Learn about the many great women in computing careers at Microsoft. Meet Kristin Tolle, director of development infrastructure in Microsoft Research Connections. She currently manages development efforts for environmental science and previously worked on the development of Microsoft Translator Hub, an extension of the Microsoft Translator platform that empowers businesses and communities to build customized automatic language translation systems.

David Breashears, founder and executive director of GlacierWorks, delivers this keynote presentation at the 2012 Microsoft Research Faculty Summit.

The Himalaya Mountains are home to the world’s most magnificent peaks and thousands of high-altitude glaciers. These important glaciers supply crucial seasonal flows to rivers across Asia, yet many are disappearing at an increasing rate. In this session, mountaineer and photographer David Breashears presents his recent photographs of the world’s least studied glaciers. By comparing them to archival photographs taken over the past century by the world’s greatest alpine photographers, the alarming loss of ice is starkly revealed.

Hear from researchers who are using computer science to solve some of the world’s most vexing problems and get insight into their current projects.

In this video, Jaime Teevan presents her research on information retrieval and how social media question asking is changing the nature of search.

The development of graphical models and the logic of counterfactuals have had a marked effect on the way scientists treat problems involving cause-effect relationships. Practical problems requiring causal information, which long were regarded as either metaphysical or unmanageable can now be solved using elementary mathematics. Moreover, problems that were thought to be purely statistical, are beginning to benefit from analyzing their causal roots.

Data is accumulating at such a rate that there are no longer enough qualified humans to analyse it. Machine learning is needed to make data useful in many sectors which are drowning in it. Examples abound from healthcare, genomics, oil exploration, marketing etc. There have been 5 distinct waves of computing which all had the human at the centre of the industry. The internet of things will change this. Most communication will be between machines. To make them useful to us again they will need machine learning. This puts machine learning at the centre of the next 6th wave of computing.

Currently, endangered species in Latin America are insufficiently studied compared to North America and Europe. Researchers at Microsoft Research, LACCIR Virtual Institute and Pontifical Catholic University of Chile are collaborating to develop better tools that provide a fresh approach for researchers and citizen scientists to map the distribution of endangered wildlife.

Direct processing of real-time data can provide a crucial edge in the software-and-services industry. Combining such processing with machine learning can provide a reasoning flow and enable runtime updates of the machine-learning model. Customer scenarios in manufacturing and IT services will benefit.

Until recently, the wet lab has been a crucial component of every biologist. Today’s advances in the production of massive amounts of data and the creation of machine-learning algorithms for processing that data are changing the face of biological science--making it possible to do real science without a wet lab. David Heckerman shares several examples of how this transformation in the area of genomics is changing the pace of scientific breakthroughs.