Posted by Rob Knies The term “natural user interfaces” has been in vogue in recent months, generally invoked to describe different ways that humans can interact with computing devices beyond the longtime pairing of keyboard and mouse.Surface computing is one example with its roots…
Posted by Rob Knies Fifty years ago, the Century 21 Exposition—the Seattle World’s Fair—provided visitors with a vision of the future. With its gleaming Monorail and its towering Space Needle, the fair trumpeted the advances made possible by science and space travel, thereby extending…
Posted by Rob Knies Distributed computing is critical for most modern, Internet-scale services, enabling high availability and the ability to scale to massive, worldwide audiences. The web as we now know it is unimaginable without advances achieved in distributed computing.It is challenging, though, to…
For the past three days I’ve been at the NCWIT (National Center for Women & Information Technology) 2012 Summit on Women and IT, and what a three days it’s been! The annual NCWIT Summit is a celebration of girls and women in technology, but above…
Posted by Rob Knies This spring, London’s Royal Court Theatre issued a most peculiar press release, announcing the forthcoming production of Ten Billion: An Exploration of the Future of Life on Earth, to debut July 12.“Scientist Stephen Emmott and director Katie Mitchell deliver a new…
The weather is warm and balmy along Mexico’s renowned Riviera Maya, the venue for the 2012 Microsoft Research Latin American Faculty Summit. I’m sure my friends would tell me to get outside, walk along the beach, and think peaceful thoughts. Great suggestions, but I find…
If you visit the University of Washington (UW), you’ll likely see students glued to their smartphones. That’s not surprising—smartphones seem to be everywhere now, and for students, these “computers in your pocket” have become constant digital companions. But on May 4–5, some UW students were…
Posted by Rob Knies Making efficient use of resources and tools is a hallmark of many computer-research projects, and that target is exemplified in a pair of videos that illuminate work coming from Microsoft Research India.The videos, recently made publicly accessible, represent two distinct research…
Posted by Rob Knies Aleksander Madry and David Steurer are both postdoctoral researchers at Microsoft Research New England focused on theoretical computer science. Each of them is intrigued by the challenges posed by graphs, and each has devised new algorithms to address those challenges.And,…
Posted by Rob Knies Life consists, in large part, of seeking answers to the questions that perplex us, and Neeraj Kayal is no exception. But for Kayal, a researcher at Microsoft Research India, those questions can take a distinctly singular direction.Such as: What is…
Posted by Rob Knies Recently, I wrote about Microsoft Research contributions to the new Translator App for Windows Phone, available for free download on Windows Phone Marketplace.Some of them, anyway.As it turns out, the story goes a bit deeper than the earlier post was…
Posted by Frank McSherry, senior researcher at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley Big data is pretty popular at the moment. Systems such as MapReduce, Hadoop, Dryad, and DryadLINQ have made writing and executing ad hoc big-data analyses easy. Still, there are several programming patterns such systems…
