Microsoft Research: Feature Stories

Feature Stories

.NET

Microsoft Research Cambridge Puts Visual Studio Beta on Fast Track
By Rob Knies | July 2007

With help from Microsoft Research Cambridge, Microsoft’s Developer Division will be offering an entirely new method for obtaining the latest beta of Visual Studio ...

3-D Graphics

SIGGRAPH 2007: Microsoft Research Leads the Way
By Rob Knies | August 2007

Microsoft Research continues to play a leading role in SIGGRAPH, the annual International Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive ...

TechVista: Confronting the Challenges of Tomorrow
By Rob Knies | October 2007

TechVista, hosted by Microsoft Research India in New Delhi on Oct. 13, offered insights into the challenges the computing industry faces—and the opportunities research ...

Using Repeated Image Content to Render Photos More Efficiently
By Rob Knies | July 2008

Factoring Repeated Content Within and Among Images is just one of 13 papers from Microsoft Research that will be presented Aug. 11-15 during SIGGRAPH ...

SIGGRAPH 2005: Microsoft Research Advancing State of the Art in Computer Graphics
By Rob Knies | August 2005

Led by a particularly prolific complement of studies from Microsoft Research Asia, almost one-sixth of the research papers accepted for presentation during SIGGRAPH 2005 feature Microsoft Research ...

Photo Tourism: Still Photography in Motion
By Rob Knies | July 2006

Photo Tourism, a research collaboration between Microsoft Research and the University of Washington, offers the potential of supplementing your photos of popular travel destinations with others’ similar shots to provide an immersive, 3D ...

Cartoon Work Makes Graphics Researcher Smile
By Rob Knies | September 2006

Kun Zhou, a researcher based in Microsoft Research’s Asia lab, enjoys an entertaining cartoon as much as anyone. But in his case, that interest is leading to groundbreaking achievements in computer ...

Accessibility

Microsoft Research Tackles the Challenges of the Next 15 Years
By Dan Hough | September 2006

In the 15 years since its inception, Microsoft Research has not only helped make significant advances in the field of computer science, but its work also has shaped many of the technologies we rely on every ...

Microsoft Researchers at Intersection of Science and Art
By Rob Knies | March 2008

Three members of Microsoft Research have their work displayed as part of an exhibit organized by New York’s Museum of Modern ...

Memorable Support for SenseCam Memory-Retention Research
By Rob Knies | November 2007

Microsoft Research funding and support for the SenseCam project holds impressive promise for helping memory-loss patients recall and retain the important moments in their ...

Inquiry in India: How Can Tech Help?
By Rob Knies | December 2007

The Technology for Emerging Markets group within Microsoft Research India focuses on finding potential technology and human solutions to a broad range of issues that confront the nation—and others that share similar ...

Algorithms

CVPR ’07: Bringing Computer Vision into Focus
By Rob Knies | June 2007

Researchers from Microsoft will play a key role in advancing the state of the art in computer vision during the annual IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, to be held June 18-23 in ...

Microsoft Research Silicon Valley Efforts Pay Distributed Dividends
By Rob Knies | May 2008

Microsoft Research’s Silicon Valley lab concentrates on distributed systems, and as became abundantly clear May 22 during the fourth Silicon Valley Road Show, that focus is delivering innovative ...

Microsoft Research New England’s Focus: Research Relationships
By Rob Knies | February 2008

Jennifer Chayes and Christian Borgs, who are taking the leadership roles in Microsoft Research’s New England lab, unveiled Feb. 4, discuss their new challenge, how they got there, and how their unique partnership will provide a foundation for ...

Understanding Climate Change—One Tree at a Time
By Rob Knies | June 2008

Drew Purves, scientist at Microsoft Research Cambridge, co-authored two papers published in the latest issue of Science, discussing new techniques for understanding forest dynamics and how that understanding could help combat climate ...

India Project Addresses Location Search from a New Direction
By Rob Knies | July 2008

Robust Location Search, a research project from Microsoft Research India, takes a new approach to solve unstructured or error-laden geospatial ...

