By Doug Gantenbein Memory has its faults—and not only the human variety. Hard drives, for instance, can hold terabytes cheaply. But they’re slow. Random-access memory (RAM) is fast but expensive, and data in RAM disappear the instant the power goes off. Flash memory is faster…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research When Chuck Thacker graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, with a bachelor’s degree in physics in 1967, he envisioned a career as an engineering physicist, designing particle accelerators. Things didn’t progress according to plan. Thacker entered the…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research George Robertson is taking this meeting seriously. He focuses intently on other participants in the room, making eye contact, noting posture and visual cues, interjecting comments when appropriate. He studies diagrams scrawled onto a whiteboard, and, on occasion,…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research Bill Buxton is a man of many interests: composer, musician, outdoorsman. Most of all, though, he is a relentless advocate for innovative product design. “Ultimately,” he says, “we are deluding ourselves if we think that the products that…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research Historically, Microsoft Research has had a big footprint during CHI, the annual conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction—and this year’s 27th gathering is no…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research Life, a great man once said, is what happens while you’re busy making other plans. And sometimes, it appears, so is art. Three members of Microsoft Research can attest to that. The three, based on different continents and…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research The research and academic community is rife with conferences. Just about any subject or discipline you can name has its own annual gathering, where the learned and the innovative come together to discuss their work, review the work…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research Xuedong Huang has a mantra: Act fast, ponder less, and learn. Those precepts are not common in research circles, where careful deliberation is generally a necessary precondition to productive work, but there’s little doubt that they have served…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research It was just past dusk when we ventured into the heart of the Nakalabande slum in the Jayanagar area of south-central Bangalore. We were seven in number—Kentaro, Udai, Vidya, Indrani, and me, accompanied by a reporter and a…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research Feng Zhao has a vision. He sees a future in which a Reality Browser enables people from around the world to query the physical world, live and up close, from anywhere. He sees a virtual global observatory, a…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research John Krumm, a researcher for Microsoft Research, is one of four co-writers of Accuracy Characterization for Metropolitan-Scale Wi-Fi Localization, a research paper accepted for presentation during MobiSys 2005, the Third International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services,…
By Suzanne Ross, Writer, Microsoft Research Isaac Asimov, the famous science fiction writer, had a vision of a world called Gaia. Gaia was a world that was aware of its inhabitants — it could heal them and react to them. It was a part of…
