Shedding Light on Code Clones in Software Development

In this talk, Dongmei Zhang, research manager from Microsoft Research Asia, will discuss the Code Clone analysis techniques that Microsoft Research has created to help developers find similar code. This aids in software development, helping to isolate bugs and working to reduce code "bloat" as more and more code is copied and grouped together.

The War On Error

This panel of researchers from Microsoft Research Cambridge discusses the field of software verification, looking back at its history, the latest successes and what challenges the future holds.

TILT: Rectify everything you see

The world is full of textures, be it faces, buildings, bar codes, or license plates. There are many local similarities and symmetries. Objects seen through a camera can be distorted by the angle or simply through the curvature of the object. In this talk, Yi Ma , principal researcher from Microsoft Research Asia explores how human beings can recognize these items despite these distortions.

Crunching Big Data

Distributed Computing has been a key focus for the Silicon Valley lab since its inception, Mihai Budiu, Researcher at Microsoft Silicon Valley talks about the importance of this work, especially when dealing with massive amounts of data that new cloud computing scenarios must handle. Examples of how Microsoft is using Dryad technologies developed in the lab to deliver better customer experiences thru Bing, Kinect and the Hotmail product teams amongst others, provide an insightful perspective on how Microsoft research efforts assist in delivering immersive technologies customers use every day.

Security Research

A great deal of research on security has taken place within Microsoft over the years. Often the research spans multiple areas, and quite often multiple labs, in cooperation with product groups and with colleagues in academia. This is actually a plus for the research. Martin Abadi, Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research Silicon Valley provides an introspective look at the scope and of the character of security research, focusing on a few recent examples from the Silicon Valley lab. And he looks to the future and how research plays an essential role in building defenses that must continually evolve to contend with a world where computing and computing systems are always changing--and so are the nature of attacks.

Machine Learning and Crowdsourcing

Much of machine learning works with similarity: how similar two separate items are to one another. Having computers create associations or similarities requires context at times, as in the use of numbers. People might look for shape similarities, while the values of numbers are vastly different to the computing system.

Using Machine Learning to Understand Childhood Asthma

Asthma and allergies rank among the most common chronic disorders in children–and their incidence is on the rise. The question is why? If we understood the underlying causes of asthma, we might learn how to prevent it in susceptible children and better treat it in adults. Although evidence from twin studies suggests a strong genetic component in asthma and allergies, few of these studies have identified the same genetic associations.

Health Care Decisions in the Information Age

Benjamin Handel of UC Berkley focuses on how individuals interact with the medical care sector to make important decisions. This involves using the information available and the incentives they face. The incentives can be financial and non-financial for both the consumer and the physician.

Data-Driven Decision Making in Healthcare Systems

Mohsen Bayati of Stanford University explains how machine learning could and is being examined and used to determine ways to make health care more cost-effective. One example is patient readmission rates, with the most common occurrences in from past studies being from elderly and Medicare patients.

Welcome to Microsoft Research India

P. Anandan, managing director of Microsoft Research India, gives an overview of Microsoft Research's mission. The organization's foremost goal is to advance the science in areas such as cloud computing, computer science, and computing, and to advance the state of science.

Conspicuous and Authentic: Fashion Blogs, Style, and Consumption

Microsoft Researcher Alice Marwick explores the global fashion blogging subculture and what motivates the people interacting in this community.

A public right to hear: Understanding what it means and why it matters online

Microsoft Researcher Mike Ananny discusses what personal freedom is, its evolving importance in online environments, and the role big-data systems play this emerging field.

Six Provocations for Big Data

With big data come big responsibilities, specifically in the realm of social media. There is a hint an emergence of a philosophy that big data is all one needs and that other scientific methods and disciplines are becoming outdated and unimportant. But big data can be incomplete because of how fragile data sources such as the Internet can be.

Algorithmic Pricing of Online Services

Cloud computing is a quickly growing business. Questions exist as to the proper business model, and this translates into how to model this, considering auction and game theory. Models exist to purchase on-demand and per-use, as well as to buying in bulk and making longer-term commitments.

Designing Auction-Based Marketplaces: Research and Practice at MSR

Platform markets have two groups of users, and these have both direct and indirect network effects throughout the market as a whole. Platform markets include media markets, credit cards, dating, and video games. There are also auction-based platforms, dealing more with advertising, display, and search.

Retroactive Security

Classic security uses access control, and, essentially, that does not work. Current systems are designed to say "no" and otherwise limit access, while another reason is code bugs. Real-world security currently is retroactive, an example being the financial system, in which mistakes or breaks can be undone after they occur.

Cryptography Resilient to Physical Attacks

Yael Kalai, researcher at Microsoft Research New England discusses how, with all the progress made in the field of cryptography, security continues to be breached. Complicating matters are hackers, who are becoming increasingly sophisticated, almost making security worse than it was more than 20 years ago. Communications remains the largest field of encryption leaks.

Communication, Computing, and Technology

Madhu Sudan, principal researcher at Microsoft Research New England, discusses the differences between theoretical computation versus communication. "Communication," in this context, refers to mobile phones, email, and other messages, while "computation" refers to things one does with a computer.