Innovation Inquiries: The Birth of a Research Lab
By Rob Knies | September 2008

As Microsoft Research New England prepares for its opening symposium, to be held Sept. 22 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Jennifer Chayes, managing director, outlines the progress made by her lab since its February ...

Microsoft Research’s Next Generation of Leaders
By Dan Hough | September 2006

How five young researchers within Microsoft Research are making an impact on the company’s products and ...

Computing in the 21st Century: A Collection of Heady Visions
By Rob Knies | November 2006

Visitors to Microsoft Research Asia’s Computing in the 21st Century conference, held in China and Taiwan in late October, learned about the many and varied ways in which software will be enhancing the world in which we ...

Analyzing Complex Systems via Machine Learning
By Rob Knies | May 2006

Moises Goldszmidt, a principal researcher within Microsoft Research’s Silicon Valley lab, discusses his work in machine learning and its role in understanding large, complex computer ...

Artificial Intelligence

Unmanned Flight with Windows XP Embedded
By Suzanne Ross | August 2004

Kids who graduated from balsa wood bi-planes to radio-controlled airplanes will love what’s coming around the corner. Faculty and students at Cornell University have built an unmanned airplane with its own on-board, embedded control ...

Nine-legged Robots
By Suzanne Ross | October 2004

Were you glued to the television when the pictures from Mars started coming in from the Rover? Did you hold your breath as the little machine, really a robot, made its slow and careful way over the Mars terrain? What if it got hurt? Broke a leg? ...

The Digital Butler
By Suzanne Ross | June 2000

A good assistant should be almost invisible, showing up just when you need him, disappearing when you're engaged in tasks that need your concentration, fielding calls and messages until you're ready to communicate with the outside world. A ...

Silicon Minds: Encouraging Intelligent Game Design
By Rob Knies | February 2008

Five winners have been named in the Dream-Build-Play 2008 Silicon Minds Warm-Up Challenge, a contest to challenge aspiring game developers to use innovative artificial-intelligence approaches to the design of computer ...

Audio

Personal Audio Space: The Headphones Experience sans Headphones
By Rob Knies | April 2007

Personal Audio Space, a project from Microsoft Research Redmond, enables users to enjoy audio at their desired volume without disturbing those around ...

Digital Green Reaps Honor for Helping Improve Agricultural Efficiency
By Rob Knies | June 2008

Digital Green, a project from Microsoft Research India, won an award in the Stockholm Challenge for novel attempts to use digital video and mediated instruction to popularize the adoption of effective agricultural practices in the developing ...

Q&A: 10 Years of Innovation at Microsoft Research Asia
By Rob Knies | October 2008

With Microsoft Research Asia celebrating a decade of groundbreaking work, Hsiao-Wuen Hon, managing director of the lab, reflects on the past 10 years—and the 10 to ...

Code Correctness/Reliability

New Area in Microsoft Research: Looking for a RiSE in Developer Productivity
By Rob Knies | October 2008

A new research area within Microsoft Research Redmond aims to improve the process of software development by providing better foundations, languages, and tools for describing, analyzing, testing, and executing ...

Feverish Foray into Satisfiability Proves Satisfying
By Rob Knies | June 2008

Youssef Hamadi of Microsoft Research Cambridge found himself working at a breakneck pace toward SAT-Race 2008, but his efforts paid off when his project was declared the world’s best parallel ...

In Search of Contracts in Software
By Microsoft Research Natural Language Processing Group | July 2008

Software incompatibility is a major concern for developers and users. In the project Tark, researchers at Microsoft Research India are attempting to alleviate this problem by discovering contracts in ...

Singularity: Rethinking Dependable System Design
By Microsoft Research Natural Language Processing Group | February 2008

It’s not the next Windows: Microsoft Research releases its Singularity source code for academic and non-commercial use, with hopes that a prototype operating system built to improve software dependability will foster inventive ...

