Commute UX, a project from the Speech Technology group at Microsoft Research Redmond, is designed to make driving more pleasurable—and less distracting.

Why does your computer bother you so much about security, but still isn't secure? Butler Lampson of Microsoft Research New England says it's because users don't have a model for security, or a simple way to keep important things safe.

that combines RFID events with information from other enterprise systems and sensors to automatically make inferences about people, objects, workspaces, and their interactions.

Map-matching is the process of aligning a sequence of observed user positions with the road network on a digital map. It is a fundamental pre-processing step for many applications, such as moving object management, traffic flow analysis, and driving directions.

We show how model-based on-the-fly testing can be applied in the context of web applications using the NModel toolkit. The concrete case study is a commercial web-based positioning system called WorkForce Management (WFM) which interacts with a number of other

This study reports results of an ethnographic action research study, exploring mobile-centric internet use. Over the course of 13 weeks, eight women, each a member of a livelihoods collective in urban Cape Town, South Africa, received training to make use

Despite the widespread use of BM25, there have been few studies examining its effectiveness on a document description over single and multiple field combinations. We determine the effectiveness of BM25 on various document fields. We find that BM25 models relevance

Evaluating DVE topology management and message propagation schemes requires avatar movement models. Most models are based on reasoned assumptions rather than measured data, potentially biasing evaluation. We measured player movement in World of Warcraft battlegrounds, and compared our observations against

In this paper, we aim at characterizing podcast services both from publishers' and users' perspectives, and at analyzing the implications of these characteristics on the design of efficient dissemination systems. Specifically, our goal is to characterize how podcasting content is

Different queries require different ranking methods. It is however challenging to determine what queries are similar, and how to rank documents for them. In this paper, we propose a new method to cluster queries according to the similarity determined based

Most work in sensor networks tries to maximize network lifetime. However, for many applications the required lifetime is known in advance. Therefore, application quality should rather be maximized for that given time. Levels, the approach presented in this article, is

No search engine is perfect. A typical type of imperfection is the preference misalignment between search engines and end users, e.g., from time to time, web users skip higherranked documents and click on lower-ranked ones. Although search engines have been

Understanding intents from search queries can improve a user's search experience and boost a site's advertising profits. Query tagging via statistical sequential labeling models has been shown to perform well, but annotating the training set for supervised learning requires substantial