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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
It’s been a busy month for the ChronoZoom team, as we’ve zoomed (literally) around the world promoting this amazing tool. For those of you who are coming in late, here’s a little background: ChronoZoom is an open-source community project dedicated to visualizing the history of…
