Research
By Xuedong Huang, Chief Speech Scientist, Microsoft Xuedong Huang (Photo by Scott Eklund/Red Box Pictures) For more than 20 years, Microsoft has invested in advanced speech recognition research and development. It’s great to see the return on that investment in products and services such as…
Posted by Jeannette M. Wing The Internet, global positioning systems, the laser, multi-touch displays and search engines. What do these have in common? These technologies, which we take for granted today, came out of basic scientific research. Basic research creates knowledge. It advances our fundamental…
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…
Posted by Rob Knies Now, here’s an interesting one: The latest video in Channel 9’s Microsoft Research Luminaries series features John Platt (@johnplattml) and explores his work in the resurgent research area of artificial intelligence (AI), its close cousin, machine learning, and the impact of…
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 Conventional wisdom holds that the use of GPS satellites to enable indoor mapping is a non-starter. GPS receivers, it is said, simply don’t work indoors, for a variety of reasons. While Earth’s outdoors environment has been mapped extensively, indoor localization of…
Sometimes, a dream needs but a nudge to propel it toward reality. That is exactly what Eric Rudder and Peter Lee delivered to Microsoft’s Machine Translation team about a year ago. Rudder, then Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, and Lee, head of Microsoft Research,…
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…
Visiting Eric Horvitz at Microsoft Research headquarters in Redmond, Wash., is a full-service experience. At the building’s first-floor bank of elevators, situated on a busy corridor, a “smart elevator” opens its doors, sensing that you need a ride. When you arrive on the third floor,…