Microsoft Research Blog

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  1. Relevance, Retrieval and Document Spaces 

    January 1, 1979 | Stephen Robertson

    It has long been accepted that, in documentary information retrieval, we can seldom expect to find a document or documents that match the initial statement of a query precisely in every detail. Some documents may be found which match the query to a greater or…

  2. Using Encryption for authentication in large networks of computers 

    December 1, 1978 | Mike Schroeder

    Use of encryption to achieve authenticated communication in computer networks is discussed. Example protocols are presented for the establishment of authenticated connections, for the management of authenticated mail, and for signature verification and document integrity guarantee. Both conventional and public-key encryption algorithms are considered as…

  3. On-the-fly Garbage Collection: an Exercise in Cooperation 

    November 5, 1978

    This paper presents the first concurrent garbage collection algorithm--that is, an algorithm in which the collector operates concurrently with the process that creates the garbage. The paper is fairly well known; its history is not. I received an early version of the paper from Dijkstra,…

  4. A Sophisticate’s Introduction to Database Normalization Theory 

    September 1, 1978 | Catriel Beeri, Phil Bernstein, and Nathan Goodman

    Formal database semantics has concentrated onĀ  dependency constraints, such as functional and multivalued dependencies, and on normal forms for relations. Unfortunately, much of this work has been inaccessible to researchers outside this field, due to the unfamiliar formalism in which the work is couched. In…

  5. An Asynchronous Garbage Collector for the Cap Filing System 

    April 1, 1978 | Andrew Birrell

    The CAP filing system [Needham and Birrell 1977] is able to produce garbage or 'lost objects' on disc, because its directory structure is a general naming network containing, in principle, cyclic substructures. Such substructures may become inaccessible as a result of deletion of capabilities or…

  6. Simulation of Wrinkled Surfaces 

    January 1, 1978 | Jim Blinn

    Computer generated shaded images have reached an impressive degree of realism with the current state of the art. They are not so realistic, however, that they would fool many people into believing they are real. One problem is that the surfaces tend to look artificial…

  7. A Scan Line Algorithm for Displaying Parametrically Defined Surfaces 

    January 1, 1978 | Jim Blinn

    This paper presents a scan line algorithm for drawing pictures of parametrically defined surfaces. A scan line algorithm is characterized by the order in which it generates the picture elements of the image. These are generated left to right, top to bottom in much the…