Welcome to the Microsoft Research New England 20th Anniversary Symposium

Spanning the globe, Microsoft Research has more than 900 researchers and 300 support staff. Over the last 20 years, no Microsoft product has been developed without input from Microsoft Research. The primary purpose of Microsoft Research is to advance the state of the art from the standpoint of research.

Privacy in the Age of Augmented Reality

Alessandro Acquisti, an economist by training and a self-described behavioral economist, explains that across history, time, and culture, people have felt the need for publicity, as well as the need for privacy. These are not contradictions, but these concepts are at times in conflict.

Economics of Privacy

Markus Mobius and Susan Athey of Harvard University discuss changes over the last five years in the way people consume online news. In the past, individuals would consume online news similarly to how they would read a traditional newspaper. Currently, the trend has become using intermediaries, such as content aggregators and social media.

Issues and Perspectives

Moderator Ethan Zuckerman hosts a panel in Cambridge, Mass., discussing issues of human rights, as well as individual and public privacy. Difficult questions on privacy include personal privacy and marketing data, and technology and tagging that could erode privacy.

eHeritage

Social responsibility is the cornerstone of the project, with conservation and presentation of cultural heritage in mind. Three-dimensional imagery provides an opportunity to find new data with regard to archeological research and to access huge amounts of data through modeling content.

Programming Life

Life is a product of Living Software: programmable matter that orchestrates a range of remarkable functions.

Changing World of Modern Science

The evolution of research has progressed though experimental science, theoretical science, and computational science to present-day data-intensive science. This new paradigm challenges researchers with how to organize and visualize these data sets into new associations and techniques.

Why Do We Build Data Centre Clusters Like We Do?

This talk will we will challenge the conventional wisdoms of how we build data center clusters. We will describe the CamCube project which has been rethinking how we build data center clusters, particularly ones that support data analytics workloads (or "big data jobs").

The Future of Web Search: Empowering People with Knowledge

Wei-Ying Ma, assistant managing director of Microsoft Research Asia, discusses how the first generation of search engines has evolved into the web of the world. Every person, location, product, road, and building is becoming digitally captured.

The Future of Looking Back

Most of us possess physical objects or heirlooms which connect us to our past and which provoke us to think about how we may someday pass on our own treasured objects to those we care about. Increasingly, though, the traces of our lives are made manifest in the digital world.

The Xbox Kinect Body Tracking Pipeline

Oliver Williams, Researcher at Microsoft Silicon Valley shares his journey working on the Xbox Kinect

InnerEye: Medical Image Research in the Hospital

Analysis of medical images is essential in modern medicine. With the increasing amount of patient data, new challenges and opportunities arise for different phases of the clinical routine, such as diagnosis, surgery and therapy.

Old World, NUI World: The Future of Digital Interaction

Shahram Izadi, Andrew Fitzgibbon, Jamie Shotton and Tom Rodden discuss and demonstate Natural User Interfaces.

This is Microsoft Research

Rick Rashid, Chief Research Officer, Microsoft Research, makes opening remarks at the Microsoft Research Redmond's 20th anniversary event.

Craig Mundie Kicks off Research's Anniversary in Asia

Craig Mundie, Microsoft chief research and strategy officer, kicked off Microsoft Research's global 20th anniversary events at Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing, China. He described how latest advances in areas such as natural user interfaces, machine learning, and big data will bring about a new era in computing. As one example of how Microsoft Research helps fuel the core businesses of Microsoft, he announced one of the latest technology transfers, "Tiger," the next-generation index serving platform for Bing.

Hsiao-Wuen Hon introduces Asia's Symposium

Hsiao-Wuen Hon, managing director of Microsoft Research Asia, welcomed the organization's long-term collaborators as part of commemorating two decades of Microsoft Research. He highlighted the latest research developed in areas including systems and software, data mining and internet search, and natural user interface, as well as the Asia lab's contributions to Kinect-related technologies.

Lintao Zhang Showcases Tiger

Microsoft Research Asia senior researcher Lintao Zhang explains "Tiger," the next-generation index serving platform for Bing, and shows a video describing the collaboration between Microsoft Research Asia and Bing's engineering teams in China and the US.

Live demo of Kinect-based Object Digitization

Microsoft Research Asia senior researcher Xin Tong performs a live demonstration of the Kinect-based Object Digitization technology enabling the creation of 3-D objects based on just a couple of snapshots and allowing Xbox users to play with their favorite toys in both real and virtual worlds, and share their cool gadgets with friends.

Teen Privacy Strategies in Networked Publics

Microsoft Researcher danah boyd's research looks at the myths surrounding teens and privacy and the ways different teens reconcile technology with their public and private lives.

Systems Biology: Where Computer Science, Engineering and Biology Meet

During the last decade an entirely new approach to studying biology has emerged from the collaboration of traditional biologists with those trained in other fields. New measurement techniques are used to observe thousands of properties of cells, and algorithmic approaches are applied to assemble these data into a coherent picture of how cells function in particular conditions. These methods are beginning to reveal previously unrecognized cellular pathways that could be targeted to treat diseases.

Anniversary Overview Video

At Microsoft Research, we are celebrating 20 years of turning ideas into products that deliver wonderful things for people. We advance the state of the art in computer science through exploration and new approaches to solve large, complex problems-tackling new areas no one has solved before.