"Moore's law" is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit will double approximately every two years. For the past 50 years, we have relied on Moore’s Law to provide increasing functionality at faster speeds and lower cost. Cheap, fast, and small…
I recently had the opportunity to attend two interesting conferences, NAACL (North America Association of Computational Linguistics) and CVPR (Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition). They are top conferences in the fields of natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision, respectively, and traditionally, their audiences are…
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…
Quantum computing has the potential to utterly overturn what it means to compute. At Microsoft, we have been studying quantum computation since the late nineties with an eye towards a scalable universal quantum computer. Quantum computers compute in a massively parallel fashion with computing power…
I read through some of the papers to be presented at CVPR 2015 this week and noticed interesting trends emerging. The opening session addresses two of the most exciting and active areas of research within computer vision, namely deep learning and modeling from depth cameras. The…
More than half of the world’s population now lives in cities and suburbs, and as just about any of these billions of people can tell you, urban traffic can be a nightmare. Cars stack up bumper-to-bumper, clogging our highways, jangling our nerves, taxing our patience,…
—Harry Shum, Executive Vice President, Technology & Research I would like to thank the broad computing research community which has taken the time to share its thoughts and concerns about the recent closure of our research lab in Silicon Valley. I share with all of…
Microsoft Research’s various summer schools provide excellent opportunities to work with our academic partners to foster the next generation of computer scientists and breakthrough applications. So with great anticipation, I headed to Moscow for the 2014 summer school in Russia, which took place over the…
When we released the Lab of Things a year ago, we knew that it would benefit researchers experimenting with connected devices in various domains. It has been very gratifying to see how the Lab of Things has helped to accelerate research on helping people with…
When world-class research organizations work together on a long-term basis, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. That premise underlies Microsoft Research’s collaborative projects and joint ventures around the globe, including our recently renewed joint research center with Inria (the French Institute…
Last June, U.S. President Barack Obama announced a Climate Action Plan to help predict and address the impacts of climate change. To further this important effort, Microsoft Research is pleased to launch a special Climate Data award program, which offers scientists and decision-makers 12 months…
I feel especially fortunate to be here in Melbourne, Australia, to participate in the launch of the Microsoft Research Centre for Social Natural User Interfaces. This is a joint research center between the University of Melbourne and Microsoft Research, in partnership with the state government…
