Microsoft Research and the Environment
Computing offers many opportunities to maintain and enhance our environment, and Microsoft Research is examining the most promising strategies to do so. From sensor networks that cool data centers to efficiencies to reduce their power consumption, and from traffic assistance for commuters to efficient scientific workflows, Microsoft Research is exploring ways to protect our planet.
Feature Stories
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Peering into Future of Cloud Computing Dan Reed of the Cloud Computing Futures group in Microsoft Research discusses his team’s work in improving the performance and efficiency of data centers. |
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Digital Green Reaps Honor for Helping Improve Agricultural Efficiency Digital Green, a project from Microsoft Research India, won an award in the Stockholm Challenge for novel attempts to use digital video and mediated instruction to popularize the adoption of effective agricultural practices in the developing world. |
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Understanding Climate Change—One Tree at a Time Drew Purves, scientist at Microsoft Research Cambridge, co-authored two papers published in the latest issue of Science, discussing new techniques for understanding forest dynamics and how that understanding could help combat climate change. |
Environmental Research and Groups
- Autonomous Monitoring of Vulnerable Ecosystems Automatically monitoring the effects of changing environmental conditions on the ecology and behavior of indicator species.
- Computational Ecology and Environmental Science
Developing novel computational tools and methods to predict and mitigate the rapid changes occurring in the earth’s life support systems. - DC Genome Project
Leveraging networked sensing and control technologies to understand and optimize data center energy consumption. - Digital Geographics
Seekingto further the state-of-the-art in the representation, analysis, and visualization of digitized geographic information. - Digital Green
Developing a participatory framework for agricultural extension through digital video. - Digital Watershed
Transforming the field of hydrology with the development of integrated software/hardware solutions. - DiskEnergy
Providing power savings of 45-60% by temporarily off-loading the write requests to other volumes in the data center. - Earth, Energy, and Environment
Working to advance the development and adoption of technologies for scientific visualization and data management, especially for accelerating insight in environmental and earth sciences.
- Fluxnet
Driving global science collaboration to more effectively manage our terrestrial resources in the face of climate change. - Life Under Your Feet
Revolutionizing soil ecology with wireless sensor networks that can provide measurements at previously impossible temporal and spatial granularities. - Low-Power Wireless Projects
Exploring different aspects of low power wireless communications, enabling a variety of always-connected application scenarios. - Networked Embedded Computing
Developing new architectures, models, and tools for organizing and programming these systems, and innovative applications in areas such as security, transportation, and healthcare. - SEAMONSTER
Advancing climate change research through the development of remote monitoring tools for harsh environments. - SenseWeb
Developing a sensor community infrastructure and innovative tools for publishing, managing, querying, and visualizing sensor data. - Trident Workbench
Enabling scientists to explore and visualize oceanographic data in real-time and to visually compose, run and catalogue workflows.
News
Publications
- Energy Aware Consolidation for Cloud Computing
- Energy-Aware Server Provisioning and Load Dispatching
- Energy-efficiency and storage flexibility in the Blue File System
- Energy Efficient Sensor Data Logging with Amnesic Flash Storage
- Energy-Optimal Software Partitioning in Heterogeneous Multiprocessor Embedded Systems
- Everest: Scaling down peak loads through I/O off-loading
- FineGrained Energy Profiling for Power Aware Application Design
- FusionFlow: Discrete-Continuous Optimization for Optical Flow Estimation
- Minimum-energy multicast in mobile ad hoc networks using network coding
- Project Genome: Wireless Sensor Network for Data Center Cooling
- Reduce, Reuse & Recycle: Efficiently Solving Multi-Label MRFs
- SenseWeb: An Infrastructure for Shared Sensing
- Somniloquy: Augmenting Network Interfaces to Reduce PC Energy Usage
- Towards Discovering Data Center Genome Using Sensor Nets
- Toward Energy Efficient Design of Multi-Radio Platforms for Wireless Sensor Networks
- Trident Workbench: A Scientific Workflow System
- Write Off-Loading: Practical Power Management for Enterprise Storage
