By Guobin Wu, Senior Research Program Manager, Microsoft Research Asia What does it take to make it to the “decisive round for the finest few” in the Beauty of Programming Contest 2016? Earlier this year, 60 young experts gathered at the Microsoft Shanghai campus to…
By George Thomas Jr., Writer, Microsoft Software verification — the crucial process of assuring programs perform as expected — may not be top of mind for most of us. But considering its role in the development of just about anything based on software — which…
By Allison Linn, Senior Writer at Microsoft When Yong Rui first began doing computer vision research in 1995, the Internet was still in its infancy and the idea of using technology to automatically search for images seemed almost absurd. “That [notion] was really quite advanced at the…
By John Kaiser, Research News Convex optimization, prized for its efficiency and utility in solving small and medium-size problems across multiple disciplines, could soon be extended to handle much larger problems and tasks, such as those found in image and vision processing. Explaining how and…
Christine Clifton-Thornton, senior writer for Research News, asked the President to write an article on STEM education. His response follows. America’s drive to tinker, invent, and push the boundaries of what’s possible sets us apart—and we have a lot to show for it. Scientific advances,…
On May 27, 2015, Suzhou, a historic, scenic city in southeast China, hosted this year’s finals of the Beauty of Programming (BoP) competition, a creative contest among talented young programmers. Sponsored by Microsoft in collaboration with IEEE, BoP encourages contestants to use their programming skills…
What is the “beauty of programming”? In our eyes, it is the act of creating a program that is in itself beautiful—a program that uses sophisticated algorithms to solve real problems, meeting the user’s needs while ensuring the best experience in the least amount of…
Posted by Rob Knies In early June, Jamie Shotton received a most welcome email from Ramin Zabih, professor of computer science at Cornell Tech and chair of the IEEE Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI) Technical Committee.Zabih had the responsibility to let a gifted young…
Posted by Rob Knies Pardon Zhengyou Zhang if he retains a certain fondness for the year just past. In early December 2013, Zhang, a research manager and principal researcher for Microsoft Research, was named a recipient of the inaugural Helmholtz Prize, a test-of-time award…
Tweet Posted by Rob Knies Eighty years ago, Albert Einstein was invited to deliver the 11th installment of the Josiah Willard Gibbs Lecture, established by the American Mathematical Society (AMS) in 1923 to give the public insight into the intricacies of mathematics and its applications.…
Tweet Posted by Rob Knies Even in this awesome, hyperbolic age, the words “extraordinary achievement” don’t get tossed around all that much. And when they come from the IEEE, the world’s largest professional association for the advancement of technology, they retain the distinction of…
