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…
Posted by Rob Knies Saikat Guha is nothing if not passionate about his research, and the goal of his current work can be stated in two words: better ads.“I am building experimental systems,” states Guha, a researcher in the…
The 28th General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) opened on August 20, 2012, at the China National Convention Center in Beijing, with WorldWide Telescope (WWT) prominently featured at the Microsoft Research exhibition. Astronomy is one of the oldest…
Posted by Rob Knies Remember that time, a decade or so ago, when spam was the scourge of the Internet, when the sheer volume of junk email threatened to engulf legitimate correspondence and short-circuit the promise of the digital…
Posted by Rob Knies A recent study by the Pew Research Center indicates that 80 percent of adults in the United States have searched for medical information online. Such a figure underscores the fundamental importance that humans place on their…