By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research Multicore and many-core processors represent the future of computing. Concerns with power consumption and heat management have limited the ability of chip manufacturers to continue to provide more processing power via faster clock speeds. Consequently, to deliver the…
By Douglas Gantenbein, Senior Writer, Microsoft News Center People love their smartphones—and they love to play games on them. On common smartphone software platforms, including Windows Phone, games are among the most popular applications and constitute the vast majority of downloads. “Games are killer apps…
By Rob Knies, Senior Editor, Microsoft Research It always helps to be prepared. Just ask Ivan Tashev. A principal software architect in the Speech group at Microsoft Research Redmond, Tashev played an integral role in developing the audio technology that enabled Kinect for Xbox 360…
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 Douglas Gantenbein, Senior Writer, Microsoft News Center Today’s world, says Sumit Basu, increasingly is driven by massive amounts of data. “Take sociology,” says Basu, a researcher with the Knowledge Tools group at Microsoft Research Redmond. “In the past, most sociologists would use surveys and…
By Douglas Gantenbein, Senior Writer, Microsoft News Center Researchers and businesspeople around the world now have at their disposal a new way to perform massive computations over large quantities of unstructured data more quickly and easily than they’ve ever imagined. The reason: a Microsoft Research-developed…
By Rob Knies, Senior Editor, Microsoft Research Peter Lee is a bit of a daredevil, having pursued race-car driving in his youth. He’s also a fervent believer in the importance of finding beautiful solutions to computer-science challenges. And, as of Sept. 27, he’s a Microsoft…
By Rob Knies, Senior Editor, Microsoft Research Collaboration is one of the hallmarks of Microsoft Research. Across the organization, the desire to work with world-class computer scientists takes on many forms, all with the express interest of advancing the state of the art in computer…
By Janie Chang, Writer, Microsoft Research Everyone understands the energy-saving benefits of shutting down PCs or leaving them on standby before leaving the office. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that companies can achieve cost savings of $25 to $75 per PC annually if users…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research You would be forgiven if you thought the “F” in F#—which made its debut as part of Visual Studio 2010 on April 12—stands for “functional.” After all, F#—pronounced “F sharp”—is a functional programming language for the .NET Framework…
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 Janie Chang, Writer, Microsoft Research If there are network tools for troubleshooting complex corporate networks, then surely there must be simpler, low-end tools to assist the home or small-business network administrator. That was Victor Bahl’s assumption when he went in search of solutions for…
