By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research These days, more than ever, it’s important for computing to be energy-efficient. Particularly in data centers, energy requirements represent a significant portion of operational costs, and power and cooling needs help dictate where data centers can be located,…
By Janie Chang, Writer, Microsoft Research Once upon a time, Web sites were the online equivalent of data sheets. Now users go to the Web to run business apps, do their banking, buy products, socialize, receive a daily news fix, or play interactive games. Nor…
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 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 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 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.…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research Modern-day software development is notoriously challenging. Programs have become highly complex. Customer expectations have never been higher. Meeting quality standards is increasingly difficult. Challenging, yes. Difficult, perhaps. But such hurdles are not insurmountable, as Spec# demonstrates. Spec#, available…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research Luca Cardelli, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge, has been named winner of the 2007 Senior Dahl-Nygaard Prize, presented annually to a senior researcher with outstanding career contributions. Cardelli, who heads the Programming Principles and Tools team…
On Jan. 8, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) announced that it had recognized 41 of its members for their contributions. Four of these new ACM fellows are from Microsoft Research.
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research One has spent his professional career exploring programming language theory. The other has made fundamental contributions to PC networks, operating systems, security, and document publishing. One works in Cambridge, U.K. The other works in Cambridge, Mass. But Tony…
Over the years, Microsoft Research has attracted experienced researchers at the top of their fields, as well as fresh new talent that achieves significant results right out of the gate. And the research community has rewarded many of them with some of its highest honors.…
