Posted by Steve Clayton

I’ve learned to track the work of Hrvoje Benko from Microsoft Research quite closely. This week at TechFest, he has been showing his latest project.

This week at Techfest, the Technologies for Emerging Markets team at Microsoft Reearch India is showing a lightweight, inexpensive system to instantly gather responses from students in classrooms.

There are a lot of really cool projects at TechFest this year - if you pushed me to pick a personal favorite, I'd choose FetchClimate!. With amazing demonstrations such as Holoflector and Illumishare, this is one that you may not expect...allow me to explain why I'm so excited about FetchClimate!

There is much discussion these days of the use of touch and multi-touch in interface design. But this week at Techfest, Helena Mentis and her teammates in the Socio-Digital Systems group in Microsoft Research Cambridge were showing two projects exploring interfaces where the intent is to avoid touch.

Posted by Rob Knies

As “news” increasingly has morphed into “conversation” over the past decade, the blog has become one of the pre-eminent platforms fostering that discussion. It’s undeniably true, whether you’re examining political dynamics in Syria, college basketball tournaments in the United States, or the latest chartbuster from Adele. Whatever your interest, there’s a blog—or a dozen—to cater to it.

That’s true in the world of computer-science research, too. Just ask Omer Reingold, principal researcher at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley.

Reingold’s interests focus on computer-science theory, and a couple of months ago, he and his lab colleagues were exploring the launching of a blog to test the theory waters. A handful of weeks later, they’re quite happy they did so, given the initial response to Windows on Theory.—a name chosen for its Microsoft connection, not because the blog is focused solely on the Windows operating system.