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…
Preparations for the 2016 ACM SIGMOD/PODS conference are already under way. SIGMOD is a leading international forum for database researchers, practitioners, developers, and users to explore cutting-edge ideas and results, and to exchange techniques, tools, and experiences. Upcoming SIGMOD dates Research paper second submission dates November…
Microsoft researchers have figured out a way to build software systems spanning many computers that can be proven free of bugs, a significant feat in the decades-long quest to create perfect software.
Web browsing is one of the core applications on smartphones. After all, who hasn’t checked Facebook or watched the latest news—or amusing cat videos—on their mobile phone? However, mobile browsers on smartphones are primarily optimized for performance, not energy efficiency, so web browsing—especially the loading…
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…
Twenty years ago, the film Hackers gave that term a shady, illicit meaning. Now, geeks around the world are taking back the term “hacker,” restoring its original connotations of creativity and intellectual curiosity. Nowhere was that restoration more apparent than at the Microsoft Student Summer…
The winners of the best paper award for UBICOMP 2015 go to: DeepEar: Robust Smartphone Audio Sensing in Unconstrained Acoustic Environments Using Deep Learning by Nicholas Lane, Petko Georgiev, Lorena Qendro Microphones are remarkably powerful sensors of human behavior and context. However, audio sensing is…
"Moore's law" is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit will double approximately every two years. For the past 50 years, we have relied on Moore’s Law to provide increasing functionality at faster speeds and lower cost. Cheap, fast, and small…
By Allison Linn, Senior Writer, Microsoft Research A Microsoft researcher and his academic colleagues have figured out a way to obtain personal information from certain encrypted databases even when the databases are being protected by a promising security method. Seny Kamara, a researcher in Microsoft's…
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…
Sigcomm, the annual mecca for networking researchers, is being held in London this week (August 17-21, 2015). The conference program includes something for all tastes: perennial sessions on wide-area and wireless networks, topics du jour like data centers and software defined networking, and even blasts…
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…
