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MIDAS: A Golden Opportunity in Russia
By Rob Knies, Senior Editor, Microsoft Research Collaboration is one of the hallmarks of Microsoft Research. Across the organization, the desire to work with world-class computer scientists takes on many forms, all with the express interest of advancing the state…
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…
Terapixel Project: Lots of Data, Expertise
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research How can you achieve the impossible? Easy—as long as you have the right people and the right tools. The Terapixel project from Microsoft Research Redmond is proof positive. The effort—to create the largest,…
F#: Putting the ‘Fun’ into ‘Functional’
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research You would be forgiven if you thought the “F” in F#—which made its debut as part of Visual Studio 2010 on April 12—stands for “functional.” After all, F#—pronounced “F sharp”—is a functional programming…
Chuck Thacker Attains Computing’s Peak
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research When Chuck Thacker graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, with a bachelor’s degree in physics in 1967, he envisioned a career as an engineering physicist, designing particle accelerators. Things didn’t progress according…
Exploding Software-Engineering Myths
By Janie Chang, Writer, Microsoft Research At Microsoft Research, there are computer scientists and mathematicians who live in a world of theory and abstractions. Then there is Nachi Nagappan, who was on loan to the Windows development group for a…
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…
CHI ’09: Computing with a Human Touch
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research Historically, Microsoft Research has had a big footprint during CHI, the annual conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction—and this…