This blog post is one I would never wish to write. As many of you know, in late August, my friend and colleague, Lee Dirks, and his wife Judy were killed in an automobile accident while vacationing in Peru. They…
What do the California condor, the snow leopard, and the Wollemi pine have in common? They’ve all made the least desirable position on one of the nature’s most important lists: the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Now, what do…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research In an era of rising temperatures, shrinking ice caps, and widespread drought, the world’s attention is focused on environmental concerns. It seems like every business, every organization, every government has plans to “go green,”…
In the news | IT World
Microsoft Research and the University of Washington develop a new gesture-sensing system that uses sound alone.
Posted by Rob Knies Imagine that you walk into a store, select an item to purchase, and approach the cash register. A wireless-proximity transmitter within your smartphone detects your presence, and a facial-recognition program determines your identity. The transaction…
By Douglas Gantenbein, Senior Writer, Microsoft News Center These days, nearly everyone stores things in the “cloud”—business-critical documents, personal photos, e-mail accounts … everything. Microsoft introduced Windows Azure Storage in 2008. Since then, that cloud offering has gained widespread use,…
In the news | American Scientist
Alice and Bob, fondly known as the first couple of cryptography, are really more interested in computational suitcases than physical ones. Suppose Alice gives Bob a securely encrypted computer file and asks him to sum a list of numbers she…
Building verifiably reliable and trustworthy software is one of the ultimate objectives of software engineering. With this goal in mind, academics, scientists, and researchers gathered in Shanghai, China, for the second Verified Software Workshop and Summer School. The event, which took…
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…