Microsoft Research Blog

Research Blog

  1. Seventh Cambridge PhD Summer School: the Biggest and Busiest Yet 

    July 13, 2012

    Almost 90 PhD students convened for the seventh PhD Summer School The first week of July was an exciting one for us here at Microsoft Research Cambridge, as we hosted the seventh PhD Summer School. Each year, we invite scholars in the Microsoft Research PhD…

  2. Tune in to the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit 2012 

    July 11, 2012

      What are the big challenges and hot trends in computer science research? How are the academic community and Microsoft Research working collaboratively to use computing to solve some of the world’s most intractable problems? On July 16 and 17, 400 elite academic investigators will…

  3. Customized, Specialized Translation Now a Reality 

    July 11, 2012

    Posted by Rob Knies   I can’t read Japanese. I know it when I see it, but what I see is merely a succession of word symbols, indecipherable to my untrained eye. No matter, though, because these days, the Microsoft Translator service enables quick translations…

  4. Information at Your Programming Fingertips 

    July 9, 2012

    A growing trend in both the theory and practice of programming is the interaction with rich information spaces. This trend derives from the ever-increasing need to integrate programming with large, heterogeneous, connected, richly structured, streaming, evolving, or probabilistic information sources—be they databases, web services, or…

  5. Conference in Beijing Spotlights Programming Languages 

    June 28, 2012

    Performance, architecture, execution, bugs, and programs: these words are heard time and again in the context of a major computer science conference. So it was in Beijing this month at PLDI 2012, the conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation. Terminology and accompanying innovative ideas…

  6. Making GPS-Like Localization Work Indoors 

    June 25, 2012

    Posted by Rob Knies You’re in a hurry. You’ve rushed to the nearest shopping mall during your lunch hour, looking for one item, one item only. It’s a five-minute task, except for finding the store with the right item—and you’re not familiar with the location…

  7. Filtering Web Images Effectively 

    June 21, 2012

    Posted by Rob Knies   You’re looking for a photo of a flower. Not just any photo—it needs to be horizontal in shape. And not just any flower—it needs to be a purple flower.What do you do? You could perform a conventional image search on…

  8. The Cloud Rains More Services on Project Hawaii 

    June 19, 2012

    What do you think of when you hear "Hawaii"? Colorful shirts, hula dancers, mai tais on a sunny beach? Well, all those things are nice, but they can’t hold a candle to the goodies that are coming out of Microsoft Research’s Project Hawaii, which extends…

  9. New Forum Promotes Computer Science and Mathematics 

    June 18, 2012

    Each year, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) presents the A.M. Turing Award, widely considered the “Nobel Prize of computer science.” As ACM’s European chairman, I had the privilege of signing an agreement that will extend the influence of Turing Award recipients in the years…

  10. Tony Hoare on the Turing Centenary 

    June 15, 2012

    Posted by Tony Hoare, winner of the A.M. Turing Award in 1980 Can computers understand their own programs? From my earliest days as a student of philosophy and classics at Merton College, Oxford, I was attracted into computing by the prospect that it would shed…

  11. Deep-Neural-Network Speech Recognition Debuts 

    June 14, 2012

    Posted by Rob Knies Last August, my colleague Janie Chang wrote a feature story titled Speech Recognition Leaps Forward that was published on the Microsoft Research website. The article outlined how Dong Yu, of Microsoft Research Redmond, and Frank Seide, of Microsoft Research Asia, had…

  12. New Research Grants Aim at Combating Human Trafficking 

    June 13, 2012

    In December 2011, Dr. danah boyd and I were pleased to announce an RFP (request for proposal), funded by the Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit and Microsoft Research, for projects that investigate the role of technology in the human trafficking of minors in the United States.…