(ii) Implementation

Innovation is the lifeblood of the computer industry. It is the spark that transforms random, pixelated Xs and Os into software that continually expands the world of knowledge at our fingertips, and makes the virtual strings that now connect people and ideas around the world ever stronger and more resilient. It nibbles away at today’s technical mountains until they are tomorrow’s molehills.

Innovation abounds at Microsoft Research. Since Microsoft Corporation established it in 1991, Microsoft Research has become one of the largest, fastest-growing, most respected software research organizations in the world. Its distinguished researchers and scientists help shape the computing experience of millions of people worldwide, with innovations that enhance virtually every product Microsoft now releases. These innovations have fueled scores of incremental advances and giant technological leaps.

Thanks to Microsoft Research breakthroughs...

• Ordinary LCD screens can offer crisp, high-resolution display of text during those long days sitting in front of the PC.
• E-mail services can be easily trained by users, based on their individual preferences, to zap as much 90 percent of spam before it arrives in their inbox.
• Hours upon hours of meandering digital home movies can be quickly and easily edited into professional-looking episodes, with tools that automatically group together related scenes, extract key frames and synchronize images to musical beats.
• Web searches provide answers to questions, not just links to relevant Web sites.
• Microsoft programmers have tools that allow them to ensure the accuracy of the millions of lines of code in today’s increasingly technical software before it gets integrated into products.
• Databases can employ the rules of probability and pattern detection that enable retailers to sniff out customer preferences and sales trends — or scientists to detect even the faintest undiscovered stars within millions of astronomic images.
• People can take a break from typing and instead use digital “ink” to write notes by hand directly onto the screen of Tablet PCs.
• On-screen graphics make the fur on Xbox video-game creatures look real enough to comb and water look real enough to jump into and take a swim.

These are just a handful of the advances that the innovative minds at Microsoft Research have helped produce. Read on and you’ll discover more, along with how Microsoft helps cultivate innovation within its research organization.

Overcoming Information Overload

The Challenge

Our world is buried in digital information — on home PCs, corporate servers, or online. Some of this information has immense value — whether it is old family photos, decades of corporate sales records, or scientific research stored in massive data stores at distant points around the globe. But to be useful, the information must be easy to find and analyze, even on the Internet where query results often include extraneous information.

The Solution

Microsoft researchers are investigating the search, retrieval, and management technologies needed to combat information overload. They are building the core systems infrastructure, along with novel algorithms and heuristics, for ranking and classifying Web pages. They also are studying basic properties of the Web and mining logs of Internet queries in search of temporal patterns within online information.

For example, researchers are working on a category of link-based ranking algorithms called query-dependent. This approach depends on an analysis of the Web graph, a mathematical model in which individual Web pages represent vertices in the graph, and hyperlinks between the Web pages represent connections between the vertices. The Scalable Hyperlink Store, an in-memory database that contains the Web graph, is distributed onto a large set of computers. Using a sample search corpus — about 25 billion hyperlinks — stored in the Scalable Hyperlink Store, researchers are working to determine if query-dependent ranking is superior to other ranking methods.

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Contents

• Advancing the Frontiers of Computing
• Microsoft Research: Making the Impossible Possible
• Creating a Foundation for Technology Breakthroughs
• Assembling an All-Star Team of Research Talent
• Imagining What Comes Next
• Putting Innovation to Work in Microsoft Products
• Advancing the State of the Art
• Planting the Seeds of Future Innovation
• Building a Global Think Tank