The Dryad Project is investigating programming models for writing parallel and distributed programs to scale from a small cluster to a large data-center.

DryadLINQ is a simple, powerful, and elegant programming environment for writing large-scale data parallel applications running on large PC clusters.

NodeXL is a powerful and easy-to-use interactive network visualisation and analysis tool that leverages the widely available MS Excel application as the platform for representing generic graph data, performing advanced network analysis and visual exploration of networks. The tool supports multiple social network data providers that import graph data (nodes and edge lists) into the Excel spreadsheet.

With Project Hawaii, you can develop cloud-enhanced Windows Phone that access a set of cloud services and Windows Azure for computation and data storage. Project Hawaii provides the tools and services; you provide the creativity and imagination.

Project Trident: A Scientific Workflow Workbench is a set of tools based on the Windows Workflow Foundation that addresses scientists’ need for a flexible, powerful way to analyze large, diverse datasets. It includes graphical tools for creating, running, managing, and sharing workflows and can run workflows on a Windows HPC Server 2008 cluster. For more information, please visit the following Trident home page:

The VRE Toolkits for SharePoint is a collaborative, multi-institutional effort to create a set of researcher-focused extensions to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2010, in order to provide core research project management and workflow capabilities, and to extend into a number of domain specific research and data management arenas.

Access petabytes of data via the Web N-gram services (Public Beta). We invite the whole community to use the Web N-gram services, made available via a cloud-based platform, to drive discovery and innovation in web search, natural language processing, speech, and related areas by conducting research on real-world web-scale data, taking advantage of regular data updates for projects that benefit from dynamic data.

Environmental Informatics Framework (EIF) is a strategy for using cutting-edge Microsoft technologies to advance environmental data discoverability, accessibility, and consumability.

SciScope (www.sciscope.org) is a search engine for environmental data. It currently facilitates data discovery and retrieval from 1.7 million sites across the United States operated by U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) as well as individual researchers and smaller regional agencies.

Imagine having the ability to take a virtual tour of the cosmos from your living room. Not just a flat, two dimensional tour, but an experience so engrossing that you have the ability to see the entire sky at once then zoom into detailed views of distant galaxies. The Terapixel project from Microsoft Research makes all of that possible, by creating the largest and clearest image of the night sky ever produced—a terapixel image, now available in the WorldWide Telescope and Bing Maps.

WorldWide Telescope is both a viewer of the universe and a developer’s tool to produce specialized and wonderful visualizations of astronomical and planetary data.

This add-in for Microsoft Word enables authors and editors to save Word files in the National Library of Medicine's NLM DTD (article or book) format, which is used for publishing and archiving. In addition, the add-in enables more metadata to be captured and stored at the authoring stage and enables semantic information to be preserved through the publishing process, which is essential for enabling search and semantic analysis once the articles are archived within information repositories.

Microsoft Research Connections funded projects at five universities to explore potential applications of Microsoft Surface technology in education. Topics included input methods for mathematical and scientific diagramming applications, approaches for managing research and teaching materials and facilitating collaborative laboratory work, hybrid applications with other technologies, control systems for mixing music, and gestural vocabularies.

This project supports the authoring and rendering of semantically rich chemistry information in Microsfot Word documents. The Chemistry Add-in for Word makes it easier to insert and modify chemical information, such as labels, formulas, and 2-D depictions, within Word. It enables the creation of inline chemical zones, the rendering of print-ready visual depictions of chemical structures, and the ability to store and expose chemical information in a semantically rich manner.

The primary goal of ChronoZoom is to make time relationships between different studies of history clear and vivid. In the process, it provides a framework for exploring related electronic resources. It thus serves as a "master timeline" tying together all kinds of specialized timelines and electronic resources, and aspires to bridge the gap between the humanities and the sciences and to bring together and unify all knowledge of the past.

This add-in for Microsoft Office enables authors and editors to embed Creative Commons licenses directly into Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel documents. With a Creative Commons license, authors can express their intentions regarding how their works may be used by others. The add-in allows the selection of a license, downloads it from the Creative Commons website, and inserts it directly into the working document.

