When Microsoft Research unveiled the Kinect for Windows Software Development Kit (SDK) beta in mid-June, we expected it would be popular with academic and enthusiast developer communities. But even with our high expectations for the SDK, we didn’t anticipate the level of creativity that was…
Question: What precocious five-year old is writing parallel code to make the most efficient use of multi-core processors? Answer: The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC)–Microsoft Research Centre in Barcelona, Spain, also known as BSCMSRC by those who enjoy trying to pronounce acronyms that contain no vowels.…
Computers are everywhere, controlling everything from phones and traffic lights to airplanes and buildings. And inside each computer is software: line after line of complex code that tells the program, and any attached hardware, what to do. It’s amazing how the world has come to…
On October 5, 2011, on the stately campus of the University of Edinburgh, Sir Tim O’Shea, principal of the University of Edinburgh, and Rick Rashid, chief research officer of Microsoft Research, officially inaugurated a significant joint initiative in informatics. It was standing room only in…
Nearly a million children die from pneumonia each year, making it a leading cause of death and the single most important health issue facing children under the age of five. The standard vaccination schedule calls for three doses of pneumonia vaccine given at six weeks,…
It’s long been known that many serious diseases—including heart disease, asthma, and many forms of cancer—run in families. Until fairly recently, however, medical researchers have had no easy way of identifying the particular genes that are associated with a given malady. Now genome-wide association studies,…
Each year, Microsoft Research awards competitive grants to computer science academics through the Software Engineering Innovation Foundation (SEIF). In the first grant round, conducted in 2010, Professor David Notkin and his colleagues at the University of Washington were the recipients of one of the 12 awards…
Fifty Latin American researchers and former Microsoft Research interns and Fellows gathered at the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington, in July to participate in the LATAM Workshop. The goals of this research workshop: share research challenges and results and seek opportunities to work together across…
As the saying goes, “Seeing is believing.” But with computers, that’s only half the story. Cameras are becoming an ever-present part of our world. They are built into cell phones and laptops, and dot the landscape in storefronts and on street corners. Their pervasive images…
It was barely a year ago that European scientific and industry leaders came together with the goal of developing, testing, and deploying a high-quality, interoperable cloud platform for industry and research. The result was VENUS-C, which stands for Virtual multidisciplinary EnviroNments USing Cloud infrastructures. Jointly…
Robotics technology plays an increasingly important role in search-and-rescue missions. Robots are used to explore areas that are deemed too dangerous or difficult for human teams to access. They can, for example, be used to investigate a hazardous material spill or search for disaster survivors.…
HIV infection may not be the death sentence it once was, but it remains an undeniably serious condition that requires aggressive, life-long treatment and entails the ever-present threat of severe immunological impairment. Consequently, medical researchers continue to investigate the mechanisms by which HIV infection evades…
