Best-paper awards from prestigious research conferences won by personnel from Microsoft Research (list established in April 2010).

2013

IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2013

• Pinocchio: Nearly Practical Verifiable Computation—Bryan Parno, Microsoft Research, Craig Gentry, IBM Research, Jon Howell, Microsoft Research, and Mariana Raykova, IBM Research.

10th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation

• Embassies: Radically Refactoring the Web—Jon Howell, Microsoft Research; Bryan Parno, Microsoft Research; and John R. Douceur, Microsoft Research.

10th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management

• Extracting Information Nuggets from Disaster-Related Messages in Social Media—Muhammad Imran, University of Trento; Shady Elbassuoni, American University of Beirut; Carlos Castillo, Qatar Computing Research Institute; Fernando Diaz, Microsoft Research; and Patrick Meier, Qatar Computing Research Institute.

35th International Conference on Software Engineering, Software Engineering in Practice

• A Characteristic Study on Failures of Production Distributed Data-Parallel Programs—Sihan Li, North Carolina State University and Microsoft Research Asia; Hucheng Zhou, Microsoft Research Asia; Haoxiang Lin, Microsoft Research Asia; Tian Xiao, Microsoft Research Asia and Tsinghua University; Haibo Lin, Microsoft; Wei Lin, Microsoft; and Tao Xie, North Carolina State University.

IEEE Transactions on Multimedia 2013

• Video Annotation Through Search and Graph Reinforcement Mining—Emily Moxley, University of California, Santa Barbara; Tao Mei, Microsoft Research Asia;  and B.S. Manjunath, University of California, Santa Barbara.

ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2013

• IllumiRoom: Peripheral Projected Illusions for Interactive Experiences—Brett Jones, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Hrvoje Benko, Microsoft Research; Eyal Ofek, Microsoft Research; and Andy Wilson, Microsoft Research.
• Weighted Graph Comparison Techniques for Brain Connectivity Analysis—Basak Alper, University of California, Santa Barbara; Benjamin Bach, INRIA; Nathalie Henry Riche, Microsoft Research; Tobias Isenberg, INRIA; and Jean-Daniel Fekete, INRIA.

10th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation

• Embassies: Radically Refactoring the Web—Jon Howell, Microsoft Research; Bryan Parno, Microsoft Research; and John R. Douceur, Microsoft Research.

International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization 2013

• SIMD Parallelization of Applications that Traverse Irregular Data Structures—Bin Ren, The Ohio State University; Gagan Agrawal, The Ohio State University; Jim Larus, Microsoft Research; Todd Mytkowicz, Microsoft Research; Tomi Poutanen, Microsoft Research; and Wolfram Schulte, Microsoft Research.

18th Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Programming Languages Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming

• From Relational Verification to SIMD Loop Synthesis—Gilles Barthe, IMDEA Software Institute; Juan Manuel Crespo, IMDEA Software Institute; Sumit Gulwani, Microsoft Research; César Kunz, IMDEA Software Institute and Technical University of Madrid; and Mark Marron, IMDEA Software Institute.

2012

15th International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses

• Trusted VM Snapshots in Untrusted Cloud Infrastructures—Abhinav Srivastava, AT&T Labs Research; Himanshu Raj, Microsoft Research; Jonathon Giffin, Georgia Institute of Technology; and Paul England, Microsoft Research.

14th ACM International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing

• An Ultra-Low-Power Human Body Motion Sensor Using Static Electric Field Sensing—Gabe Cohn, University of Washington and Microsoft Research; Sidhant Gupta, University of Washington and Microsoft Research; Tien-Jui Lee, University of Washington; Dan Morris, Microsoft Research; Joshua Smith, University of Washington; Matthew Reynolds, Duke University; Desney Tan, Microsoft Research; and Shwetak Patel, University of Washington and Duke University.

Tenth International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services

• ACE: Exploiting Correlation for Energy-Efficient and Continuous Context Sensing—Suman Nath, Microsoft Research.

Asia Information Retrieval Societies 2012

• The Reusability of a Diversified Search Text Collection—Tetsuya Sakai, Microsoft Research Asia; Zhicheng Dou, Microsoft Research Asia; Ruihua Song, Microsoft Research Asia; and Noriko Kando, (Japan) National Institute of Informatics.

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award

For the authors of a paper of exceptional merit dealing with a subject related to the Society’s technical scope and appearing in one of the Society’s solely owned periodicals, irrespective of the author’s age. Eligibility is based on a five-year window.

• An Empirical Bayesian Strategy for Solving the Simultaneous Sparse Approximation Problem (2007)—David P. Wipf, University of California, San Francisco; and Bhaskar D. Rao, University of California, San Diego.