Ajax View: Providing Insights into Web-App Behavior in the Wild
By Rob Knies | May 2007

Ajax View, a project from Microsoft Research, uses the dynamic nature of the current generation of Web-based applications to help developers understand how their programs are performing for ...

Microsoft Research Cambridge’s Dynamic Decade
By Rob Knies | July 2007

As Microsoft Research Cambridge celebrates its 10th anniversary, it’s time to assess its successes over its first decade—and to consider what the next could ...

Spec#: Producing High-Quality Software
By Rob Knies | August 2007

Spec#, a research project from Microsoft Research Redmond, tries to make it easier for software developers to author programs of superior ...

Indian Team Applies Rigor to Solving Software Challenges
By Rob Knies | September 2007

The Rigorous Software Engineering team within Microsoft Research India is taking advantage of Indian talent to improve the process of software ...

Computing in the 21st Century 2007: Web Wonders to Unfold
By Rob Knies | November 2007

Thousands of Asian computer-science and professors received an opportunity to hear and interact with a collection of the brightest minds in academia and industry during the ninth annual Computing in the 21st Century conference, held in Nanjing, ...

Beating Back the Blue Screen
By Suzanne Ross | August 2002

What's bright blue, all encompassing, and once struck terror into the modern heart? You've guessed it – the dreaded Blue Screen. Even though the Blue Screen offered options to the user to repair whatever caused the glitch, most users still had ...

PREfast: Less Bugs, More Reliability
By Suzanne Ross | May 2004

Pop Quiz. What are the three things a Microsoft developer can't live without? If you guessed: 1) Pizza, 2) Late-night Xbox play-offs, and 3) PREfast, you'd be pretty darn close. Okay, you're saying. I got the first two, obvious. But ...

Providing a Template for Tech Transfer
By Rob Knies | October 2005

As Thomas Ball and Sriram Rajamani worked on their SLAM device-driver-analysis engine, they found that their experience provided a textbook case on how to achieve successful tech ...

BrowserShield: Helping Make the Web Safe for Surfers
By Rob Knies | August 2006

BrowserShield, a research project from Microsoft Research’s Redmond lab, offers significant advances in collaring the malevolent forces that haunt the World Wide ...

Terminator Tackles an Impossible Task
By Rob Knies | August 2006

Terminator, a collaborative research project spearheaded by Byron Cook of Microsoft Research Cambridge, is an attempt to develop a tool that mitigates one of computer science’s longstanding ...

Microsoft Research’s Next Generation of Leaders
By Dan Hough | September 2006

How five young researchers within Microsoft Research are making an impact on the company’s products and ...

Code Specification/Verification

Do the Math
By Suzanne Ross | March 2003

Leslie Lamport is a storyteller. He's also a theoretician who knows that, just as cookies taste better with milk, proofs are easier to swallow with stories. He once formulated the answer to a problem in reliable computing by using the ...

Code Testing

Passing the Test: Magellan Improves Your Code
By Suzanne Ross | September 2004

The job of a software tester is more art than science. Testers need to be interpreters, communicators, detectives, and diplomats. They need to know what an application does, and how it is supposed to do it. They need to decipher project ...

Microsoft Research’s Next Generation of Leaders
By Dan Hough | September 2006

How five young researchers within Microsoft Research are making an impact on the company’s products and ...

Collaboration

MIT iCampus Project Yields Key Educational Learnings
By Rob Knies | November 2006

iCampus, an educational collaboration between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Microsoft Research, has proved a bellwether of educational innovation in its seven-year history, says Kevin Schofield, general manager of Microsoft Research ...

Microsoft Research Remembers a Colleague, Friend: A. Richard Newton
By Rob Knies | January 2007

Microsoft Research joins the engineering community in mourning the passing of A. Richard Newton, dean of the College of Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and a longtime member of the Microsoft Research Technical Advisory ...

iCampus Experiments with Technology and Higher Learning
By Press Pass | November 2006

Learning Without Barriers/Technology Without Borders, a two-day symposium, marks the completion of a seven-year pact between Microsoft and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that will have lasting benefits for education institutions ...

