In December, I blogged about the beta release of Layerscape, a free set of research tools from Microsoft that enable earth scientists to visualize and tell stories around large, complex data sets. The full release is now available to the public at Layerscape. We’re calling…
Youngsters love gadgets. So wouldn’t it be great if they could build their own, and at school? This is exactly what more than 70 British students, ages 13 to 16, are doing by using .NET Gadgeteer. On January 30, they gathered at the Microsoft Research…
Two major computing conferences take place this month in the Seattle area: the ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 2012), which runs February 8–12 in Seattle and focuses on how to improve web search algorithms, and the ACM Conference on Computer…
Last year, women accounted for only 14 percent of computer science college graduates in the United States, according to the Computing Research Association. That’s down from 35 percent in 1985, despite U.S. Labor Department statistics that show computing to be among the fastest-growing, most in-demand…
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.…
Computer Science Education Week (CSEdWeek), which took place this year from December 4 to 10 in the United States, is a celebration of computer science education. And while it’s a great idea to devote a week to recognizing the importance of this field, it’s a…
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…
The Jim Gray eScience Award—named for Jim Gray, a Technical Fellow at Microsoft Research and a Turing Award winner who disappeared at sea in 2007—recognizes innovators whose work makes science easier for other scientists.It was a special pleasure to be part of the audience in…
The first documented case of HIV was in 1981. Today, HIV is viewed as a treatable, chronic disease by many in developed nations where treatments are readily available. Yet HIV continues to devastate, claiming the lives of 1.8 million people annually—about 5,000 deaths per day.…
It began with a simple question: “Why can’t students earn digital rewards for being awesome?” A research group comprised of university faculty, staff, and students at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) decided to find out. The team delved into the everyday travails of college…
The challenge of DNA sequencing is central to all genomics research, and while the technology has existed since the 1970s, today’s massively-parallel sequencing instruments are capable of producing gigabytes of raw genomic data quickly and increasingly cheaply. Reconstruction of a DNA sequence from this data…
On October 25, 2011, Microsoft Research Connections released an update to Zentity, a repository platform designed to manage research objects—such as journal articles, reports, datasets, projects, and people—as well as the relationships among them. Zentity supports arbitrary data models, and provides semantically rich functionality that…
