Microsoft Research News and Highlights

In-Place, a project from Microsoft Research Redmond, combines technologies from the 1990s with the newfound capabilities of the 21st century to create a novel approach to touch interaction with display screens.

Microsoft—and Microsoft Research in particular—are demonstrating a commitment to encourage more girls and young women to consider a career in computer science during the 12th annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.

During UIST 2012, Microsoft Research will show revolutionary new interfaces, including a wrist-worn sensor that recovers the full 3-D pose of the user's hand without needing “data gloves.”

Big data has become a key topic for scientists, researchers, and technologists, as became obvious to those attending Microsoft Research's 2012 eScience Workshop.

Microsoft has released the beta release of Try F#. which makes programming in F# 3.0 easy to learn, simple to use3, and straightforward to share.

On Oct. 9, Antony John Williams, who is working to construct a platform to enable a semantic web for chemistry, was named the winner of the 2012 Jim Gray Award.

Microsoft researchers, working with a colleague from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, have developed a library of code that converts a 2-D video or still image into a 3-D depth image.

The potential for using technology to battle human trafficking gained the spotlight during a Sept. 24 event at the U.S. White House.

Georges Gonthier of Microsoft Research Cambridge, working with colleagues from Inria, recently delivered a computer-assisted proof of the Feit-Thompson Theorem, which when first published 50 years ago, took two volumes and 255 pages to contain it.

Gesture control, devices that recognize different people, and tricks to make a screen feel as if it has physical buttons could be coming to your gadgets.

KinEtre, a 3-D animator from Microsoft Research, lets you control virtual objects on a screen with your body.

Microsoft researcher Cormac Herley, who specializes in computer security, says that running up-to-date software and antivirus software can help thwart password-based security exploits.

Forget being stuck standing directly in front of a gaming console for some interactive fun. Steerable augmented reality called Beamatron from Microsoft Research can turn a whole room or space into a game.

On Oct. 12, the PBS NewsHour will explore three ways to predict the presidential election: polling, economic modeling, and betting in the prediction markets. Economist David Rothschild of Microsoft Research New York City tracks all three.

The Microsoft eScience Workshop, held in Chicago, explored the current state of how science can be extended through computing and looked forward to what progress could be made in the future.

On Oct. 16, John Markoff of The New York Times will participate in a Computer History Museum discussion with Rick Rashid, head of Microsoft Research, as part of the museum’s Revolutionaries Series of invited speakers.

Teachers could get an instant read of students' comprehension with a new, low-cost polling technique being developed by Microsolft Research India.

Microsoft Research has released an SDK for Windows 8 that you can use to develop Windows Store apps that take advantage of cloud services and Windows Azure.