Can smartphones use less energy to browse the web?
Web browsing is one of the core applications on smartphones. After all, who hasn’t checked Facebook or watched the latest news—or amusing cat videos—on their mobile phone? However, mobile browsers on smartphones are primarily optimized for performance, not energy efficiency,…
Meeting the data challenges of urban computing
Many people living in the People’s Republic of China and Hong Kong have a new habit: they check the air pollution index before venturing outside. Air quality has deteriorated rapidly in China, with nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter levels frequently exceeding…
Microsoft Student Summer Camp embodies the hacker spirit
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…
Awards | The European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM)
Zuzana Kukelova receives the 2015 Cor Baayen Award
Zuzana Kukelova received the 2015 Cor Baayen Award – an annual award given to a promising young researcher in computer science and applied mathematics by ERCIM – The European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics. The award was created in…
UBICOMP 2015: Best paper awards
The winners of the best paper award for UBICOMP 2015 go to: DeepEar: Robust Smartphone Audio Sensing in Unconstrained Acoustic Environments Using Deep Learning by Nicholas Lane, Petko Georgiev, Lorena Qendro Microphones are remarkably powerful sensors of human behavior and…
The end of Moore’s law? Oh, not again…
"Moore's law" is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit will double approximately every two years. For the past 50 years, we have relied on Moore’s Law to provide increasing functionality at faster speeds and lower…
Researchers make advances in database security “arms race”
By Allison Linn, Senior Writer, Microsoft Research A Microsoft researcher and his academic colleagues have figured out a way to obtain personal information from certain encrypted databases even when the databases are being protected by a promising security method. Seny…
In the news | NetworkWorld
Why Micro Datacenters really matter to mobile’s future
Microsoft Research distinguished scientist Victor Bahl has been spreading the word about Micro Datacenters, also known by the adorable name cloudlets, as a key concept for optimizing the performance and usefulness of mobile and other networked devices via the cloud.
In the news | New Scientist
Intelligent cameras can put an end to always-on surveillance
Many cities are packed with cameras pointlessly recording everything they see, but smart algorithms could allow them to keep only footage that matters.