Proving software free of security bugs is hard. Programming language support to ensure that programs correctly enforce their security policies would help, but, to date, no language has the ability to verify the enforcement of the kinds of policies used in practice---dynamic, stateful policies which address a broad range of concerns including forms .. more »

Behavioural type and effect systems regulate properties such as adherence to object and communication protocols, dynamic security policies, avoidance of race conditions, and many others. Typically, each system is based on some specific syntax of constraints, and is checked with an ad hoc solver. Instead, we advocate types refined with first-order .. more »

Built on Microsoft cloud services technologies, NASA’s interactive “citizen-science” Web service lets anyone explore the Red Planet up close, while also contributing to Mars missions... more »

The Games for Learning Institute, a joint research endeavor of Microsoft Research, New York University, and other universities, has announced the Game Design Challenge to build mini-games for learning on Microsoft’s XNA Game Studio 3.1 platform... more »

Recommender systems are now popular both commercially and in the research community, where many approaches have been suggested for providing recommendations. In many cases a system designer that wishes to employ a recommendation system must choose between a set of candidate approaches. A first step towards selecting an appropriate algorithm is to .. more »

Predicting user's action provides many monetization opportunities to web service providers. If a user's future action can be predicted and identified correctly in time or in advance, we can not only satisfy user's current need, but also facilitate and simplify user's future online activities. Traditional works on user behavior modeling such as .. more »

Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer of Microsoft delivered a lecture titled Rethinking Computing at The Chinese University of Hong Kong on Nov. 16... more »

A new study from Microsoft Research shows the power of seeding your code with assertions... more »

A sensing surface developed by Microsoft researchers offers new ways to use computers... more »

We provide sample code implementing the algorithm described in our 1999 paper “Optimal Compression of IP Routing Tables.” This is a single C file: no binary, installation kit, nor documentation... more »

Dynamically allocated and manipulated data structures cannot be translated into hardware unless there is an upper bound on the amount of memory the program uses during all executions. This bound can depend on the generic parameters to the program, i.e., program inputs that are instantiated at synthesis time. We propose a constraint based method for .. more »

We show how model-based on-the-fly testing can be applied in the context of web applications using the NModel toolkit. The concrete case study is a commercial web-based positioning system called WorkForce Management (WFM) which interacts with a number of other services, such as billing and positioning, through a mobile operator. We describe the .. more »

Lost in Translation: Forgetful Semantic Anchoring.. more »

After the Nov. 4 announcement of Microsoft Research’s Mt. Fuji Plan, Microsoft Research Asia demonstrated its commitment to one of the plan’s key pillars, collaboration with academia, during the 11th annual Computing in the 21st Century conference... more »

Craig Mundie, Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer, finished his 2009 Microsoft College Tour at the University of Washington on Thursday, demonstrating a few prototype technologies from Microsoft Research... more »

Wed like to share a little news about Live Labs with you. Weve recently made some changes to our organization, and a number of teams from within the lab will be joining product groups around the company. For instance, the social streams team . Some of our engineers will be helping out with the next generation of Windows Mobile. And others are off .. more »

Desktop notifications are designed to provide awareness of information while a user is attending to a primary task. Unfortunately the awareness can come with the price of disruption to the task at focus of attention. We review results of a field study on the use and perceived value of email notifications in the workplace. We recorded users’ in.. more »

Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer of Microsoft will deliver a lecture titled Rethinking Computing at The Chinese University of Hong Kong on Nov. 16... more »

danah boyd of Microsoft Research New England discusses her work with the findingEducation blog... more »

Mobicast - A system for collaborative event casting using mobile phones.. more »