This blog post is one I would never wish to write. As many of you know, in late August, my friend and colleague, Lee Dirks, and his wife Judy were killed in an automobile accident while vacationing in Peru. They leave behind two young daughters…
What do the California condor, the snow leopard, and the Wollemi pine have in common? They’ve all made the least desirable position on one of the nature’s most important lists: the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Now, what do Microsoft and the Zoological Society…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research In an era of rising temperatures, shrinking ice caps, and widespread drought, the world’s attention is focused on environmental concerns. It seems like every business, every organization, every government has plans to “go green,” and information-technology firms are no…
Posted by Rob Knies Imagine that you walk into a store, select an item to purchase, and approach the cash register. A wireless-proximity transmitter within your smartphone detects your presence, and a facial-recognition program determines your identity. The transaction is recorded onto video, and,…
By Douglas Gantenbein, Senior Writer, Microsoft News Center These days, nearly everyone stores things in the “cloud”—business-critical documents, personal photos, e-mail accounts … everything. Microsoft introduced Windows Azure Storage in 2008. Since then, that cloud offering has gained widespread use, not only within Microsoft, but…
Building verifiably reliable and trustworthy software is one of the ultimate objectives of software engineering. With this goal in mind, academics, scientists, and researchers gathered in Shanghai, China, for the second Verified Software Workshop and Summer School. The event, which took place from August 23 to…
Posted by John Davis, researcher at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley Storage in the data center has been dominated by expensive, aggregated systems that provide consistency but not fault tolerance, or by cheaper, partitioned designs that provide performance but not consistency. Leveraging the properties of…
Posted by Rob Knies Saikat Guha is nothing if not passionate about his research, and the goal of his current work can be stated in two words: better ads.“I am building experimental systems,” states Guha, a researcher in the Mobility, Networks, and Systems group…
The 28th General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) opened on August 20, 2012, at the China National Convention Center in Beijing, with WorldWide Telescope (WWT) prominently featured at the Microsoft Research exhibition. Astronomy is one of the oldest and most inspirational areas of…
Posted by Rob Knies Remember that time, a decade or so ago, when spam was the scourge of the Internet, when the sheer volume of junk email threatened to engulf legitimate correspondence and short-circuit the promise of the digital revolution?Those concerns are a bit…
Posted by Rob Knies A recent study by the Pew Research Center indicates that 80 percent of adults in the United States have searched for medical information online. Such a figure underscores the fundamental importance that humans place on their health and wellbeing—and their reliance…
Posted by Rob Knies First, there was Kinect. You’ve probably heard of that one. Next, it was KinectFusion, which uses live data from Kinect for Windows to create high-quality, 3-D models of a room and its contents. KinectFusion made a splash in 2011 during the…
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