News & features
Mashup Developers Get Chance to Romp in Sandbox
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research Mashups have become one of the hallmarks of the Web 2.0 era. The practice of combining two sets of related yet disparate data from unrelated sources in one user-friendly, information-intensive collection has become…
Ensuring That Human Values Play a Central Role in Our Digital Future
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research On March 15-16, 2007, a forum entitled HCI 2020: Human Values in a Digital Age, was held in Sanlúcar la Mayor, Spain, just outside Seville. Its purpose was to gather luminaries in computing,…
Microsoft Researchers at Intersection of Science and Art
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research Life, a great man once said, is what happens while you’re busy making other plans. And sometimes, it appears, so is art. Three members of Microsoft Research can attest to that. The three,…
Translating the Web for the Entire World
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research People all over the world use the Internet every day, to purchase goods or services, to search for information, to find diversions. But is the World Wide Web truly worldwide? It’s difficult to…
Go Fishing for Ink with InkSeine
Ken Hinckley always thought that searching for information on his computer was like going on a fishing expedition. Every so often, he’d even catch whatever it was he wanted. Hinckley, a senior researcher in the Adaptive Systems and Interaction group…
Microsoft Research New England’s Focus: Research Relationships
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research On Feb. 4, Microsoft Research unveiled its latest lab, to be called Microsoft Research New England and to be based in Cambridge, Mass., in the midst of the Boston region’s bustling academic environment.…
Indian Team Applies Rigor to Solving Software Challenges
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research For Sriram Rajamani, the opportunity to work on improving software performance for Microsoft Research has been a productive, rewarding experience. And getting a chance to do so while stationed in his native India…
Spec#: Producing High-Quality Software
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research Modern-day software development is notoriously challenging. Programs have become highly complex. Customer expectations have never been higher. Meeting quality standards is increasingly difficult. Challenging, yes. Difficult, perhaps. But such hurdles are not insurmountable,…
Putting Search into Context
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research The breathtaking ascendance of Internet search over the past decade has tended to obscure the limitations of the underlying technology. So quickly has search been embraced by hundreds of millions worldwide that it…