Through my work with academics in Brazil, I have witnessed an increasing awareness of the importance of computing in advancing scientific research in such areas as bioenergy, biodiversity, climate change, and plant physiology. In order to advance these fields, scientists need to deal with increasingly…
Posted by Rob Knies Congratulations to Georges Gonthier, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge, for winning the 2011 EADS Foundation Grand Prize in Computer Science.Gonthier, who spends a significant amount of his time collaborating with French researchers from INRIA at the Microsoft Research-INRIA Joint…
It began with a simple question: “Why can’t students earn digital rewards for being awesome?” A research group comprised of university faculty, staff, and students at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) decided to find out. The team delved into the everyday travails of college…
Jonathan Fay and I recently visited the California Academy of Sciences, the world-class natural history museum and research center located in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Our goals were to connect in person with Academy researchers and to help prepare the Academy’s Morrison Planetarium for…
Posted by Rob Knies If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’re already familiar with HoloDesk, research from the Sensors and Devices team at Microsoft Research Cambridge that my colleague Steve Clayton posted on the Next at Microsoft blog a few weeks ago. The…
The challenge of DNA sequencing is central to all genomics research, and while the technology has existed since the 1970s, today’s massively-parallel sequencing instruments are capable of producing gigabytes of raw genomic data quickly and increasingly cheaply. Reconstruction of a DNA sequence from this data…
From November 9 to 12, 2011, Portland, Oregon, the City of Roses, becomes the City of Hoppers, as technology-minded women from the across the United States flock to the Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) of Women in Computing, an annual conference that brings the research and…
On October 25, 2011, Microsoft Research Connections released an update to Zentity, a repository platform designed to manage research objects—such as journal articles, reports, datasets, projects, and people—as well as the relationships among them. Zentity supports arbitrary data models, and provides semantically rich functionality that…
Posted by Rob Knies Can you remember details about what you were doing 10 years ago? Ken Hinckley certainly can.In 2001, he and co-authors Jeff Pierce, Mike Sinclair, and Eric Horvitz, had a paper called Sensing Techniques for Mobile Interaction accepted for the 13th annual…
Today (November 4) is the first anniversary of the launch of Kinect for Xbox 360 in the United States, with subsequent availability around the world. It has been a smashing success since its debut, thanks in part to contributions from Microsoft Research to its audio,…
When Microsoft Research unveiled the Kinect for Windows Software Development Kit (SDK) beta in mid-June, we expected it would be popular with academic and enthusiast developer communities. But even with our high expectations for the SDK, we didn’t anticipate the level of creativity that was…
Posted by Rob Knies Over the last few months, I’ve published a series of feature stories to outline the contributions Microsoft Research has made to the groundbreaking Kinect for Xbox 360 product, which Guinness World Records has dubbed the fastest-selling consumer electronic device ever. This…
