As astute readers of this blog will recall, back in April we reported on the progress of the non-commercial Kinect for Windows Software Development Kit (SDK), offering tantalizing descriptions of its capabilities and inviting you to follow its progress on a dedicated website. Well, I’m…
The Women in Computing workshop took place at the recent 2011 Latin American Faculty Summit. Amidst Faculty Summit topics such as open data, the role of basic research, and cluster and cloud computing, the Women in Computing workshop explored the underrepresentation of women in technology…
As Chinese citizens celebrate Chinese Cultural Heritage Day, an annual event that takes place on the second Saturday in June, thousands will likely take a virtual walk along a river and a stroll through time, as they digitally explore one of their country’s most famous…
As some of you may recall, in December 2010, Microsoft Research and Bing jointly announced the Speller Challenge—the first ever Microsoft Research-Bing contest—which enticed participants to grapple with the issue of spelling correction of web search queries. Participants vied to build a speller that would…
In the now decades-long battle against HIV and AIDS, researchers have been stymied by the virus’s ability to evade attacks by our immune system. Normally, a cell that is infected by a pathogen displays on its surface characteristic pieces of the pathogen peptides, known as…
Earlier this year, Lee Dirks, Cheri Ekholm, and I attended Phil Bourne’s Beyond the PDF workshop at the University of California, San Diego. This workshop advanced the premise that scholarly communication can and should evolve from static and disparate data and knowledge representation, as embodied…
On April 19 and 20, the Microsoft Biology Initiative welcomed a small, focused group to the Microsoft Biology Foundation Workshop 2011, held at the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The workshop was a clinic in the use of the Microsoft Biology…
There is a saying dating back to the days of punched cards that "the software is in the holes"—and therefore invisible. At the recent Microsoft Research Software Summit in Paris, software was anything but invisible. It was all around us and manifest in the smartphones, gadgets,…
There are clouds on the horizon in Brussels, and European technology leaders couldn't be happier. On March 22, Microsoft inaugurated its new Cloud and Interoperability Center (CIC) in the Belgian capital—the heart of the European Union's (EU) institutions—underscoring Microsoft's and the EU's commitment to the…
I am pleased to announce the release of Microsoft Biology Foundation (MBF) 2.0 beta 1, an open-source Microsoft .NET library and application programming interface for bioinformatics research. This beta provides the first significant update since MBF 1.0. Notable improvements include: Increased capacity for de novo…
It may seem like an unlikely way to celebrate Earth Day, but this year, students at the University of Washington (UW) can mark the occasion with an exhilarating virtual trip away from our small blue planet, thanks to a unique collaboration between Microsoft Research Redmond and…
Time to celebrate: we are releasing the Hawaii OCR (optical character recognition) service this week! This OCR service is the next step in the evolution of Project Hawaii, the Microsoft Research project that is exploring how to take full advantage of the cloud to enhance…
