Research
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…
By Allison Linn, Senior Writer, Microsoft Research A new Microsoft Research project lets people to create high-quality 3D images in real time, using a regular mobile phone, with about the same effort it takes to snap a picture or capture a video. "What this system…
By Allison Linn, Senior Writer, Microsoft Research Jamie Shotton was just starting his career in computer vision at Microsoft Research Cambridge when some colleagues from the company's Redmond offices came to the U.K. lab with a challenge. They were creating a gaming system that could…
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…
In the 1999 American film Bicentennial Man, the late Robin Williams played a robot who strives to achieve the physical, social and legal status of a human being. The character’s growing language capabilities—his capacity to communicate fluently with his human family—proved crucial in his quest.…
By George Thomas Jr., Writer, Microsoft Research Researchers have for years sought to understand the way opinions are formed and disseminated throughout social settings. Is there such a thing as the wisdom of the crowd? New research presented at this year’s International Joint Conference on…
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…
A novel method of structuring the largest and most complex datasets—from social networks to global financial markets—has won a Best Paper award at the world’s leading academic conference on machine learning. In the paper, A Nearly-Linear Time Framework for Graph-Structured Sparsity, by Chinmay Hegde, Piotr…
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