Through my work with academics in Brazil, I have witnessed an increasing awareness of the importance of computing in advancing scientific research in such areas as bioenergy, biodiversity, climate change, and plant physiology. In order to advance these fields, scientists need to deal with increasingly…
Astronomy is rapidly becoming exponentially data rich, with data management, data exploration, and knowledge discovering becoming central to the research enterprise. This has brought about great opportunity for growth and discovery in both astronomy and computational science. It has also created many technical and methodological…
As I read the Washington Post article by Anna Holmes entitled, “Technically, science will be less lonely for women when girls are spurred early,” I felt my heart grow heavy when I encountered the following quote from Jennifer Skaggs, a University of Kentucky education researcher:…
Twenty years; two decades; a fifth of a century—we can phrase it several ways, but what does it mean? To a person, it’s the onset of adulthood (or maybe the point marking only 10 more years of living in Mom and Dad’s basement); to a…
Fifty Latin American researchers and former Microsoft Research interns and Fellows gathered at the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington, in July to participate in the LATAM Workshop. The goals of this research workshop: share research challenges and results and seek opportunities to work together across…
In nine years, the Imagine Cup has become one of the pre-eminent youth technology competitions in the world. This year, more than 350,000 young people from 183 countries and regions around the globe signed up to compete. Beginning last Friday evening and running through to…
With the academic year drawing to a close, Microsoft Research Cambridge was delighted to welcome more than 60 doctoral students for the sixth PhD Summer School at the end of June 2011. Participants came from as far afield as Israel and Russia, numerous European countries,…
There is a saying dating back to the days of punched cards that "the software is in the holes"—and therefore invisible. At the recent Microsoft Research Software Summit in Paris, software was anything but invisible. It was all around us and manifest in the smartphones, gadgets,…
Time to celebrate: we are releasing the Hawaii OCR (optical character recognition) service this week! This OCR service is the next step in the evolution of Project Hawaii, the Microsoft Research project that is exploring how to take full advantage of the cloud to enhance…
What could be better than Paris on a spring day? How about Paris on a spring day at the inaugural Software Summit sponsored by Microsoft Research? Yes, I'm here at the Microsoft Le Campus in Issy-les-Moulineaux, just southwest of central Paris, along with more than…
From March 9-12, a group of Microsoft researchers had their wares on display at SIGCSE 2011, this year's annual convention of the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (ACM SIGCSE). Held in Dallas, SIGCSE 2011 attracted some 1,200 participants from…
(from left to right) Fayçal Djeffal, Konrad Scheffler, Moustafa Youssef received the 2010 TWAS-AAS-Microsoft Award in a ceremony held in Nairobi, Kenya. On February 26, 2011, three African scientists received the 2010 TWAS-AAS-Microsoft Award in a ceremony held in Nairobi, Kenya. The award, funded by…
