Plant biologists in Brazil are working to develop a better understanding of tropical ecosystems—how they work and how they impact climate change, not only in the region, but worldwide. These researchers are dedicated and disciplined. They’re in the field from dawn to dusk, working through…
In this era of big data, researchers are relying more and more on data mining to help them with their research. Researchers from nearly every field (not to mention businesses from almost every sector) are slicing, dicing, and sifting an exponentially growing mass of data,…
Antibiotics, antivirals, NSAIDs—the list of modern “wonder drugs” goes on and on. And yet many diseases remain resistant to drug therapy, and in other instances, the side effects of drug treatment are as bad as or worse than the disorder. Why, the public wonders, aren’t…
Think about supercomputers of the recent past. Just 15 years ago, supercomputers were rare and exotic machines. Government laboratories in the United States and Japan spent hundreds of millions of dollars on custom computing rigs and specialized facilities to house them, in a bid to…
Are you a student looking to win a little extra spending money? Or maybe just get some props for your coding chops? If so, you’ll want to enter your Windows Phone or Windows 8 app in the Project Hawaii Mobile Code Jam Challenge. But you’d…
We’re happy to announce that the beta release of the new Try F# has arrived! We’re proud of this new release, and with good reason: Try F# makes programming in F# 3.0 easy to learn, simple to use, and straightforward to share—all through the browser.…
As a researcher, I know the value of having the right tools for the job. The right tool makes working easier and more efficient—well, that’s the definition of a tool, isn’t it? So if you’re like me, always looking for programming tools that help bring…
The warm, sunny days of late August in Saint Petersburg, Russia’s “northern capital,” were made even brighter by the 2012 Microsoft Research Russian Summer School. An annual Microsoft Research event, the Russian Summer School is intended for doctoral and master’s students, as well as young…
I’ve done numerous public presentations of WorldWide Telescope (WWT) since 2008, but last month’s demos at the International Astronomical Union’s 2012 General Assembly (IAU2012) in Beijing were by far the most satisfying. Why? Because they were conducted primarily by student volunteers, eager to showcase the…
Well, not literally, but many of our interns did spend a lot of their own time probing the stratosphere over the last 12 weeks, building cloud-based apps for the Windows Phone. These interns were participants in Project Hawaii Intern XAPFest 2012, a contest for building…
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…
What are the big challenges and hot trends in computer science research? How are the academic community and Microsoft Research working collaboratively to use computing to solve some of the world’s most intractable problems? On July 16 and 17, 400 elite academic investigators will…
