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…
The 28th General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) opened on August 20, 2012, at the China National Convention Center in Beijing, with WorldWide Telescope (WWT) prominently featured at the Microsoft Research exhibition. Astronomy is one of the oldest and most inspirational areas of…
Posted by Rob Knies Remember that time, a decade or so ago, when spam was the scourge of the Internet, when the sheer volume of junk email threatened to engulf legitimate correspondence and short-circuit the promise of the digital revolution?Those concerns are a bit…
Posted by Rob Knies A recent study by the Pew Research Center indicates that 80 percent of adults in the United States have searched for medical information online. Such a figure underscores the fundamental importance that humans place on their health and wellbeing—and their reliance…
Posted by Rob Knies First, there was Kinect. You’ve probably heard of that one. Next, it was KinectFusion, which uses live data from Kinect for Windows to create high-quality, 3-D models of a room and its contents. KinectFusion made a splash in 2011 during the…
Posted by Rob Knies On Nov. 26, 2011, the Mars rover Curiosity was launched from Cape Canaveral, a trip that will have taken more than eight months before Curiosity lands on the surface of the Red Planet.With excitement peaking in the days before the…
Korea’s Ministry of Knowledge Economy (MKE) recently announced that Microsoft Research Asia will once again be a key partner in the Information Technology Software Creative Research Program, which provides support to world-class researchers in that country. MKE plans to provide matching funds in the amount…