Microsoft Research Working with INRIA to Foster Fundamental Advances
By Rob Knies | February 2007

Microsoft Research, in conjunction with the French research institute INRIA, is investigating new avenues for fundamental research at the Microsoft Research-INRIA Joint Centre, which recently was inaugurated just outside ...

Faculty Summit: Taking the Pulse of Pipeline Issues
By Rob Knies | June 2006

Microsoft Research’s seventh annual Faculty Summit, held July 17-18, provided an opportunity for the academic community to take measure of efforts to entice more bright, young students into the study of computer ...

Multimouse Makes Computer Learning a Communal Experience
By Rob Knies | May 2006

Multimouse, technology devised by Microsoft Research’s India lab, enables the use of multiple mice on a single computer, enhancing the education of children in schools without the resources to provide a PC for each ...

Microsoft and PBS Create Global Web Resource to Enhance Understanding of AIDS Pandemic
By Press Pass | May 2006

Microsoft researcher helps FRONTLINE launch enchanced broadband television Web site linked to "The Age of AIDS" ...

ConferenceXP Proves Its Mettle
By Rob Knies | December 2005

ConferenceXP, a shared-source resource platform from Microsoft Research that enables distance learning and collaboration, has gained significant momentum recently on a variety of ...

Making Cellphones Enhance Village Economies in Rural India
By Rob Knies | March 2006

With support from Microsoft Research’s Digital Inclusion program, academic researchers are bringing technology to rural India—and ...

Microsoft Research’s 2006 Silicon Valley Road Show May 2
By Rob Knies | April 2006

Microsoft Research’s 2006 Silicon Valley Road Show, to be held in Mountain View, Calif., on May 2, will feature demonstrations of projects from Microsoft Research’s Silicon Valley and Redmond ...

Summer Jobs
By Suzanne Ross | October 2004

Summer is a traditional time for students to kick back and soak up the sun. But some students spend their summer working instead, heating up a computer keyboard, discovering the next big thing in computer ...

Women in Research
By Suzanne Ross | March 2004

Women have been changing the face of science for thousands of years. The Countess of Lovelace is called 'the first computer programmer' because she wrote programs for Babbage's Analytical Engine. Women's History month celebrates the many ...

Fancy Meeting You Here
By Suzanne Ross | July 2000

Researchers have a habit of experimenting on themselves—consider Dr. Jekyll. Microsoft researchers aren't any exception to this rule, which is why employees in the company's research department might soon find themselves on camera as they run ...

Microsoft Research Supports IT Research in Brazil
By Press Pass | April 2007

Microsoft Research's External Research & Programs and the São Paulo State Research Support Foundation will invest $800,000 in the development of Information and Communication Technology solutions, focusing on local ...

Helping Biomedical Research Help Others
By Rob Knies | August 2007

A pair of projects supported by funding from Microsoft Research’s External Research & Programs group is encouraging various forms of communication that could have a dramatic impact on health care ...

Talking Research with New Head of Microsoft Research Asia
By Rob Knies | October 2007

On Oct. 30, Hsiao-Wuen Hon was named the new managing director of Microsoft Research Asia, and he recently found time to discuss his new ...

U.K. Students Focus Their Attention on Computer Science
By Rob Knies | December 2007

About 250 students in the United Kingdom congregated at the University of Cambridge on Dec. 11 for Microsoft Research Cambridge’s annual Think Computer Science ...

Hall of Fame Honors Elicit Smiles from Silicon Valley Researchers
By Rob Knies | December 2007

Three of the five papers recently given Hall of Fame Awards from the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Operating Systems were written all or in part by researchers from Microsoft Research Silicon ...

ESL Assistant Helps Non-Native English Speakers Help Themselves
By Rob Knies | October 2008

ESL Assistant, a beta Web service recently released from Microsoft Research Redmond, helps non-native English users confirm that their choice of words is ...

