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…
What could be better than Paris on a spring day? How about Paris on a spring day at the inaugural Software Summit sponsored by Microsoft Research? Yes, I'm here at the Microsoft Le Campus in Issy-les-Moulineaux, just southwest of central Paris, along with more than…
Back in February at TechForum, Craig Mundie, Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer, and Don Mattrick, president of Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Business (IEB), announced that Microsoft Research and IEB would release a non-commercial Kinect for Windows software development kit this spring. Addressing a growing body…
These days, much is made of applications that run in the metaphorical cloud. Well, here's an example of hardware and software that soared through the clouds, both real and metaphorical. On March 4, the ASTRA 7, a stratospheric gas balloon carrying a mobile phone running…
Recently, when I delivered my presentation, The Revolution in Astronomy Curricula Introduced by WorldWide Telescope (WWT), at INTED2011, I heard frequent comments from the audience that the variety of potential educational uses for WWT is "fascinating." The presentation was made possible by a collaboration between…
From March 9-12, a group of Microsoft researchers had their wares on display at SIGCSE 2011, this year's annual convention of the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (ACM SIGCSE). Held in Dallas, SIGCSE 2011 attracted some 1,200 participants from…
(from left to right) Fayçal Djeffal, Konrad Scheffler, Moustafa Youssef received the 2010 TWAS-AAS-Microsoft Award in a ceremony held in Nairobi, Kenya. On February 26, 2011, three African scientists received the 2010 TWAS-AAS-Microsoft Award in a ceremony held in Nairobi, Kenya. The award, funded by…
