News and Awards

Your house plants are definitely sending you a message when they wilt or drop leaves on the floor. But what if they could actually “speak” to you and convey how they’re feeling?

Thanks to Project Florence, you can now talk to the plants in your garden. We have been hearing and reading that talking to plants or playing music near plants help them grow better.

Adam Fourney received the Bill Buxton Dissertation Award (opens in new tab) for the best doctoral dissertation completed at a Canadian university in the field of Human-Computer Interaction. His dissertation: Web Search, Web Tutorials &…

Project Florence could have incredible implications for the future of farming–and revolutionize the way we understand our environment.

Researchers have decoded the genomes of mammoths and a 700,000-year-old horse using DNA fragments extracted from fossils in the past few years. DNA clearly persists far longer than the bodies for which it carries the…

Project Florence could have incredible implications for the future of farming—and revolutionize the way we understand our environment.

Hanna Wallach was honored with the Borg Early Career Award (opens in new tab) from the Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRA-W). For a woman in computer science and/or engineering who…

Citing 25 years of significant impact on software engineering research, the IEEE Computer Society Technical Council on Software Engineering has awarded Microsoft Research the 2016 TCSE Distinguished Synergy Award.

Yuval Peres (opens in new tab) elected as Foreign Associate and Robert Schapire elected as a member to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) (opens in new tab) for distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.…

Aaron Sidford awarded ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award Honorable Mention (opens in new tab) for his dissertation, “Iterative Methods, Combinatorial Optimization, and Linear Programming Beyond the Universal Barrier (opens in new tab),” which provides the first…