Video Investigations Enable Researcher Hua to Find Success
By Rob Knies | October 2008

Xian-Sheng Hua, a lead researcher at Microsoft Research Asia, explores multimedia advertising and content analysis, and his work has been recognized by Technology Review, which named him to its annual list of top innovators under the age of ...

INRIA Researcher Wins Royal Society and Académie des sciences Microsoft Award
By Rob Knies | September 2008

Nicholas Ayache, research director for the French national institute for research in computer science and automatic control, has been named the 2008 winner of the Royal Society and Académie des sciences Microsoft ...

Chinese Researcher Leaps into Prominence
By Rob Knies | October 2008

Dongmei Zhang, who heads the User Interface Group at Microsoft Research Asia, credits her youthful athletic career for instilling the characteristics needed to achieve professional ...

Worldwide Telescope: Two Months Old, a Million Downloads Strong
By Rob Knies | July 2008

Twenty-nine years after man first walked on the moon, astronomical exploration retains an irresistible allure, as evidenced by Microsoft Research’s Worldwide Telescope, which attained its millionth download less than two months after being ...

Tweaking Channel Widths to Improve Wireless Communication
By Rob Knies | July 2008

A Case for Adapting Channel Width in Wireless Networks is just one of eight papers from Microsoft Research to be accepted for presentation during SIGCOMM 2008, scheduled for Aug. 17-22 in ...

Talented Interns Take Microsoft Research by Storm
By Rob Knies | July 2008

In what has become a summertime tradition, Microsoft Research once again is playing host to hundreds of high-achieving interns—and a fun, productive time is had by ...

Exploring Ways to Make Search Better than Ever
By Rob Knies | July 2008

Microsoft Research has contributed almost 19 percent of the papers accepted for presentation during SIGIR 2008, underscoring the organization’s commitment to make search a much more compelling experience than it is ...

Microsoft External Research’s Hey Tells Scientists: We Can Help
By Rob Knies | July 2008

Tony Hey, corporate vice president of Microsoft External Research, discusses his first year in that role, his vision for how Microsoft and academic researchers can collaborate, and some of the challenges and opportunities for his ...

BEE3: Putting the Buzz Back into Computer Architecture
By Rob Knies | February 2008

BEE3, a hardware platform from Microsoft Research Silicon Valley and a host of partners, aims to return computer architecture to the forefront of computer-science ...

Ensuring That Human Values Play a Central Role in Our Digital Future
By Rob Knies | March 2008

Being Human, a report resulting from 2007’s HCI 2020 Forum, was released April 2. Microsoft Research Cambridge’s Richard Harper discusses the report and the importance of human values in successful ...

Translating the Web for the Entire World
By Rob Knies | March 2008

Windows Live Translator, powered by machine-translation technology from Microsoft Research Redmond, aims to provide the most intuitive, integrated, and useful translation service on the ...

Task Market: Web Bazaar for Document Expertise
By Rob Knies | June 2008

Task Market, a technology preview from Microsoft Research Asia, enables small businesses to get more done by connecting with document experts for Microsoft Office-related ...

Is Your Group Seeking Information? SearchTogether!
By Rob Knies | June 2008

SearchTogether, a project from Microsoft Research Redmond, is available as an Internet Explorer plug-in, enabling members of a group to investigate subjects of mutual interest in collaborative ...

Fighting Back Against the Spam-Zombie Hordes
By Rob Knies | May 2008

Yinglian Xie and Fang Yu, researchers at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley, have devised a unique way to detect computers transformed into zombie drones for transmitting spam ...

500,000,000 Years Later, Eating Patterns Persist
By Rob Knies | April 2008

Rich Williams of Microsoft Research Cambridge is a member of a small team who have looked back a half-billion years to identify food-web patterns similar to those of ...

WorldWide Telescope: The Universe at Your Fingertips
By Rob Knies | May 2008

WorldWide Telescope, a public beta from Microsoft Research brings a seamless, immersive view of the entire known universe to your ...

