MS Research

"Concurrent Basic extends Visual Basic with stylish asynchronous concurrency constructs derived from the join calculus. Our design advances earlier MSRC work on Polyphonic C#, Comega and the Joins Library. Unlike its C# based predecessors, CB adopts a simple event-like syntax…

Ever wonder what it takes to compute language (language in this case refers to what we humans speak and or/write)? From Wikipedia: Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the statistical and/or rule-based modeling of natural language from a computational…

    Building applications that are responsive and can exploit parallel hardware poses an important challenge. In particular, enabling applications to execute various tasks in parallel can be difficult if those tasks exhibit read and write conflicts. Revisions are forked and joined…

Drawbridge is a research prototype of a new form of virtualization for application sandboxing. Drawbridge combines two core technologies: First, a picoprocess, which is a process-based isolation container with a minimal kernel API surface. Second, a library OS, which is a version of Windows…

ICSE, the International Conference on Software Engineering,® is the premier software engineering conference, providing a forum for researchers, practitioners and educators to present and discuss the most recent innovations, trends, experiences and concerns in the field of software engineering.…

From something as simple as a paperclip to far more complex machines such as computers, there are a wide variety of machines forming a regular part of our daily lives. None, however, come close to the complexity found in the machine that is the human being.When you think of Microsoft, you might…

Typed Assembly Language (TAL) extends traditional untyped assembly languages with typing annotations, memory management primitives, and a sound set of typing rules. These typing rules guarantee the memory safety, control flow safety, and type safety of TAL programs. Moreover, the typing constructs…

You may recall us thinking outloud about the idea of an advanced keyboard using LCD displays for each key and a touch LCD panel across the top. We call it our Adaptive Keyboard and it's an idea that Steven Bathiche has been thinking about for many years in our Applied Sciences Group. This year…

Jamie Shotton is one of the inventors of Human Skeletal Tracking—he works in Microsoft Research Cambridge and dropped by the states, and our studio, to chat about this great invention. Human skeletal tracking employed in Kinect is a great example of collaboration between MSR and Microsoft…

Brian Beckman is a fascinating individual. Ex-cosmologist, ex-military operating system and simulation developer (have you ever considered processes that move both forward and backward in time? Well, Brian and team at JPL created just that. He explains in this interview...). Brian was one of…