the stratosphere over the last 12 weeks, building cloud-based apps for the Windows Phone. These interns were participants in Project Hawaii Intern XAPFest 2012, a contest for building…
This blog post is one I would never wish to write. As many of you know, in late August, my friend and colleague, Lee Dirks, and his wife Judy were killed in an automobile accident while vacationing in Peru. They leave behind two young daughters…
What do the California condor, the snow leopard, and the Wollemi pine have in common? They’ve all made the least desirable position on one of the nature’s most important lists: the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Now, what do Microsoft and the Zoological Society…
Posted by Rob Knies Imagine that you walk into a store, select an item to purchase, and approach the cash register. A wireless-proximity transmitter within your smartphone detects your presence, and a facial-recognition program determines your identity. The transaction is recorded onto video, and,…
Building verifiably reliable and trustworthy software is one of the ultimate objectives of software engineering. With this goal in mind, academics, scientists, and researchers gathered in Shanghai, China, for the second Verified Software Workshop and Summer School. The event, which took place from August 23 to…
Posted by John Davis, researcher at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley Storage in the data center has been dominated by expensive, aggregated systems that provide consistency but not fault tolerance, or by cheaper, partitioned designs that provide performance but not consistency. Leveraging the properties of…
Posted by Rob Knies Saikat Guha is nothing if not passionate about his research, and the goal of his current work can be stated in two words: better ads.“I am building experimental systems,” states Guha, a researcher in the Mobility, Networks, and Systems group…
