By Vikas Sabharwal and Vineet Pruthi, Microsoft Shared Platform Group In late 2011, Bing’s shared platform team started looking at different solutions for distributed NoSQL stores. We needed a fast, unified, distributed key value-store that is scalable and can be turned into a shared platform for…
The Internet is awash in user generated content (UGC)—from blogs, reviews, and Q&As, to wikis, tweets, and Facebook posts. And let’s not forget photo- and video-sharing sites: every second, one hour of video is uploaded to YouTube, and an average of more than 80 million…
Posted by Jeannette M. Wing The Internet, global positioning systems, the laser, multi-touch displays and search engines. What do these have in common? These technologies, which we take for granted today, came out of basic scientific research. Basic research creates knowledge. It advances our fundamental…
A novel method of structuring the largest and most complex datasets—from social networks to global financial markets—has won a Best Paper award at the world’s leading academic conference on machine learning. In the paper, A Nearly-Linear Time Framework for Graph-Structured Sparsity, by Chinmay Hegde, Piotr…
A study of new algorithms that improve “online boosting” has won a Best Paper award at the world’s leading academic conference on machine learning. In the paper, Optimal and Adaptive Algorithms for Online Boosting, by Alina Beygelzimer, Satyen Kale, and Haipeng Luo, delivered to the recent…
In 2004, Microsoft Research and Microsoft’s Web Search team started a joint effort to improve the relevance of our web search results. There followed a sustained effort that, over the next several years, resulted in our shipping three generations of web search ranking algorithms, culminating…
The published research generated by the global research community constitutes a diary of humankind’s scientific achievements. As this output grows year after year, it creates new opportunities for further inquiry—and new challenges in dealing with the volume and complexity of the information. As a result,…
Posted by George Thomas Jr. Microsoft researcher Vasilis Syrgkanis and two colleagues this week unveiled a new approach to understanding and optimizing online bidding and auctions, with implications far beyond the online advertising marketplace in which their study was based. Working with Denis Nekipelov of…
Posted by Allison Linn Kristin Lauter is solving a problem you may not even know you have: She's working to keep your most personal data private and secure. We're not talking about your bank account balance or even your Social Security number. Lauter, a mathematician…
The annual conference of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM) is always a highlight for those who follow the latest developments in applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communication. SIGCOMM 2014, to be held in Chicago from August…
Can you tell the difference between the two breeds of corgis? If you’re like many, you probably are barely even aware that such dogs exist, let alone the fact that there are two—and only two—kinds of corgis. Add the detail that those two breeds are…
Posted by Rob Knies When the world starts watching, it’s time for David Rothschild to shift into overdrive. Readers of this blog need little introduction to the work on prediction models from Rothschild, a Microsoft researcher and economist. Past posts have examined his efforts to…
