Bargaining networks model social or economic situations in which agents seek to form the most lucrative partnership with another agent from among several alternatives. There has been a flurry of recent research studying Nash bargaining solutions (also called `balanced outcomes') in bargaining networks, so that we now know when such solutions exist, .. more »

Street Slide: Browsing Street Level Imagery.. more »

Craig Mundie, Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer, says that the many areas in which Microsoft Research offers expertise has been the key to the forthcoming Kinect system that enables game control through body movements... more »

Judith Bishop and Rico Malvar were among those who represented Microsoft Research during the Snowbird Conference, held in Utah from July 18 to 20 under the auspices of the Computing Research Association... more »

Microsoft Research's danah boyd and her colleague Eszter Hargittai have published a paper that examines the attitudes and practices of 18- and 19-year-olds regarding Facebook's privacy settings... more »

As users of social networking websites expand their network of friends, they are often flooded with newsfeed posts and status updates, most of which they consider to be "unimportant" and not newsworthy. In order to better understand how people judge the importance of their newsfeed, we conducted a study in which Facebook users were asked to rate .. more »

In this paper, we describe and evaluate two state-of-the-art systems for identifying and correcting writing errors involving English articles and prepositions. CriterionSM, developed by Educational Testing Service, and ESL Assistant, developed by Microsoft Research, both use machine learning techniques to build models of article and preposition .. more »

David Heckerman, Microsoft distinguished scientist and senior director of the eScience Research Group within Microsoft Research, discusses his work in applying advanced algorithms to human biology... more »

danah boyd of Microsoft Research New England discusses her observation that behavior at social-networking websites amounts to a form of "white flight" for the digital age... more »

Microsoft's new toy allows for a more seamless walk down an online avenue... more »

To evaluate the diversity of search results, test collections have been developed that identify multiple intents for each query. Intents are the different meanings or facets that should be covered in a search results list. This means that topic development involves proposing a set of intents for each query. We propose four measurable properties of .. more »

Information retrieval effectiveness is usually evaluated using measures such as Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG), Mean Average Precision (MAP) and Precision at some cutoff (Precision@k) on a set of judged queries. Recent research has suggested an alternative, evaluating information retrieval systems based on user behavior. Particularly .. more »

This paper presents an investigation into the possibility of using a regular concurrent programming language for modelling and implementing digital circuits. Some of the reasons for using an existing language include the ability to use existing compilers and analysis tools for circuit design and verification. Another important reason is the ever .. more »

Microsoft Research will be making a robust contribution to SIGGRAPH 2010, being held in Los Angeles from July 25 to 29... more »

Over the last five years, P. Anandan has built Microsoft Research India into one of the nation's premier research institutions... more »

Enabling applications to execute various tasks in parallel is difficult if those tasks exhibit read and write conflicts. We recently developed a programming model based on concurrent revisions that addresses this challenge in a novel way: each forked task gets a conceptual copy of all the shared state, and state changes are integrated only when .. more »

The cultural heritage of a region consists of both tangible physical artifacts and various intangible aspects in the form of stories associated with the regions, dance styles, rituals, etc. Hitherto, the task of creating digital representations for each of these aspects has been addressed in isolation, i.e. using specific media most suited to the .. more »

Microsoft Research announced July 12 at its annual Faculty Summit that it has awarded a $200,000 fellowship grant to each of seven young computer science faculty members... more »

Prior studies on multi-style language model reveal that, when elaborated modeling techniques are employed to properly account for various language style usages in the documents, the resultant language modeling scores appear to be a reasonable proxy to hu-man relevance judgments. As the need of manually labeled data remains a formidable impediment .. more »

This paper presents a comparative study of the recently released Bing Web N-gram Language Models (BWNLM) on three web search and natural language processing tasks: search query spelling correction, query reformulation, and statistical machine translation. BWNLM, as well as the corresponding web services, are much more accessible and easier to use .. more »