Communication

Mashup Developers Get Chance to Romp in Sandbox
By Rob Knies | April 2008

MashupOS, a project from Microsoft Research Redmond, aims to revisit browser design and empower Web programmers to create more secure and robust Web ...

Improving Collaboration and Communication
By Rob Knies | March 2007

Among the many innovative demos on display during TechFest 2007, Microsoft Research’s annual showcase for promising research projects, a couple of the most compelling displays feature ways to make it easier for people to collaborate and ...

General Manager’s Mantra Drives Incubation Success
By Rob Knies | April 2007

Xuedong Huang, general manager of the Microsoft Research Incubation team, reflects on the innovation process as his team prepares to ship its first ...

Microsoft Research and Innovation Fair
By Suzanne Ross | September 2004

Microsoft Research will hold an Innovation Fair in Brussels, Belgium on September 23. The Innovation Fair will feature demonstrations of projects from Cambridge, Redmond and Silicon Valley. Two universities will also demonstrate projects that ...

Better Than Permanent Ink
By Suzanne Ross | July 2004

If you write your meeting notes on a Live Whiteboard, not only can you save them, index them, and annotate them, you can also give remote viewers a way to see and share in all the meeting fun. The notes will last beyond the meeting, and no one will ...

OMM: Mantra for Mobile Devices
By Rob Knies | July 2005

Microsoft Outlook Mobile Manager 2.0, a just-released, downloadable add-in for Microsoft Outlook, selectively forwards urgent messages to a user’s portable ...

Interactive Visual Media Group Helps MSNBC Document Katrina’s Devastation
By Rob Knies | August 2006

Matt Uyttendaele of Microsoft Research’s Interactive Visual Media Group devised a 360-degree video camera that helped MSNBC provide unique Web coverage in the wake of last year’s devastating Hurricane ...

zCast: Broadcasting Data-Based Services to Mobile Devices
By Rob Knies | August 2006

zCast, a project from Microsoft Research’s lab in Cambridge, England, is exploring the possibilities of using datacasting to provide services to mobile ...

Compiler Technology

Four from Microsoft Research Named ACM Fellows
By Rob Knies | January 2007

Susan Dumais, Albert Greenberg, Jim Larus, and Harry Shum from Microsoft Research have been named fellows of the Association for Computing ...

Computer Architecture

Computing Industry Bestows Rare Honor upon Hoare, Lampson
By Rob Knies | October 2006

Tony Hoare and Butler Lampson, computer-science pioneers, were named fellows of the Computer History Museum on Oct. 17 in an awards ceremony held at the museum’s Mountain View, Calif., ...

Dryad: Programming the Datacenter
By Rob Knies | November 2007

The Dryad project from Microsoft Research Silicon Valley makes it easier for programmers to make distributed applications analyze data concurrently over large-scale ...

Computer Graphics/Imaging

AutoCollage: Summarize Your Adventures with a Click
By Rob Knies | September 2008

AutoCollage, a new product created by Microsoft Research Cambridge in conjunction with colleagues on two other continents, enables users to assemble a representative, attractive photo collage with a minimum of ...

HD View: Panoramas with a Purpose
By Rob Knies | December 2007

HD View, technology from Microsoft Research Redmond’s Interactive Visual Media group, offers users an opportunity to explore and create huge, Web-viewable images that can contain hidden ...

Text-Search Tricks Speak Volumes in Image Search
By Rob Knies | May 2007

Researchers from Microsoft Research Asia are using techniques adapted from text retrieval to streamline ways to search for images on the ...

European Policymakers Look to Future During Innovation Day 2006
By Rob Knies | November 2006

A group of 150 key European policymakers will learn about the frontiers of technology and how they can accelerate growth in their region during the third annual Microsoft Innovation Day, held Nov. 9 in Brussels, ...

Making the Web People-Friendly
By Rob Knies | March 2007

A couple of demos on display during TechFest, Microsoft Research’s annual showcase of research projects, promise to make the Internet more ...

