By Vikas Sabharwal and Vineet Pruthi, Microsoft Shared Platform Group In late 2011, Bing’s shared platform team started looking at different solutions for distributed NoSQL stores. We needed a fast, unified, distributed key value-store that is scalable and can be turned into a shared platform for…
Have you ever found yourself waiting for results from your Internet search engine? Oh, sure, search for Kim Kardashian and the results come flying back at warp speed. But queries with vague terms are often automatically reformulated into complex queries that may take significantly longer…
Posted by Rob Knies Back in February, a post on this blog introduced Bing Code Search, a project to deliver new tools to save developers time and to make software development easier.Youssef Hamadi of Microsoft Research served as spokesman for his end of a collaboration…
We’re here at the Microsoft Conference Center in Redmond, Washington, where the first day of the 2014 Microsoft Research Faculty Summit is underway. The event kicked off with an opening keynote from Harry Shum, executive vice president of Microsoft’s Development and Research group, during which…
Posted by Rob Knies Cortana, the personal assistant for Windows Phone 8.1, certainly has received plenty of attention since being announced in April. Her ability to make your day-to-day life easier by managing your information and keeping you up to date has made her one…
Posted by Rob Knies Operating a datacenter at web scale requires managing many conflicting requirements. The ability to deliver computation at a high level and speed is a given, but because of the demands such a facility must meet, a datacenter also needs flexibility. Additionally,…
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…
Posted by Rob Knies Among the many earthly domains attributed to the Greek goddess Athena are those of mathematics, inspiration, strength, skill, and wisdom—traits that, combined, begin to describe the career of Susan Dumais, named April 8 as the ninth recipient of the Athena Lecturer Award.The…
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…
Tweet Posted by Rob Knies Some people, it seems, are simply born to be computer-science researchers.Take Youssef Hamadi, for example. Earlier this week, he was asked a question about challenges he had encountered during a research project. His response began by sharing this revealing nugget:“As…
“Makes HDTV look low-res.” “Wow, how did they make this?” “Hyper-detailed and actually looks 3-D.” These are just some of the words reviewers have used to describe the new Photosynth. A technical preview, launched December 10, enables photography enthusiasts to create even more realistic 3-D…
Springtime on the sun-drenched Amalfi Coast. A perfect little café perched high above the sea, the scent of jasmine and lemon blossoms wafting past. You open the menu, hungry for lunch. Oh, wait—you don’t know any Italian. Now what? Not to worry: Just whip out…
