Microsoft Research Blog

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  1. Intermedia: The Concept and the Construction of a Seamless Information Environment 

    January 5, 1988 | Nicole Yankelovich, Bernard J. Haan, Norman K. Meyrowitz, and Steven Drucker

    A description is given of Intermedia, a tool designed to support both teaching and research in a university environment. This multiapplication hypermedia system provides linking capabilities integrated into a desktop user environment. Hypermedia is simply an extension of hypertext that incorporates other media in addition…

  3. Rational Nonmonotonic Reasoning 

    January 1, 1988 | Carl Kadie

    Nonmonotonic reasoning is a pattern of reasoning that allows an agent to make and retract (tentative) conclusions from inconclusive evidence. This paper gives a possible-worlds interpretation of the nonmonotonic reasoning problem based on standard decision theory and the emerging probability logic. The system's central principle…

  4. Building User Interfaces by Direct Manipulation 

    January 1, 1988 | Luca Cardelli

    User interfaces based on mice, bitmap displays and windows are becoming commonplace, and there are guidelines on how such interfaces should function [Apple 85]. As a consequence, there is a growing expectation that all programs, no matter how trivial or how complicated, should present a…

  5. High-performance polygon rendering 

    January 1, 1988 | Kurt Akeley and Tom Jermoluk

    This paper describes a system architecture for realtime display of shaded polygons. Performance of 100,000 lighted, 4-sided polygons per second is achieved. Vectors and points draw at the rate of 400,000 per second. High-speed pan and zoom, alpha blending, realtime video input, and antialiased lines…

  6. Reasoning Under Varying and Uncertain Resource Constraints 

    January 1, 1988 | Eric Horvitz

    We describe the use of decision-theory to optimize the value of computation under uncertain and varying resource limitations. The research is motivated by the pursuit of formal models of rational decision making for computational agents centering on the explicit consideration of preferences and resource availability.…

  7. Graphical Search and Replace 

    January 1, 1988 | David Kurlander and Eric A. Bier

    Graphical search is a technique for finding all instances of a graphical pattern in a synthetic picture in which objects are regions bounded by lines and curves. The pattern may describe shape, color and other properties. Matched objects may be allowed to differ from the…

  8. Phase Distinctions in Type Theory 

    January 1, 1988 | Luca Cardelli

    Type systems were originally introduced in programming languages to provide a degree of static checking, achieved through typechecking. As type systems become more complex and typechecking more sophisticated, the attribute static becomes less appropriate. The situation is better described by thinking that the execution of…

  10. Total domination in interval graphs 

    January 1, 1988 | G. Ramalingam and C. Pandu Rangan

    A total dominating set of a graph G is a subset S of nodes such that each node of G is adjacent to some node of S. We present an O(n2) time algorithm for finding a minimum cardinality total dominating set in an interval graph…

  11. Structural Subtyping and the Notion of Power Type 

    January 1, 1988 | Luca Cardelli

    Many statically and dynamically typed languages attempt to achieve flexibility in their type discipline by some notion of subtyping. Subtyping relaxes the requirement that functions take arguments of a given type, by allowing arguments of any subtype of that type to be given. Such functions…

  12. Functional programming on the GRIP multiprocessor 

    January 1, 1988

    Most MIMD computer architectures can be classified as tightly-coupled or loosely-coupled, depending on the relative latencies seen by a processor accessing different parts of its address space. By adding microprogrammable functionality to the memory units, the authors have developed a MIMD computer architecture which explores…