Our most popular blog posts of 2014 reflect the breadth of our research and our collaborative efforts across multiple product groups as well as with external organizations worldwide.
Bringing Big-Data Dreams Down to Earth
Holograph, an interactive, 3-D data-visualization research platform that can render static and dynamic data above or below the plane of a display using a variety of 3-D stereographic techniques, is featured.
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| Krysta Svore and David Rothschild |
Unraveling the Mysteries of Quantum Computing
Researcher Krysta Svore, whose team is developing a full software architecture for quantum computing, discusses a potential future for machine learning: "We know quantum computers give exponential speedups for some problems.
The question is: Can we get exponential speedups for problems in big data, data analysis, and machine learning?"
Seeking Answers amid World Cup Excitement
Researcher and economist David Rothschild elevates the science of predictive analytics to new heights, be it politics, entertainment, or sports.
Share Your Photos, Not Your Phone
Xim, a free app for Windows Phone, Android, and iOS, enhances social interactions and experiences by enabling nearly effortless photo sharing, be it face-to-face or in a remote setting.
Making Cortana the Researcher’s Dream Assistant
Cortana, the personal assistant for Windows Phone 8.1 powered by Bing, gets an infusion of academic data tightly integrated and prominently featured on its search pages.
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| The Catapult team |
Catapult: Moving Beyond CPUs in the Cloud
In a collaborative project called Catapult, Microsoft researchers and colleagues from Bing describe an effort to combine programmable hardware and software that uses field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to deliver performance improvements of as much as 95 percent.
OSDI '14 Highlight: Preserving Trust in the Cloud
Haven, the first system to achieve shielded execution of unmodified legacy applications, including SQL Server and Apache, on a commodity OS (Windows) and commodity hardware, is awarded Best Paper at the 11th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation. Other OSDI 2014 papers are featured.
Microsoft Research Adopts Open Access Policy for Publications
The open-access policy underscores Microsoft’s commitment to promoting open publication of all research results and encouraging deep collaborations with academic researchers.
Young Talent Gathers at Microsoft Research Asia PhD Forum
The past decade has witnessed an incredible boom in Chinese academic research—a boom fueled in large measure by talented young researchers. Microsoft Research Asia’s Joint PhD Program collaborates with leading Chinese universities to discover and foster outstanding research talent.
What if Coding Were a Game?
Code Hunt, a browser-based game, teaches coding as a by-product of solving a problem that is presented as pattern matching inputs and outputs. The fun is in finding the pattern.
Microsoft Research
