News & features
Icebreaker: New model with novel element-wise information acquisition method reduces cost and data needed to train machine learning models
| Cheng Zhang and Sebastian Tschiatschek
In many real-life scenarios, obtaining information is costly, and getting fully observed data is almost impossible. For example, in the recruiting world, obtaining relevant information (in other words, a feature value) for a company could mean performing time-consuming interviews. The…
In the news | OnMSFT
A conversation with the researcher who put a movie on a piece of glass with Project Silica
One of the highlights of Satya Nadella’s vision keynote at the Microsoft Ignite 2019 last week was Project Silica where he held out a drink coaster-sized piece of regular quartz glass and shared that the piece of glass had the…
In the news | Ars Technica
Microsoft’s Project Silica offers robust thousand-year storage
Ars spoke Tuesday with Dr. Ant Rowstron, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK, about an innovative cold storage project called Silica. Silica aims to replace both tape and optical archival discs as the media of choice for…
Optics for the cloud: storage in the zettabyte era with Dr. Ant Rowstron and Mark Russinovich
Remember when a hard drive that could hold a terabyte of data was a big deal? Well, we’re now in an era where peta-, exa- and even zetta-bytes are the bytes of the day, and it turns out it’s hard to fit…
In the news | Movieweb
Superman: The Movie Gets Archived on Futuristic Glass Disc by Microsoft
Microsoft and Warner Bros. have partnered to preserve the iconic superhero movie on a piece of glass roughly the size of a coaster. The idea, hopefully, is that this type of storage technology could help to preserve classic movies for…
In the news | Microsoft Research Podcast
Optics for the cloud: storage in the zettabyte era with Dr. Ant Rowstron and Mark Russinovich
Remember when a hard drive that could hold a terabyte of data was a big deal? Well, weâre now in an era where peta-, exa- and even zetta-bytes are the bytes of the day, and it turns out itâs hard…
In the news | CMS WiRE
Microsoft Ignite 2019: Not Your Grandfather’s Microsoft
If you thought Microsoft was simply a productivity company, think again. CEO Satya Nadella kicked off this year’s Microsoft Ignite 2019 Conference in Orlando, Fla. with a big sky vision for the company: “How do we power every person and…
In the news | PCMag
Microsoft Highlights Azure Management, Office Improvements, and More at Ignite
Microsoft has the broadest portfolio of software of any company, and at the firm’s annual Ignite conference, it proved it by introducing a raft of new products and services in cloud, development, security and management, and productivity. These include Azure…
In the news | The Telegraph
From glass to DNA: technologies that could store our data for billions of years
When Elon Musk sent his Tesla Roadster into space aboard SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket last year, the spacesuit-clad mannequin placed in the driver’s seat had a few essentials packed. A copy of Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy…