Other Areas of Research

Microsoft Research pursues projects in a wide variety of directions, not all of which fall neatly into a particular discipline. A few examples of research that, while difficult to classify, remains critical to advancing the state of the art in computer science and related fields.

 

 

Recent Projects
  • Neural Networks for Software Developers
    There is some evidence that a gap exists between the neural network research and software development communities. Although neural networks have been investigated for decades, source code examples available to software developers are often incomplete, misleading, or just plain incorrect. The goal of this project is to bridge that gap by providing a series of high quality demo programs and code examples.
  • Pex4Fun
    Pex4Fun is a browser-based teaching and learning environment targeting teachers and students for introductory to advanced programming or software engineering courses. At the core of the platform is an automated grading engine based on symbolic execution. In Pex4Fun, teachers can create virtual classrooms, customize existing courses, and publish new learning material including learning games.
  • Column store technology
    Column store technology can provide very substantial performance improvements on data warehousing workloads. This project investigated how to integrate columnar storage into SQL Server. The solution adopted was to add a new index type, columnstore index, that stores data column wise instead of row wise. Columnstore indexes first shipped in SQL Server 2012 and significant enhancements will be included in the next release.
  • ASHA Assist
    This project focuses on rural government maternal health workers in India (called Accredited Social Health Activists, or ASHAs), using a tool called ASHA Assist to help ASHAs engage their clients in persuasive discussions about various topics related to maternal health. ASHA Assist consists of interactive videos on mobile phones, covering topics related to maternal health for use in counseling their clients.

More projects...

Recent Publications