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 In the summer of 2008, the leadership at Microsoft Research Redmond reorganized an existing set of research groups with a refreshed, more encompassing mandate: reinventing all aspects of software development. The revamped area, Research in Software Engineering (RiSE),…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research Concurrent programming is demanding. While part of a program is modifying data, the other parts must be prevented from doing likewise. Manually organizing such tasks is challenging for the most adept experts. People have been trying for decades…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research Since Microsoft Research New England was announced on Feb. 4, Jennifer Chayes, managing director of the lab, based in Cambridge, Mass., has been hard at work along with her deputy managing director, Christian Borgs. Chayes and Borgs moved…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research What’s the most powerful, untapped information repository on the Web today? If you said Wikipedia, please go stand in the corner. Actually, it’s people, the billion or so of you who are tapping your keyboards and clicking your…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research We’ve been spoiled. In this age of virtually instantaneous communication, we have developed a thirst for immediate access to information. Waiting is a pain in the Internet age. Soon is not sufficient; we need it now. Researchers from…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research Mashups have become one of the hallmarks of the Web 2.0 era. The practice of combining two sets of related yet disparate data from unrelated sources in one user-friendly, information-intensive collection has become commonplace in the past few…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research On March 15-16, 2007, a forum entitled HCI 2020: Human Values in a Digital Age, was held in Sanlúcar la Mayor, Spain, just outside Seville. Its purpose was to gather luminaries in computing, design, social sciences, and philosophy…
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 On Feb. 4, Microsoft Research unveiled its latest lab, to be called Microsoft Research New England and to be based in Cambridge, Mass., in the midst of the Boston region’s bustling academic environment. Jennifer Chayes will serve as…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research For Sriram Rajamani, the opportunity to work on improving software performance for Microsoft Research has been a productive, rewarding experience. And getting a chance to do so while stationed in his native India has been a rare privilege.…
