By Athima Chansanchai, Microsoft News Center Staff Matt Long and Mark Nichols have a particular affinity for balloons – but not the kind that you see at birthday parties or ride with in big baskets, or find in 80s one-hit wonders. They’re focused on the…
By Vani Mandava, Senior Program Manager; Victor Bahl, Distinguished Scientist; and Alec Wolman, Principal Researcher, all from Microsoft Research In a two-day summit in February that was as much mind meld as conference, 45 PhD candidates from the top computer science departments in the United…
By George Thomas Jr., Writer, Microsoft For Sudipta Sengupta, Microsoft Research is a magical place. "At Microsoft and the places I was at previously, my work has often been in collaboration with researchers and engineers, so I have benefitted a lot from interacting with and…
By Vikas Sabharwal and Vineet Pruthi, Microsoft Shared Platform Group In late 2011, Bing’s shared platform team started looking at different solutions for distributed NoSQL stores. We needed a fast, unified, distributed key value-store that is scalable and can be turned into a shared platform for…
Many people living in the People’s Republic of China and Hong Kong have a new habit: they check the air pollution index before venturing outside. Air quality has deteriorated rapidly in China, with nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter levels frequently exceeding safety guidelines set by the…
Stuart, a 66-year-old man with diabetes, felt lousy—constantly fatigued, nauseated, and short of breath after just the slightest exertion. His daughter, worried by his increasing frailty, took him to the emergency room at the local hospital. Her concern was amply justified: Stuart was suffering from…
While we know that climate change will likely affect every aspect of the food system—from our ability to grow food, to the reliability of food transportation and food safety, to the dynamics of international trade in agricultural goods—we don’t yet know how to anticipate and…
Standing atop the tallest educational edifice in the world—the 240-meter (787-foot) tower of Lomonosov Moscow State University (MSU)—really makes you think about the impact of education and research. This is home to some of the brightest minds in the world, including 11 Nobel Prize and…
A special report in the April 19, 2014, issue of The Economist predicted that 70 percent of China’s population—some 1 billion people—will live in cities by 2030. While China’s urban growth offers a higher standard of living to many citizens, it also creates serious problems.…
Mosquitoes. They can ruin your backyard barbeque and leave you covered with itchy welts. Or, their bites may also transmit dangerous pathogens. The World Health Organization estimates that mosquito-borne diseases kill more than 1 million people annually. In fact, mosquitoes do more than just transmit pathogens. Their…
Leslie Lamport first began dabbling in computers while he was still in high school. Nothing too unusual about that—until you consider that this was in the mid-1950s. Lamport was attending the Bronx High School of Science in New York, and he and a friend used…
By Douglas Gantenbein, Senior Writer, Microsoft News Center A new approach to managing data over a network has enabled a Microsoft Research team to set a speed record for sifting through, or “sorting,” a huge amount of data in one minute. The team conquered what…
