Microsoft Research Blog

Distributed systems

  1. Mind meld, Microsoft Research style 

    March 25, 2016

    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…

  2. The Evolution of Bing’s ObjectStore 

    October 29, 2015

    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…

  3. Meeting the data challenges of urban computing 

    September 11, 2015

    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…

  4. All that RaaS: saving lives and transforming healthcare economics 

    August 28, 2015

    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…

  5. Innovation from the ground up and into the cloud 

    June 25, 2015

    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…

  6. Smartphone app takes aim at noise pollution 

    June 23, 2015

    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.…

  7. Leslie Lamport Receives Turing Award 

    March 18, 2014

    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…

  8. Data in the Fast Lane 

    May 21, 2012

    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…