Fourth International Conference on Mobile Computing Applications and Services

• Visage: A Face Interpretation Engine for Smartphone Applications—Xiaochao Yang, Dartmouth College; Chuang-Wen You, Dartmouth College; Hong Lu, Intel; Mu Lin, Dartmouth College; Nicholas D. Lane, Microsoft Research Asia; and Andrew T. Campbell, Dartmouth College.

Visual Communications and Image Processing 2012

• Assessing Photo Quality with Geo-Context and Crowdsourced Photos (Best Student Paper)—Wenyuan Yin, State University of New York at Buffalo; Tao Mei, Microsoft Research Asia; and Chang Wen Chen, State University of New York at Buffalo.

International Symposium on Microarchitecture 2012

• Neural Acceleration for General-Purpose Approximate Programs (Top Picks in Computer Architecture)—Hadi Esmaeilzadeh, University of Washington; Adrian Sampson, University of Washington; Luis Ceze, University of Washington; and Doug Burger, Microsoft Research. 

28th IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering

• Temporal Analytics on Big Data for Web Advertising—Badrish Chandramouli, Microsoft Research Redmond; Jonathan Goldstein, Microsoft; and Songyun Duan, IBM T.J. Watson Research.

Information Systems Research—Best Published Paper

• The Effect of Online Privacy Information on Purchasing Behavior: An Experimental Study—Janice Y. Tsai, Carnegie Mellon University; Lorrie Cranor, Carnegie Mellon University; Serge Egelman, Carnegie Mellon University; and Alessandro Acquisti, Carnegie Mellon University.

33rd IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy

• User-Driven Access Control: Rethinking Permission Granting in Modern Operating Systems (Best Practical Paper)—Franziska Roesner, University of Washington; Tadayoshi Kohno, University of Washington; Alexander Moshchuk, Microsoft Research; Bryan Parno, Microsoft Research, Helen J. Wang, Microsoft Research.

14th Association for Computing Machinery International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services

• MemReflex: Adaptive Flashcards for Mobile Microlearning—Darren Edge, Microsoft Research Asia; Stephen Fitchett, Microsoft Research Asia and University of Canterbury; Michael Whitney, Microsoft Research Asia and University of North Carolina Charlotte; and James Landay, Microsoft Research Asia and University of Washington.

Seventh Workshop in Primary and Secondary Computing Education

• Challenge and Creativity: Using .NET Gadgeteer in Schools—Sue Sentence, Anglia Ruskin University, and Scarlet Schwiderski-Grosche, Microsoft Research Cambridge.

14th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing

• Automatically Characterizing Places with Opportunistic CrowdSensing using Smartphones—Yohan Chon, Yonsei University; Nicholas D. Lane, Microsoft Research Asia; Fan Li, Microsoft Research Asia; Hojung Cha, Yonsei University; and Feng Zhao, Microsoft Research Asia.

10th Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems

• Energy-Efficient GPS Sensing with Cloud Offloading—Jie Liu, Microsoft Research Redmond; Bodhi Priyantha, Microsoft Research Redmond; Ted Hart, Microsoft Research Redmond; Heitor S. Ramos, Federal University of Minas Gerais; Antonio A.F. Loureiro, Federal University of Minas Gerais; and Qiang Wang, Harbin Institute of Technology.

Fourth International Conference on Internet Multimedia Computing and Service

• AMIGO: Accurate Mobile Image Geotagging—Xiaobin Xu, University of Science and Technology of China; Tao Mei, Microsoft Research Asia; Wenjun Zeng, University of Missouri; Nenghai Yu, University of Science and Technology of China; and Jiebo Luo, University of Rochester.

25th Association for Computing Machinery Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology

• Cliplets: Juxtaposing Still and Dynamic Imagery—Neel Joshi, Microsoft Research; Sisil Mehta, Georgia Institute of Technology; Eric Stollnitz, Microsoft Research; Steven Drucker, Microsoft Research; Hugues Hoppe, Microsoft Research; Matt Uyttendaele, Microsoft Research; and Michael Cohen, Microsoft Research.

11th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems

• Predicting Your Own Effort—David F. Bacon, IBM Research; Yiling Chen, Harvard University; Ian Kash, Microsoft Research Cambridge; David C. Parkes, Harvard University; Malvika Rao, Harvard University; and Manu Sridharan, IBM Research.

