Posted by George Thomas Jr. Many programmers recognize Don Syme's name, but even more are influenced daily by his research and development. After all, Syme, a principal researcher in Microsoft's Cambridge, U.K., lab, has helped to develop and influence features of popular computer languages used…
On Monday, June 15, Microsoft Research’s Z3 theorem prover received the 2015 ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Software Award. This prestigious award honors an institution or individuals for “developing a software system that has had a lasting influence, reflected in contributions to concepts, in commercial acceptance,…
Launched a year ago, Code Hunt is a coding game that challenges players first to deduce a hidden problem from clues presented as unit tests and then to write a program to solve it. The game has been enormously successful, attracting more than 150,000 players…
Posted by George Thomas Jr. How is it you seem to be spending more and more time every day sifting through and prioritizing email messages? According to research by The Radicati Group, Inc., the legitimate emails you receive — already upwards of 100 per day — will…
Part 1: Introduction and Basic Theory > Part 2: Accounting for Bug Fixes > Part 4: Step By Step Guide This is just a summary of the previous chapters as a flow chart (click here for the derivation of the method): Here variable meanings are: External…
Part 1: Introduction and Basic Theory > Part 3: Harsh Reality That simple logic is nice, but practice makes it questionable for at least two reasons: Bugs found by either of the parties are fixed. After that, another party gets no chances to find them…
Part 1: Introduction Probably every piece of software has some defects in it. Known defects (also called bugs) are found by manufacturers and users and fixed. Unknown ones remain there, waiting to be discovered some day. The question is: how big is that unknown set?…
Posted by Rob Knies A couple of years ago, a few Microsoft researchers published a couple of interesting papers on storage efficiencies. Now, with breathtaking speed, the concepts in those papers have been embraced across the cloud-computing world. Technological change can occur at lightning speed.…
Simon Peyton Jones’ contributions to computer science continue to be recognized, and now, so is his advocacy for computing education. On June 10, during the 35th annual conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, hosted by SIGPLAN, the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM’s) Special Interest…
How do you spark excitement about computer programming among preteen girls? “Make me a Hunger Games arena.” That’s the challenge Kate Miller presented to a group of middle schoolers during last summer’s Penn Girls in Engineering, Math & Science Camp (GEMS) at the University of…
In the age of big data, the challenge is no longer how to collect or store vast quantities of data—it’s how to make sense of it and use it for practical benefit. Scientific researchers, governmental agencies, nonprofits, and businesses of all sizes are among those…
Springtime in Paris this year sees the Association for Computing Machinery’s 31st Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) in full swing from April 27 through May 2, welcoming experts and students from more than 60 countries. A large contingent of researchers from Microsoft…