A World of Breakthroughs
By Dan Hough | September 2006

Microsoft Research’s four labs outside Redmond have become leaders in their regions and have contributed significant enhancements to the company’s products and ...

Group Shot: Getting Everyone to Smile
By Rob Knies | June 2006

Group Shot, technology from Microsoft Research’s Redmond lab, helps amateur photographers compile a series of group photos into a composite that is better than the sum of its ...

MapCruncher: Interactive Web Maps Come to Life
By Press Pass | May 2006

MapCruncher, prototype technology from Microsoft Research that makes it easy for users to create their own, personalized mash-ups, may revolutionize the way people use online ...

Hugues Hoppe: Redefining Computer Graphics
By Suzanne Ross | August 2004

Hugues Hoppe is a quiet man. He sits quietly, he talks quietly, and his smile, which he uses often, is as calm as Mona Lisa. For such a quiet man, he's made himself heard in the world of graphics ...

Smaller and Faster
November 1999

Most of the photographs you see on the Web are encoded in the JPEG file format. Developed by the Joint Photographic Experts Group, JPEG compresses digital images, rendering them in fewer bits while retaining a high degree of color fidelity so ...

Cut It Out!
By Suzanne Ross | July 2002

In times past, you had to stand behind cardboard muscle men or bathing beauties and put your head through the cut out face if you wanted a picture of yourself with a different look. Now you can click a few buttons to move your digital head ...

Computer Vision

Novel Looks at Computer Vision on Display in Big Apple
By Rob Knies | June 2006

The 24th Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, held June 17-22 at New York University, included a strong contingent of contributions from Microsoft ...

A Celebration of Asian Innovation
By Rob Knies | July 2008

On Aug. 12 in Hong Kong, Microsoft Research Asia will inaugurate a series of events to commemorate 10 years of ground-breaking work by hosting the Microsoft Research Asia 10th Anniversary Innovation Forum—featuring a special ...

Cryptography

Providing Accurate, More Secure Information
By Rob Knies | March 2007

TechFest 2007, Microsoft Research’s seventh annual innovation extravaganza, features a pair of demos addressing difficult challenges in the areas of data accuracy and more secure ...

Microsoft Research India Demonstrates Multilingual Interactive Digital Map
By Rob Knies | January 2006

Microsoft Research India continues to grow, expands into cryptography and security ...

Fighting Pirates
By Dan Bellow | September 1999

Meet ANalias. He makes his living fighting software pirates in a high-stakes duel of wits and computer programming skills. Out there on the high seas of the Internet, a lot of very smart people are devoted to cracking software – stripping it of ...

Copyright Crusaders
By Dan Bellow | August 1999

What if you took a really great photograph and posted it to your website, and the next thing you know it’s on the cover of a magazine and the credit and the money belong to someone else? Unless you can prove that you took the photo, ...

Computational Number Theory
By Dan Bellow | October 1999

The cryptographers at Microsoft Research hope that cryptography applications such as e-commerce and secure email will someday be an ordinary part of everyone’s experience with computers. But for these applications to become widely used, ...

The Open Box
April 2002

One of the greatest virtues of the personal computer is that it is an open box. Anyone can look under the hood and see how it works, write software for it and share files with other PC users. But the PC’s open nature is its greatest weakness, ...

Data Mining

Panning for Gold Among the Gigabytes
By Suzanne Ross | April 2000

Mining has always been associated with dark,bottomless pits and workers who didn’t see the light of day for hours at a time. Integrating a data mining engine into Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 wasn’t quite that daunting-- but the researchers ...

The Virtual Observatory
By Suzanne Ross | March 2001

Once upon a time, the sky was an immeasurable frontier, the epitome of how far we could reach, a sentinel guarding the borders of our grasp. But, that's not quite true anymore, thanks to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and the international group ...