This apps provides electronic program guides for conferences. The app includes information on the sessions and talks of the conference and co-located events. The "Now" page indicates what sessions are happening at the moment and what sessions are next. Tap on a paper to see its abstract and add it to favorites if you like it.

ConferenceXP integrates recent advances in high-performance audio, video, and network technologies to seamlessly connect multiple, distant participants in a rich, immersive environment for distance conferencing, instruction, and collaboration. ConferenceXP provides an extensible foundation for interactive collaborative environments and serves as a research platform for designing and implementing distance conferencing and learning applications.

Digital Humanities is about applying new technologies to enhancing the scholarly lifecycle, preserving and exposing collections that are otherwise difficult to access, encouraging new creative expression by using digital media, and studying the impact of technology in the humanities or providing cultural commentary. Digital Heritage is a subset of Digital Humanities that focuses on preserving and exploring our combined cultural heritage.

We think differently about games. Instead of disconnected experiences that are difficult to assess, we empower the educator to teach in new ways. Technological innovations drive our research toward building a new platform for education. Instrumentation of the digital and analog worlds of educators, students, administrations, and institutions enables new kinds of longitudinal studies. We engage with the community and advocate within Microsoft to transform the education experience.

Just Press Play is a collaboration with Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) to wrap gameful and ludic experiences around the traditional pedagogical processes of a modern university. Starting in October of 2011, 750 students at RIT’s school of Interactive Games and Media received some cryptic instructions to log onto a website, create a profile, talk to a professor, and pick up a keychain.

Created for Microsoft Surface 2.0 by the Graphics, Visualization, and Interaction Group at Brown University, led by Andy van Dan, LADS is a platform for viewing large, digitized images on touch screen devices. LADS takes advantage of Deep Zoom, Surface, and other novel Microsoft technologies to create an intuitive browsing experience combined with a simple and powerful authoring interface.

Emerging from an ongoing relationship between Microsoft Research Connections and Miguel Nussbaum at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, the One Mouse Per Child project is a broad spectrum of experiments in the education space around games for learning. Using Single Display Groupware and multiple mice, collaborative learning activities are supported which improve the way resources can be used in schools and foster personalized learning with individual feedback.

Microsoft Research Connections' goal with this project is to enable communities who maintain ontologies to more easily experiment and to enhance the experience of authors who use Microsoft Word for content creation, incorporating semantic knowledge into the content. This add-in is intended to simplify the development and validation of ontologies.

The Research Information Centre (RIC) is a virtual research environment framework jointly developed by Microsoft Research Connections and The British Library.

Supporting collaborations between major research institutions and Microsoft Research Connections, this program intends to build the foundations for a unified game layer for education. By instrumenting our everyday experiences, we can transform them into gameful experiences and, by doing so, provide the inputs for entirely new capabilities such as eportfolios, adaptive learning, and project-based learning. We look forward to inviting you to the game!

Zentity is a research output repository platform that provides a suite of building blocks, tools, and services that help you create and maintain an organization’s digital library ecosystem. With Zentity, researchers can easily access, analyze, and unlock the previously hidden structure and relationships among data elements, as well as extend existing data models by adding additional relationships and properties to these relationships. Zentity is flexible and extensible.

The Microsoft Biology Initiative (MBI) is a Microsoft Research effort to bring new technology and tools to bioinformatics and biology research. This initiative is comprised of two primary components, .NET Bio (formerly Microsoft Biology Foundation [MBF]) and the Microsoft Biology Tools (MBT).

SenseCam is a wearable camera with a wide-angle lens that takes periodically photos without user intervention. This simple device turns out to have many valuable applications.

The Kinect for Windows SDK beta from Microsoft Research is a programming toolkit for application developers. It enables the academic and enthusiast communities easy access to the capabilities offered by the Microsoft Kinect device connected to computers running the Windows 7 operating system.