News & features
MAVIS Unlocks Spoken Words
By Janie Chang, Writer, Microsoft Research Not long ago, Internet content was mostly text-based, with search tools supporting the need to index text efficiently and browsers providing the ability to search within a document for every instance of a keyword…
UIST Showcases Novel Interfaces
By Janie Chang, Writer, Microsoft Research Hallway conversations at UIST 2010 can sound like planning discussions for science-fiction-movie special effects, buzzing with terms such as “wearable computing,” “augmented reality,” and “smart rooms.” UIST, the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM’s) Symposium…
Software Aids Language Learners
By Gary Alt, Writer, Microsoft Imagine mining the web to learn a language. No, not the jargon of webspeak, where IMHO means “in my humble opinion” or F2F is “face to face,” but real, spoken languages, such as Spanish, Hindi,…
The Quest for Quality Searches
By Janie Chang, Writer, Microsoft Research When the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM’s) Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR) holds a conference, it must be difficult for participants to decide which sessions to attend, because creating easy, effective search…
SIGGRAPH 2009: Work in Graphic Detail
By Janie Chang, Writer, Microsoft Research With its New Orleans location and a schedule that includes team competitions, an animation festival, musical performances, and a gallery of interactive art, the 36th annual International Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and…
SIGIR 2009: Seeking Better Search
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research Organizing threaded discussions. Using reasoning to rank answers on community sites. Predicting click-through rates for news queries. Assessing how crawl policies affect the effectiveness of Web search. Taking context into consideration when classifying…
Beijing Lab’s New Initiative: eHeritage
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research Leonardo da Vinci and Filippo Brunelleschi resound through history as two of the guiding lights of the Italian Renaissance. Leonardo, of course, gifted us with the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, but…
Microsoft Research Asia’s Guo Discusses the Future of Graphics
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research Microsoft Research Asia, celebrating its 10th anniversary, recently presented its annual Computing in the 21st Century academic symposium, held over two days, Nov. 4 in Beijing and Nov. 7 in Singapore. For the…
AutoCollage: Summarize Your Adventures with a Click
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research You’ve got photos—lots and lots of photos. Everybody does these days, thanks to the digital-photography revolution. Hundreds, thousands, a veritable treasure trove of image-based memories. Sometimes, though, you don’t need thousands of photos.…