International Conference on Software Engineering 2012 Software Engineering in Practice track

• Characterizing and Predicting Which Bugs Get Reopened—Thomas Zimmermann, Microsoft Research Redmond; Nachiappan Nagappan, Microsoft Research Redmond; Philip J. Guo, Stanford University; and Brendan Murphy, Microsoft Research Cambridge

Tenth International Conference on Pervasive Computing

• Interactive Environment-Aware Handheld Projectors for Pervasive Computing Spaces—David Molyneaux, Microsoft Research Cambridge and Lancaster University; Shahram Izadi, Microsoft Research Cambridge; David Kim, Microsoft Research Cambridge and Newcastle University; Otmar Hilleges, Microsoft Research Cambridge; Steve Hodges, Microsoft Research Cambridge; Xiang Cao, Microsoft Research Asia; Alex Butler, Microsoft Research Cambridge; and Hans Gellersen, Lancaster University.

2012 USENIX Annual Technical Conference

• Erasure Coding in Windows Azure Storage—Cheng Huang, Microsoft Research Redmond; Huseyin Simitci, Microsoft; Yikang Xu, Microsoft; Aaron Ogus, Microsoft; Brad Calder, Microsoft; Parikshit Gopalan, Microsoft Research Silicon Valley; Jin Li, Microsoft Research Redmond; and Sergey Yekhanin, Microsoft Research Silicon Valley.

13th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce

• Improving the Effectiveness of Time-Based Display Advertising—Daniel G. Goldstein, Yahoo! Research; R. Preston McAfee, Yahoo! Research; and Siddharth Suri, Yahoo! Research.

European Conference on Computer Systems 2012

• MadLINQ: Large-Scale Distributed Matrix Computation for the Cloud—Zhengping Qian, Microsoft Research Asia; Xiuwei Chen, Microsoft Research Asia; Nanxi Kang, Shanghai Jiaotong University; Mingcheng Chen, Shanghai Jiaotong University; Yuan Yu, Microsoft Research Silicon Valley; Thomas Moscibroda, Microsoft Research Asia; and Zheng Zhang, Microsoft Research Asia.

2011

ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering

• Proving Programs Robust—Swarat Chaudhuri, Rice University; Sumit Gulwani, Microsoft Research; Roberto Lublinerman, Pennsylvania State University; and Sara Navidpour, Pennsylvania State University.

Conference for Innovative Data Systems Research

• Hyder—A Transactional Record Manager for Shared Flash—Phil Bernstein, Microsoft; Colin W. Reid, Microsoft; and Sudipto Das, University of California, Santa Barbara.

Ninth International Conference on Pervasive Computing

• Learning Time-Based Presence Probabilities—John Krumm, Microsoft Research, and A.J. Bernheim Brush, Microsoft Research.

12th International Symposium on Spatial and Temporal Databases

• FAST: A Generic Framework for Flash-Aware Spatial Trees—Mohamed Sarwat, University of Minnesota; Mohamed F. Mokbel, University of Minnesota; Xun Zhou, University of Minnesota; and Suman Nath, Microsoft Research.

38th International Symposium on Computer Architecture

• Dark Silicon and the End of Multicore Scaling (Top Picks in Computer Architecture)—Hadi Esmaeilzadeh, University of Washington; Emily Blem, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Renée St. Amant, The University of Texas at Austin; Karthikeyan Sankaralingam, University of Wisconsin-Madison; and Doug Burger, Microsoft Research.

ACM Special Interest Group on Management of Data Test of Time Award

For the best paper from the SIGMOD proceedings 10 years prior based on the criterion of identifying the paper that has had the most impact over the intervening decade.

• Optimizing Queries Using Materialized Views: A Practical, Scalable Solution—Jonathan Goldstein, Microsoft Research, and Per-Åke Larson, Microsoft Research.

EuroSys 2011

• Cycles, Cells and Platters: An Empirical Analysis of Hardware Failures on a Million Consumer PCs—Edmund B. Nightingale, Microsoft Research; John R. Douceur, Microsoft Research; and Vince Orgovan, Microsoft.

Eighth International Conference on Emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies 2011

• Reclaiming the White Spaces: Spectrum Efficient Coexistence with Primary Users—George Nychis, Carnegie Mellon University; Ranveer Chandra, Microsoft Research Redmond; Thomas Moscibroda, Microsoft Research Asia; Ivan Tashev, Microsoft Research Redmond; and Peter Steenkiste, Carnegie Mellon University.

Second International Workshop on Sensing Applications on Mobile Phones

• Can Your Smartphone Infer Your Mood?—Robert LiKamWa, Rice University; Yunxin Liu, Microsoft Research Asia; Nicholas D. Lane, Microsoft Research Asia; and Lin Zhong, Rice University.

