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 Moises Goldszmidt, well known for his research in machine learning, joined Microsoft Research’s Silicon Valley lab as a principal researcher in January 2006 after spending four years with the Utility Infrastructure Management Department of Hewlett-Packard Labs. A graduate…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research There’s a new restaurant in town. Wonder what people are saying about it? Take a photo. That handy gadget you’ve been coveting is on sale at the mall. How does its price compare to those offered elsewhere? Snap…
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 Joshua Goodman’s grandfather recently got himself a new computer. He’s a medical writer who had been accustomed to typing his columns and mailing them to his publishers. But the publishers increasingly began to ask that he submit his…
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 If you want to go to another country, it would behoove you to learn the language of the land. Luca Cardelli, an Italian researcher working in England, knows this lesson well. He wants to help scientists travel to an…
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…
By Suzanne Ross, Writer, Microsoft Research If you've never seen some of the ingenious ways that researchers have invented to make viewing data on a small screen easy, you might say, "I'll never do all my computing on a PDA or Smartphone." You might concede…
By Suzanne Ross Remember when you brought your favorite toy, household object or bug and shared it with the class on Show and Tell day? Most kids were excited about sharing anything and everything with anyone. But then we grew up and started being selective…
By Suzanne Ross People read stories to find out what happens next. That's easy enough in a book, but if the story is about real life, and it's online in the news media, it's harder to find out what happens next. There's just too much…
We don't like worms, in any incarnation. Not the crawly ones, not the human ones, not the computer ones. Especially not the computer ones. We can usually avoid the other kinds. That's why Helen Wang and her colleagues decided to design a shield that would…
