MS Research

It's been a while since we checked in with the Singularity folks over in MSR Redmond. You know, the usual suspects like Jim Larus and Galen Hunt. So, Charles went and visited them recently to see where they are with Singularity, see what they're up to, what's new... As you may expect, they…

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…

Recently, we visited MSR Cambridge(UK) to meet some of the great minds working there. In this case, we were fortunate enough to get an hour's time with Simon Peyton-Jones and Tim Harris, who are researchers working on a very hard problem: making it easier (more predictable, more reliable, more…

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…

Jim Gray is a distinguished engineer in Microsoft's Scalable Servers Research Group and manager of our Bay Area Research Center. That doesn't even start to do justice to the role Jim has played in the development of databases. You might know him as the guy behind Terra Service or Sky…

    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…

CHESS is an automated tool from Microsoft Research for finding errors in multithreaded software by systematic exploration of thread schedules. It finds errors, such as data-races, deadlocks, hangs, and data-corruption induced access violations, that are extremely hard to find with…

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…

Charles Torre and Robert Scoble recently visited Microsoft's Research Center in San Francisco, CA (They call it the Bay Area Research Center) where Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell work. Don't know who Gordon Bell is? He's one of the most respected technologists in the world and is the founder of the…

Developed by a group of people at MSR Cairo, Mobicast is a system that allows users to sync and stream live video from a number of handheld portable devices (e.g., cell phones) and have those streams stitched together on the viewer-end, creating a single, larger image. We don't get out to Cairo…