Burton J. Smith, an internationally recognized leader in high performance computer architecture, a co-founder of Cray, Inc. and a Microsoft technical fellow who innovated in the field of parallel computing and devoted his life to helping others, died April 3 at Regional Hospital in Highline Medical Center in Burien, Washington. He was 77. He is survived by two daughters, Julia and Katherine. Burton’s wife Dorothy had preceded him in death. Among his colleagues at Microsoft,…
April 4th, 2018
At the workshop, 400 female graduate students in their first, second, or third years will listen to speakers, attend mentoring lunches, meet other graduate students in their research areas, get one-on-one career mentoring and have many informal chats.
April 4th, 2018
Episode 18, April 4, 2018 - Dr. Chandra talks about how his research may eventually make your wi-fi signal stronger and your battery life longer, but also shares the story of how spending childhood summers with his grandparents in rural India inspired a line of research that could change the face of farming and help meet the food and nutrition needs of a growing global population.
April 4th, 2018
It’s a big shift to change from being motivated by getting published in prestigious conferences and journals, to being motivated by solving real problems for real people. Halfway through my 18-year research career working on program synthesis–the task of automatically constructing a program that satisfies a given high-level specification–I had a series of epiphanies that profoundly changed the way I approach research. Yes, I had a good and rising publication list, h-index, and awards. Yes,…
March 29th, 2018
Episode 17, March 28, 2018 - Dr. McDuff talks about why we need computers to understand us, outlines the pros and cons of designing emotionally sentient agents, explains the technology behind CardioLens, a pair of augmented reality glasses that can take your heartrate by looking at your face, and addresses the challenges of maintaining trust and privacy when we’re surrounded by devices that want to know not just what we’re doing, but how we’re feeling.
March 28th, 2018
The Microsoft Research PhD Scholarship Programme in EMEA awards scholarships to fund the most promising and groundbreaking computer science research by PhD students across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. We are extremely proud today to highlight some of the selected projects for 2018.
March 26th, 2018
In a recent collaboration, Microsoft and China’s Tsinghua University released an academic graph, named Open Academic Graph (OAG). This billion-scale academic graph integrates the current Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG) and Tsinghua's AMiner academic graph. Specifically, it contains the metadata information of 155 million academic paper metadata from AMiner and 166 million papers from MAG. By consolidating metadata information of each, it generates nearly 65 million matching relationships between the two academic graphs [1]. The construction…
March 22nd, 2018
Episode 16, March 21, 2018 - Dr. Trischler talks about his dream of making literate machines, his efforts to design meta-learning algorithms that can actually learn to learn, the importance of what he calls “few-shot learning” in that meta-learning process, and how, through a process of one-to-many mapping in machine learning, our computers not may not only be answering our questions, but asking them as well.
March 21st, 2018
Last week’s rollout of SwiftKey 7.0 is the intelligent keyboard app’s biggest update since joining Microsoft in April 2016. Available on both Android and iOS, SwiftKey 7.0 debuts Toolbar, an expandable menu found under a new '+' sign on the left of your prediction bar that gives you fast and easy access to both new and existing features. For Android users, Toolbar will replace the existing Hub. Tapping on the '+' will reveal not only…
March 20th, 2018
Today's update from Microsoft debuts a new feature for its intelligent camera app, Microsoft Pix, that works with LinkedIn, showcasing the productivity capabilities of the AI-powered camera. The new Business Card feature for iPhones makes it quick and easy for you to add contacts, not only to your iPhone's address book but also to your LinkedIn account. To use, simply open Pix and point your iPhone at a contact's business card. Microsoft Pix automatically detects…
March 9th, 2018
“Ask yourself how you really want to interact with virtual objects? The simple answer is that we want to handle them as if they are real, just reach out a hand to grasp them, pick them up, feel what they’re made of, and do all that in a natural way that requires no learning.” said Mike Sinclair, principal researcher at Microsoft Research’s Redmond, WA labs. Sinclair is part of a team of talented researchers at…
March 8th, 2018
Episode 15, March 7, 2018 - Dr. Badam discusses the historic trade-offs between volatile and non-volatile memory, shares how software-defined batteries are changing the power-supply landscape, talks about how his research is aiming for the trifecta of speed, cost and capacity in new memory technologies, and reminds us, once again, how one good high school physics teacher can inspire the next generation of scientific discovery.
March 7th, 2018