Ninth International Conference on Pervasive Computing

• Learning Time-Based Presence Probabilities—John Krumm, Microsoft Research Redmond, and A.J. Bernheim Brush, Microsoft Research Redmond.

IEEE Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2011

• Real-time Human Pose Recognition in Parts from Single Depth Images—Jamie Shotton, Microsoft Research Cambridge; Andrew Fitzgibbon, Microsoft Research Cambridge; Mat Cook, Microsoft Research Cambridge; Toby Sharp, Microsoft Research Cambridge; Mark Finocchio, Microsoft; Richard Moore, Microsoft; Alex Kipman, Microsoft; Andrew Blake, Microsoft Research Cambridge.

IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy

• How to Shop for Free Online — Security Analysis of Cashier-as-a-Service Based Web Stores—Rui Wang, Indiana University Bloomington; Shuo Chen, Microsoft Research; XiaoFeng Wang, Indiana University Bloomington; Shaz Qadeer, Microsoft Research.

USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies

• A Study of Practical Deduplication—Dutch T. Meyer, Microsoft Research Redmond and The University of British Columbia; and William J. Bolosky, Microsoft Research Redmond.

ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

• Your Noise is My Command: Sensing Gestures Using the Body as an Antenna—Gabe Cohn, Microsoft Research and the University of Washington; Daniel Morris, Microsoft Research; Shwetak Patel, Microsoft Research; and the University of Washington; and Desney Tan, Microsoft Research.
• Effects of Community Size and Contact Rate in Synchronous Social Q&A—Ryen White, Microsoft Research; Matthew Richardson, Microsoft Research; and Yandong Liu, Carnegie Mellon University.

Best Notes

• Interactive Generator: A Self-Powered Haptic Feedback Device—Akash Badshah, Phillips Exeter Academy; Sidhant Gupta, University of Washington; Gabe Cohn , University of Washington; Nicolas Villar, Microsoft Research; Steve Hodges, Microsoft Research; Shwetak Patel, University of Washington.

2010

16th IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium

• Energy-optimal Batching Periods for Asynchronous Multistage Data Processing on Sensor Nodes: Foundations and an mPlatform Case Study—Qing Cao, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Dong Wang, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Tarek Abdelzaher, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Bodhi Priyantha, Microsoft Research; Jie Liu, Microsoft Research; and Feng Zhao, Microsoft Research.

Asia Information Retrieval Societies 2010

• Relevance Ranking using Kernels—Jun Xu, Microsoft Research Asia; Hang Li, Microsoft Research Asia; and Chaoliang Zhong, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications.

15th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems

• Dynamically Replicated Memory: Building Reliable Systems from Nanoscale Resistive Memories—Engin Ipek, University of Rochester; Jeremy Condit, Microsoft Research; Edmund B. Nightingale, Microsoft Research; Doug Burger, Microsoft Research; and Thomas Moscibroda, Microsoft Research.

33rd Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval

• Assessing the Scenic Route: Measuring the Value of Search Trails in Web Logs—Ryen W. White, Microsoft Research, and Jeff Huang, University of Washington.

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology—John Wiley Best JASIST Paper

• Evaluating Advanced Search Interfaces using Established Information-Seeking Models—Max L. Wilson, University of Southampton; m.c. schraefel, University of Southampton; and Ryen W. White, Microsoft Research.

USENIX Annual Technical Conference 2010

• LiteGreen: Saving Energy in Networked Desktops Using Virtualization—Tathagata Das, Microsoft Research India; Pradeep Padala, DOCOMO USA Labs; Venkata N. Padmanabhan, Microsoft Research India; Ramachandran Ramjee, Microsoft Research India; and Kang G. Shin, University of Michigan.

ACM International Conference on Emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies

• ICTCP: Incast Congestion Control for TCP in Data Center Networks—Haitao Wu, Microsoft Research Asia; Zhenqian Feng, Microsoft Research Asia and the National University of Defense Technology; Chuanxiong Guo, Microsoft Research Asia; and Yongguang Zhang, Microsoft Research Asia.

14th biennial conference of the International Society for Augmentative and Alternative Communication

• From Holant to #CSP and Back: Dichotomy for Holant^c Problems—Jin-Yi Cai, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Sangxia Huang, Shanghai Jiao Tong University; and Pinyan Lu, Microsoft Research Asia.

European Conference on Computer Vision

• Graph Cut based Inference with Co-occurrence Statistics—Ľubor Ladický, Oxford Brookes University; Chris Russell, Oxford Brookes University; Pushmeet Kohil, Microsoft Research Cambridge; and Philip H.S. Torr, Oxford Brookes University.

