Posted by Rob Knies With the World Cup final between Germany and Argentina set for July 13 at Estadio do Maracana in Rio de Janeiro, the powerful appeal of sporting events to a global audience becomes apparent once again. What began with a 3-1 victory…
Posted by Rob Knies Earlier today, during Microsoft Research’s Silicon Valley TechFair, we learned about visualization of big-data collections using Holograph. Another aspect of the big-data movement, though, is enabling data analysts to develop an application and then deploy it seamlessly to the cloud. Such…
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…
Tweet Posted by Rob Knies Distributed computing can be a fiendishly difficult endeavor. Its benefits are manifest: Such systems pass messages across a series of computing devices connected to a network, and those devices interact efficiently to achieve results beyond the capability of any…
Tweet Posted by Rob Knies So, if you’re writing a book called On the Efficient Determination of Most Near Neighbors: Horseshoes, Hand Grenades, Web Search and Other Situations When Close is Close Enough, how exactly do you start?You could start by providing an overview…
Tweet Posted by Rob Knies Computing today is generating and capturing a wealth of data previously unimaginable. Such information has great promise for unlocking some of society’s most elusive secrets, but how can those secrets be unearthed and identified?That pursuit provided the impetus behind Big…
Posted by Kelly Berschauer The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has a history of conducting successful student competitions during its major conferences, so it was only fitting that when Microsoft Research Connections and Microsoft Research Silicon Valley were considering hosting a similar event in the…
Posted by Roy Levin, managing director of Microsoft Research Silicon Valley Transferring research results into products and services is always a challenging part of Microsoft Research’s job. No two transfers ever happen quite the same way. This year, Microsoft Research Silicon Valley had a tech-transfer…
Posted by Rob Knies On Oct. 16 in Mountain View, Calif., the Computer History Museum will host a conversation between Rick Rashid, Microsoft chief research officer and worldwide head of Microsoft Research, and John Markoff of The New York Times. For 90 minutes, beginning…
Posted by John Davis, researcher at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley Storage in the data center has been dominated by expensive, aggregated systems that provide consistency but not fault tolerance, or by cheaper, partitioned designs that provide performance but not consistency. Leveraging the properties of…
Posted by Rob Knies Distributed computing is critical for most modern, Internet-scale services, enabling high availability and the ability to scale to massive, worldwide audiences. The web as we now know it is unimaginable without advances achieved in distributed computing.It is challenging, though, to…
Posted by Frank McSherry, senior researcher at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley Big data is pretty popular at the moment. Systems such as MapReduce, Hadoop, Dryad, and DryadLINQ have made writing and executing ad hoc big-data analyses easy. Still, there are several programming patterns such systems…
