Internet Services Research Center (ISRC)

The Internet Services Research Center (ISRC) is a specialized research group, focusing on all aspects of internet services. We see applications moving to the cloud, with Web search posing deep technical challenges, and with mobility, social networks, data mining, and system structures seeing huge changes. We work to accelerate innovations in search and ad technologies, and partner with other parts of Microsoft to rapidly deliver them to our search products, customers, and advertisers.

New in the News:

How to Shop for Free Online: Rui Wang, Shuo Chen, XiaoFeng Wang and Shaz Qadeer win Best Practical Paper Award at IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy Conference 2011.

Researchers find major flaws in online payment systems

CNN writes an article about Shuo Chen's research: "A group of security researchers say software flaws in the ways major merchants have implemented payment systems from PayPal, Amazon Payments and Google Checkout allowed them to buy products online for free or at a deep discount". April 13, 2011.

Featured Projects:

Facto

Facto is a fact lookup engine that can directly answer your fact-based queries, such as “how old is Britney Spears” or “mass of Mars”. Facto crawls structured data from tables on the web and answers your questions when corresponding data is available. Please give Facto a try and learn how it works.

Microsoft Web N-gram Services

In partnership with Bing, we invite the whole community to use the Web N-gram services. Access petabytes of data via a cloud-based platform to drive discovery and innovation in web search, natural language processing, speech, and related areas. Take advantage of real-world web-scale data, with regular data updates for projects that benefit from dynamic data.

ISRC Research Groups

ISRC Director: Yi-Min Wang

Human Intelligence Technology (HIT) Group
Manager: Kuansan Wang
- Group Members: Paul Hsu, Nikolas Gloy, Ricky Loynd
- R&D Areas: Web-Scale Language Model, Search User Behavior Model, Dialog Model
ISRC Advanced Development Group (ADG)
Manager: Johnson Apacible
- Group Members: Mark Encarnacion, Atilla Gunal, Krishna Nareddy, Yutaka Suzue, Riyaaz Shaik, Woon Kiat Wong
- R&D Areas: Search Ecosystem, Structured Data Search, Micro-Verticals
Search Quality Intelligence (SQI) Group
Manager: Li-wei He
- Group Members: Jinliang Fan, Yang Song, Ethan Tu, Hung-chih Yang
- R&D Areas: Search Quality, Competitive Analysis
Systems & Social Networking
Manager: Emre Kiciman
- Team Member: Chun-Kai Wang
Data Intelligence Group (DIG)
Manager: Chao Liu
- Team Member: Hao Ma
Other ISRC Members
- Shuo Chen, Peter Bodik, Wenzhao Tan, Xiaoxin Yin

Selected Publications

Chao Liu, Ryen White and Susan Dumais, Weibull Analysis of Webpage Dwell Time and Its Implications for Understanding User Browsing Behavior in SIGIR 2010
Kuansan Wang, Xiaolong Li and Jianfeng Gao, Multi-style Language Model for Web Scale Information Retrieval in SIGIR 2010
Xiaoxin Yin, Wenzhao Tan, Xiao Li, and Yi-Chin Tu, Automatic Extraction of Clickable Structured Web Contents for Name Entity Queries in WWW 2010.
Xiaoxin Yin and Sarthak Shah, Building Taxonomy of Web Search Intents for Name Entity in WWW 2010.
Yang Song and Li-wei He, Optimal Rare Query Suggestion With Implicit User Feedback in WWW 2010.
Chao Liu, Hung-chih Yang, Jinliang Fan, Li-Wei He, and Yi-Min Wang, Distributed Non-negative Matrix Factorization for Web-Scale Dyadic Data Analysis on MapReduce in WWW 2010
Jian Huang, Jianfeng Gao, Xiaolong Li, Kuansan Wang, and Jiangbo Miao, Exploring Web Scale Language Models for Search Query Processing in WWW 2010.
Hongwen Kang, Kuansan Wang, David Soukal, and Fritz Behr, Large-Scale Bot Detection for Search Engines in WWW 2010
Shuo Chen, Rui Wang, XiaoFeng Wang, and Kehuan Zhang, in Side-Channel Leaks in Web Applications: a Reality Today, a Challenge Tomorrow in IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy (Oakland 2010)
Zhichun Li, Ming Zhang, Zhaosheng Zhu, Yan Chen, Albert Greenberg and Yi-Min Wang, WebProphet: Automating Performance Prediction for Web Services, the 7th Usenix Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), April 2010
Chao Liu, Mei Li, and Yi-Min Wang, Post-Rank Reordering: Resolving Preference Misalignments between Search Engines and End Users, in CIKM '09: Proceedings of The 18th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., November 2009
Emre Kiciman, Benjamin Livshits, and Madanlal Musuvathi, CatchAndRetry: Extending Exceptions to Handle Distributed System Failures and Recovery, in Programming Languages and Operating Systems (PLOS), October 2009
Chao Liu, Fan Guo, and Christos Faloutsos, BBM: Bayesian Browsing Model from Petabyte-scale Data, in KDD '09: Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., June 2009
Emre Kiciman, Ben Livshits, and Madanlal Musuvathi, FLUXO: A Simple Service Compiler, in 12th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems, USENIX, 18 May 2009
Shuo Chen, Ziqing Mao, Yi-Min Wang, and Ming Zhang, Pretty-Bad-Proxy: An Overlooked Adversary in Browsers’ HTTPS Deployments, in Proceedings of IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland), IEEE Computer Society, May 2009
Kuansan Wang, Toby Walker, and Zijian Zheng, PSkip: estimating relevance ranking quality from web search clickthrough data, in KDD '09: Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2009
Fan Guo, Chao Liu, Anitha Kannan, Tom Minka, Michael Taylor, Yi-Min Wang, and Christos Faloutsos, Click Chain Model in Web Search, in WWW'09: Proceedings of the 18th International World Wide Web Conference, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., April 2009
Kuansan Wang and Xiaolong Li, Efficacy of A Constantly Adaptive Language Modeling Technique for Web-Scale Applications, in Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP'2009), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc., Taipei, Taiwan, April 2009
Fan Guo, Chao Liu, and Yi-Min Wang, Efficient multiple-click models in web search, in WSDM'09: Proceedings of the Second ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., February 2009