Fourth International ICST Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare 2010

• Automatic Classification of Daily Fluid Intake—Jonathan Lester, University of Washington; Desney Tan, Microsoft Research Redmond; Shwetak Patel, University of Washington; A.J. Bernheim Brush, Microsoft Research Redmond.

 Foundations of Computer Science

• Computational Transition at the Uniqueness Threshold—Allan Sly, Microsoft Research Redmond.
• Subexponential Algorithms for Unique Games and Related Problems—Sanjeev Arora, Princeton University; Boaz Barak, Princeton University (now with Microsoft Research New England); and David Steurer, Princeton University (now with Microsoft Research New England).

Symposium on Usable Privacy and Secuirty

• Where Do Security Policies Come From?—Dinei Florêncio, Microsoft Research Redmond; and Cormac Herley, Microsoft Research Redmond.

ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce

• Truthful Mechanisms with Implicit Payment Computation—Moshe Babaioff, Microsoft Research Silicon Valley; Robert D. Kleinberg, Cornell University; and Aleksandrs Slivkins, Microsoft Research Silicon Valley.

ACM SIGPLAN Outstanding Dissertation Award, 2010

• Akash Lal, for the unusual scope and depth of the dissertation Interprocedural Analysis and the Verification of Concurrent Programs and its excellent presentation.
• Bill Thies, for the novel and interdisciplinary nature of the work detailed in Language and Compiler Support for Stream Programs, the care given to evaluation, and the quality of the presentation.

ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

• A Longitudinal Study of How Highlighting Web Content Change Affects People’s Web Interactions—Jaime Teevan, Microsoft Research Redmond; Susan Dumais, Microsoft Research Redmond; and Dan Liebling, Microsoft Research Redmond.
• Mobile-izing Health Workers in Rural India—Divya Ramachandran, University of California, Berkeley; John Canny, University of California, Berkeley; Prabhu Dutta Das, Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology; and Ed Cutrell, Microsoft Research India.
• Skinput: Appropriating the Body as an Input Surface—Chris Harrison, Carnegie Mellon University; Desney Tan, Microsoft Research Redmond; Dan Morris, Microsoft Research Redmond.

2009

22nd Annual Association for Computing Machinery Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology

• Mouse 2.0: Multi-touch Meets the Mouse—Nicolas Villar, Microsoft Research Cambridge; Shahram Izadi, Microsoft Research Cambridge; Hrvoje Benko, Microsoft Research Redmond; John Helmes, Microsoft Research Cambridge; Dan Rosenfeld, Microsoft; Eyal Ofek, Microsoft Research Redmond; Jonathan Westhues, Microsoft; Alex Butler, Microsoft Research Cambridge; Xiang Cao, Microsoft Research Cambridge; Bill Chen, Microsoft; and Steve Hodges, Microsoft Research Cambridge.

36th International Symposium on Computer Architecture

• Architecting Phase Change Memory as a Scalable DRAM Alternative (Top Picks in Computer Architecture)—Benjamin C. Lee, Microsoft Research; Engin Ipek, Microsoft Research; Onur Mutlu, Carnegie Mellon University; and Doug Burger, Microsoft Research.

14th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems

• An Evaluation of the TRIPS Computer System—Mark Gebhart, The University of Texas at Austin; Bertrand A. Maher, The University of Texas at Austin; Katherine E. Coons; The University of Texas at Austin; Jeff Diamond, The University of Texas at Austin; Paul Gratz, The University of Texas at Austin; Mario Marino, The University of Texas at Austin; Nitya Ranganathan, The University of Texas at Austin; Behnam Robatmili, The University of Texas at Austin; Aaron Smith, The University of Texas at Austin; James Burrill, The University of Texas at Austin; Stephen W. Keckler, The University of Texas at Austin; Doug Burger, The University of Texas at Austin; and Kathryn S. McKinley, The University of Texas at Austin.

Sixth USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation

• TrInc: Small Trusted Hardware for Large distributed Systems—Dave Levin, University of Maryland; John R. Douceur, Microsoft Research; Jacob R. Lorch, Microsoft Research; and Thomas Moscibroda, Microsoft Research.

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers International Conference on Multimedia and Expo

• Multi-Rate Peer-to-Peer Video Conferencing: A Distributed Approach Using Scalable Coding—Miroslav Ponec, Akamai Technologies and Polytechnic Institute of NYU; Sudipta Sengupta, Microsoft Research Redmond; Minghua Chen, The Chinese University of Hong Kong; Jin Li, Microsoft Research Redmond; and Philip A. Chou, Microsoft Research Redmond.

• Microsoft Research Awards