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The Computer, Once a Tool for Scientists, Is Becoming a Collaborator
It's not just a tool serving science anymore. It's becoming a part of the science.

New Area in Microsoft Research: Looking for a RiSE in Developer Productivity
A new research area within Microsoft Research Redmond aims to improve the process of software development by providing better foundations, languages, and tools for describing, analyzing, testing, and executing software.

Microsoft Goes Far Afield to Study Emerging Markets
A nine-person team at Microsoft Research India approaches the technology of emerging markets in unconventional ways. Most often, they rely on a mix of sociology and empirical testing to see whether quirky ideas can make technology useful to those who have heretofore lived without it.

Dryad: Programming the Datacenter
The Dryad project from Microsoft Research Silicon Valley makes it easier for programmers to make distributed applications analyze data concurrently over large-scale systems.

Can Microsoft Innovate in a Web-Centric World?
For all its dominance, the company needs to find a way to prove to the public that it is indeed a masterful game-changer, and part of that may come from shifting the way it invents itself. Microsoft Research could play a key role.

Video: Countdown to PDC2008 - Rick Rashid, a Researcher’s Researcher
Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research, talks about all of the cool innovation coming out of his organization and foreshadows his PDC keynote.

Microsoft Unveils Prototype Search Engine That Personalizes Results
Microsoft Research has developed a prototype search engine with social-networking features that let users edit and reorder search results, and share them with online friends.

Microsoft SecondLight Makes 'Surface' Magic
Take Microsoft Surface, sprinkle it with fairy dust, and you might have something close to Microsoft's SecondLight, a new technology in the works from Microsoft Research.

ESL Assistant Helps Non-Native English Speakers Help Themselves
ESL Assistant, a beta Web service recently released from Microsoft Research Redmond, helps non-native English users confirm that their choice of words is correct.

Microsoft Aims to Get More Touchy-Feely
At a user interface conference this week, Microsoft plans to present several research papers, including a number designed to take the multitouch interface used in Microsoft's Surface and expand it into new arenas.

Video Investigations Enable Researcher Hua to Find Success
Xian-Sheng Hua, a lead researcher at Microsoft Research Asia, explores multimedia advertising and content analysis, and his work has been recognized by Technology Review, which named him to its annual list of top innovators under the age of 35.

UW, Microsoft Research Aim to Turn Northwest Into a Neural Engineering Hotspot
The Pacific Northwest Center for Neural Engineering Workshop, held Oct. 9 at Microsoft Research's Redmond lab, focused on fostering more collaboration among the region’s engineers, physicists, biologists, computer scientists, and neuroscientists.

Intelligent Machines? Think Again
At Microsoft Research's Cambridge laboratory, researchers have been building a video camera, designed for teleconferencing, which has intelligence built in so that participants do not have to think about whether they are “on camera” and in view.

U Rank: Search Gets Organized
U Rank is a search engine that enables people to organize, edit, and annotate search results, as well as share information with others.

Revisiting Old Technology Could Bring Broadband to Masses
During the second International Federation for Information Processing International Symposium on Wireless Communications and Information Technology in Developing Countries, Microsoft Research's Victor Bahl described how revisiting old technology and tweaking current legislation could be the answer to providing cheap broadband en masse in South Africa and other developing nations.

Intelligent Systems: Tools That Will Discreetly Tap a Shoulder to Offer Help
Eric Horvitz of Microsoft Research wants computer applications to be courteous and intelligent about the nature and timing of interruptions, that understand how busy you are and when to defer alerts till later.

Microsoft Research, NYU, and Consortium of University Partners Create First Scientific-Based Game Research Alliance to Transform Learning
Games for Learning Institute to study how games can boost student interest in math and sciences.

Tech Experts Enable Virtual Walk Through Heritage Sites
India’s cultural heritage and monuments are to be presented (in an interactive way) and preserved virtually with the Department of Science and Technology, Academia and Microsoft Research India coming together in a new venture.

Research Interest Growing in India
Compared to a thousand doctorates in computer science that come out of American universities every year, India produces 50. But the situation in India is improving, says P. Anandan, managing director of Microsoft Research India.

A New Prototype: Research Desktop
Here’s something cool: a Microsoft Research prototype called Research Desktop, "a project aimed to demonstrate Microsoft innovation in the area of content management and analysis and design of personal information management environments."

The A-Z of Programming Languages: Haskell
Simon Peyton-Jones of Microsoft Research Cambridge talks about why he is most proud of Haskell's purity, type system, and monads.

'The Best Place in the World' for Interdisciplinary Research: A Talk with Microsoft’s Jennifer Chayes
After the opening of Microsoft’s newest research lab, in Cambridge, Mass, I met the lab’s director, Jennifer Chayes. I have to say that Microsoft could hardly have picked a more dynamic and outgoing person to lead its first formal research facility in the Hub.

Gadgets Help Draw World's Poorest into Global Economy
People in the developed world enjoy instant access to information and take global connectivity for granted. But the world's poorest people are still largely excluded from the economic and social benefits that widespread access to digital technology can bring. Some projects, including one from Microsoft Research, are seeking to redress this imbalance.

Microsoft Makes Key Hire in Researcher Danah Boyd
Microsoft Research has hired social-network researcher danah boyd. Boyd, who spells her own name with lower-case letters, is probably the most high-profile academic in the world focused on the emerging Web and its social consequences.

Doors Open at Microsoft Research New England
Microsoft celebrated the official opening of its newest research lab, in Cambridge, Mass., on Sept. 22 with a daylong symposium at MIT on the intersection of computer science and the social sciences.

Microsoft Research New England Kicks Off New Era in Computer Science
New lab in Cambridge, Mass., to focus on interdisciplinary research in partnership with region’s tech community.

Innovation Inquiries: The Birth of a Research Lab
As Microsoft Research New England prepares for its opening symposium, to be held Sept. 22 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Jennifer Chayes, managing director, outlines the progress made by her lab since its February unveiling.

INRIA Researcher Wins Royal Society and Académie des sciences Microsoft Award
Nicholas Ayache, research director for the French national institute for research in computer science and automatic control, has been named the 2008 winner of the Royal Society and Académie des sciences Microsoft Award.

Computing at the Bottom of the Pyramid
Microsoft's research lab in India, more so than its five counterparts around the world, has become the company's locus for ideas on how to use technology to bridge the developing world's digital divide and make some money along the way.

Oded Schramm, 46, Mathematician, Is Dead
Oded Schramm, a Microsoft researcher who melded ideas from two branches of mathematics into an equation that applies to a multitude of physics problems from the percolation of water through rocks to the tangling of polymers, died Sept. 1 in a fall at Guye Peak near Snoqualmie Pass in Washington state. He was 46.

Winning Academy Awards and Naming Asteroids Can’t Compare to Working on ClearType
John Platt, a research area manager at Microsoft Research Redmond, discusses his interesting career with a prominent blogger.

AutoCollage: Summarize Your Adventures with a Click
AutoCollage, a new product created by Microsoft Research Cambridge in conjunction with colleagues on two other continents, enables users to assemble a representative, attractive photo collage with a minimum of effort.

Novel Genetics Research Advances Possibility of HIV Vaccine
Massachusetts General HospitalHIV Vaccine Study has discovered how the HIV virus evades the human body’s immune system. The research involves scientists from the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, Massachusetts General Hospital, Microsoft Research, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Microsoft Touts Functional Programming with F#
Microsoft is boosting integration of functional programming with its Visual Studio 2008 software-development platform. Improved integration is featured in a September Community Technology Preview of the F# language for the .NET platform. The development of F# was spearheaded by Microsoft Research Cambridge.