Microsoft Research

October 10, 2013
Get inside the head of a Microsoft researcher who can riff on processors, Aerosmith and Godzilla

If you want to get inside the head of a researcher who works on fast, scalable storage systems for datacenters, check out James Mickens’ essay, “The Slow Winter.” Mickens, a researcher in the Distributed Systems group at Microsoft’s Redmond lab, riffs on a variety of topics that don’t seem to have much to do with each other, but he makes connections between air travel’s heyday, the hard working (and harder partying) glory days of being a hardware architect and touring with Aerosmith.

October 10, 2013
Microsoft researcher tunes into social media metrics by interviewing musicians

In a paper published Monday, Microsoft Research’s Nancy Baym focuses on musicians and the “big difference between massive amounts of data being available, thanks to new media, and being well-equipped to manage and interpret data. It’s important because, these days, people are putting a lot of faith in big data, often harvested from social media, as a purveyor of truth.”

October 3, 2013
From student to Microsoft employee, a journey marked by thinking big and driving forward

New Microsoft employee Katie Doran can’t imagine a more perfect theme for the 2013 Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) of Women in Computing than “Think Big, Drive Forward.” In a blog post on the Microsoft Research Connections Blog, Doran writes that she has been “thinking big things about my own career and driving ideas forward through events like GHC, the world’s largest annual event for technical women.”