As do other recreational pilots, Ashish Kapoor learned during flight training that he shouldn’t count on the accuracy of wind forecasts. The best available forecasts in the United States—from the federal government’s Winds Aloft program—have been based largely on data from instrumented weather balloons released…
Most of us can only dream of having the perfect personal assistant, one who is always there when needed, anticipating our every request and unobtrusively organizing our lives. Cortana, the new digital personal assistant powered by Bing that comes with Windows Phone 8.1, brings users…
Gaurav Sharma appeared relaxed but focused in his purple hoodie on January 16, 2014. Less than 20 seconds later, Sharma, a 15-year-old from Lakeside High School in Seattle, found himself the owner of a Guinness World Record® for fastest text message using a touch-screen mobile…
Leslie Lamport first began dabbling in computers while he was still in high school. Nothing too unusual about that—until you consider that this was in the mid-1950s. Lamport was attending the Bronx High School of Science in New York, and he and a friend used…
Cyrus Bamji had encountered a challenge. Luckily for him, Microsoft Research had just the solution. Bamji, Microsoft partner hardware architect for Microsoft’s Silicon Valley-based Architecture and Silicon Management group, and members of his team were trying to incorporate a time-of-flight camera into Xbox One, the…
A robot comes up from the subway. How does it know where it is? To most people, this sounds like the opening line of a joke, but for Jamie Shotton, senior researcher in the Computer Vision Group at Microsoft Research Cambridge, the “lost robot” is…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research At 5:46 p.m. on Sept. 20, Georges Gonthier, principal researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge, sent a brief email to his colleagues at the Microsoft Research-Inria Joint Centre in Paris. It read, in full: “This is really the End.”…
By Douglas Gantenbein, Senior Writer, Microsoft News Center In a classroom near Bangalore, India, young students packing a classroom eagerly wave sheets of white paper covered with black symbols. They aren’t misbehaving—they are participating in a test of new educational technology pioneered by a team at…
By Douglas Gantenbein, Senior Writer, Microsoft News Center A new approach to managing data over a network has enabled a Microsoft Research team to set a speed record for sifting through, or “sorting,” a huge amount of data in one minute. The team conquered what…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research On Nov. 22, in a Parisian ceremony at the Institut de France, Georges Gonthier, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge, was awarded the 2011 EADS Foundation Grand Prize in Computer Science. The award, established in 2007 by…
By Janie Chang, Writer, Microsoft Research Each summer, Microsoft Research facilities from around the world welcome a fresh crop of interns. Microsoft Research considers the intern program a vital part of its interactions with the academic world, with some facilities increasing their head count by…
By Janie Chang, Writer, Microsoft Research For the past 11 years, the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit has brought academic and government research professionals together to share perspectives on new research, the challenges facing the research community, and ways to break new ground. The 12th version…