Scalable Hyperlink Store: Making the Impossible Possible
By Rob Knies | June 2006

The Scalable Hyperlink Store, a specialized, distributed database that spreads enormous amounts of Web data across a host of computers, may provide a way to make Web searching a whole lot more ...

Putting Search into Context
By Rob Knies | May 2007

A project from Microsoft Research Redmond offers promise for making searching the Web more robust, productive, and ...

Databases

Honoring Jim Gray
By Microsoft Research Natural Language Processing Group | May 2008

Today, we are honoring Jim Gray and his legacy. Jim was our friend and colleague—here at Microsoft and throughout the field of computer ...

Update on Search for Jim Gray
By Microsoft Research Natural Language Processing Group | January 2007

Microsoft researcher and technical fellow Jim Gray is still missing after embarking on a solo boating trip from San Francisco on Jan. ...

SensorMap Delivers Real-Time Data on the Go
By Rob Knies | June 2006

SensorMap, new technology from Microsoft Research, provides a platform for publishing and searching for real-time data from networked ...

Microsoft Research’s Next Generation of Leaders
By Dan Hough | September 2006

How five young researchers within Microsoft Research are making an impact on the company’s products and ...

Curiosity Built the Database
By Suzanne Ross | August 2001

Tom Barclay is a curious man who once wondered what it would take to put a terabyte of data online. He made a list of possibilities and came up with 12 terabytes of raw data gathered from the United States Geological Survey (USGS). The resulting Web ...

Does Time Change All?
By Suzanne Ross | April 2003

Dynamic. Fleeting. Ephemeral. Definitions of the Web? Perhaps, but does the Web really change that much? And, if so, how often and by how much? Researchers Marc Najork and Mark Manasse from Microsoft's Silicon Valley research lab, in ...

Database Conference Attracts Worldwide Experts
By Suzanne Ross | June 2004

Many of the top researchers in database systems from around the world gathered in Paris, France for the SIGMOD/PODS conference last week. They met to share information about innovations to advance the state-of-the art in the ...

Less Cost, More Power: Databases That Rock
By Suzanne Ross | August 2004

"Database systems are as interesting as the household plumbing to most people," said Paul Larson, a senior researcher in the Database group. "But if they don't work right, that's when you notice ...

Finding Trends in Customer Feedback
By Steve Johnson | December 2004

Have you ever sent an email to Microsoft, asking a question, suggesting a new feature, telling them about how you use their ...

Development Tools

Concurrent Programming Enters Atomic Age
By Rob Knies | September 2005

In a research project being conducted by Microsoft Research’s Cambridge and Redmond labs, the use of atomic blocks seems to hold promise in making concurrent programming easier and more ...

Microsoft's Tool Box
By Suzanne Ross | June 2001

Imagine two or three guys in white shirts with pocket protectors, grinning with pride as the first software program, a simple thing akin to an amoeba swimming around inside primitive hardware, causes a red light to blink off and on. That's how it ...

Microsoft Research’s Next Generation of Leaders
By Dan Hough | September 2006

How five young researchers within Microsoft Research are making an impact on the company’s products and ...

Distributed Systems

New SIGOPS Chair Happy with SOSP 2007 Contributions
By Rob Knies | October 2007

Doug Terry of Microsoft Research Silicon Valley, the new chair of the ACM’s Special Interest Group on Operating Systems, is delighted that his colleagues again will be playing a key role during this year’s Symposium on Operating Systems ...

Microsoft Research’s Dwork Wins 2007 Dijkstra Prize
By Rob Knies | August 2007

Cynthia Dwork, a principal researcher for Microsoft Research Silicon Valley, has been named co-winner of the 2007 Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize, one of the most prestigious in the distributed-system ...

mPlatform: A Lego-Like Approach to Sensor Research
By Rob Knies | June 2007

Microsoft researchers Feng Zhao and Bodhi Priyantha have devised a research platform for building hardware with modules that promises to help researchers and engineers optimize devices for specific data-collection ...

A World of Breakthroughs
By Dan Hough | September 2006

Microsoft Research’s four labs outside Redmo