Reasoning about figures Almost every scientific publication is accompanied by data visualizations in the form of graphs and charts. Figures are an intuitive aid for understanding the content of documents, so naturally, it is useful to leverage this visual information for machine reading comprehension. To enable…
By Winnie Cui, Senior Research Manager, Microsoft Research Asia Data scientist, Anthony Tockar, used publicly available location data to show how celebrities can be tracked throughout New York City, while working on his Master’s Degree at Northwestern University. By cross-referencing public news and photos about…
Posted by Rob Knies You’ve probably heard a bit about big data in recent months. Chatter abounds about the enticing possibilities such prodigious data collections offer. But what, really, is in store for owners and users of big data sets? Curtis Wong knows. He should.…
For the past five years, WorldWide Telescope (WWT) has served as an enriching resource in schools, museums, planetariums, and homes all over the world, inspiring students and astronomy enthusiasts with its detailed views of the heavens and interactive educational content. In celebration of its fifth…
Posted by Rob Knies If you are feeling hungry, you go to the kitchen. If you’d like to take a swim, you head to a swimming pool. If you want to catch a movie, you’re bound for a theater. And, Danyel Fisher says, if you’re…
Big Data: these words are on the lips of researchers everywhere these days. But it’s more than a catch phrase—it’s a reality in the burgeoning world of eScience, as investigators strive to make sense of the seemingly endless flow of new information. Nowhere is the…
In November, during the SharePoint Conference 2012, attendees received a Public Preview of project codename “GeoFlow” for Excel, the latest business-intelligence (BI) functionality to be integrated with Microsoft Excel 2013 later this year. As an Excel add-in, GeoFlow provides interactive, 3-D geospatial and temporal data…
Powerful Research Tools Shared at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting We love our jobs at Microsoft Research, and a big part of that is about how much we love physics and technology. And chocolate. Consider: if you place helium in a (well-made) bag and…
First to explain… no, there is no time. Let me sum up: you are a scientist with complex geospatial data visualization challenges. We at Microsoft Research have a solution for you and we’re enhancing this through the release of a software library called Narwhal. (We…
This week, the annual Microsoft eScience Workshop is being held in Chicago (the “Windy City”), providing an unparalleled opportunity for domain scientists, researchers, and technologists to discuss the benefits and difficulties of incorporating more computing and information technology into the scientific process. Over the years,…
Overwhelmed by data? You’re not alone. Data mining has become one of the most critical research processes in this era of data-intensive science. There are, however, many areas of science where the usefulness of data mining is limited by the massive nature of the datasets.…
Every so often, a new platform comes along that really shakes things up. Well, if you’re part of the earth-sciences community, prepare to be shaken, because Microsoft Research has just released a new way to convey earth-science concepts. It’s called Layerscape, and I like to…
