Data Science for Research

May 6, 2019 | A team of researchers at the Human Computation Institute and Cornell University seek to understand what causes a 30% reduction of blood flow to the brain in Alzheimer’s patients. Preliminary findings from the Schaffer-Nishimura Biomedical Engineering Lab suggest…

March 12, 2019 | What started as a one-day conference organized by Stanford University in 2015, Women in Data Science (WiDS) has blossomed into a movement bringing together women data scientists and aspiring data scientists via a series of over 150 virtual and in-person events worldwide, ultimately culminating in the March 4, 2019 main event at Stanford…

March 1, 2019 | It’s not uncommon for physicians to disagree about a diagnosis. That’s why people often seek a second or third opinion when faced with a serious or complex health concern. What if instead of a second opinion, hundreds of expert opinions could be collated…

June 21, 2018 | The Microsoft Research Outreach team has worked extensively with the external research community to enable adoption of cloud-based research infrastructure over the past few years. Through this process, we experienced…

June 21, 2018 | Over the past decade, Microsoft has partnered with the National Science Foundation (NSF) on three separate programs, first in 2010, and more recently through a commitment of $6M in cloud credits across two NSF supported data science programs…

July 11, 2018 | Scientific research breakthroughs are often achieved when many different scientists, in different labs and organizations, work together on a single task. That happened at the turn of the 21st century with the Human Genome Project, where human DNA was mapped for future reference and is now key to many breakthroughs in medicine…

July 31, 2017 | The newspaper headlines about “Bangalore’s looming water crisis” have been ominous, with one urban planning expert proclaiming that Bangalore will become “unlivable” in a few years because of water scarcity. This is a critical issue that threatens the future of one of India’s fastest-growing cities. In fact, water availability is a cause for worry in the entire country. According to an estimate by The Asian Development…

March 13, 2017 | Doctors make life-saving — and life-changing — decisions every day. But how do they know that they are making the best decisions? Can artificial intelligence (AI) help? “Before evidence-based medicine, decision-making in health care was heavily reliant on the expertise and knowledge of the health professional, usually a doctor. What has happened in the last 20, 30 years is that the health…

March 9, 2017 | While some may regard data science as an easy passport to a job for the tech savvy, Luis Macias has different ideas. The fourth-year undergraduate student, who is majoring in American Studies at University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), wants to turn the hype of data science into hope for low-income…

June 16, 2016 | People often rank public speaking as the number one fear that they face. New cloud-based technology from researchers at the University of Rochester lets speakers polish and practice at home in front of their computer camera, while the analysis provides instant feedback about improvement. Leading this effort known as ROC Speak is M. Ehsan Hoque, an assistant professor of…

May 5, 2016 | On October 31, 2013, the city of Austin, Texas, faced a destructive flood. At the time, I was visiting David Maidment, Chaired Professor of the Civil Engineering Center for Research in Water Resources on site at the University of Texas at Austin. The day before the flood, we had been discussing research and analytics around the long-standing drought conditions across western Texas. Overnight…

April 14, 2016 | Jacob Katuva used to get up at dawn to cycle 12 miles from his village to collect water with his uncles and cousins when he was growing up in Kenya. Now he is part of a research team at the University of Oxford using cloud computing and mobile sensors to monitor water wells and help ensure that thousands of villages in rural Africa and Asia have a safe, secure supply of water. Millions of people across the world fear not having…

February 24, 2016 | Nobody likes a delay at the airport. Many of us have spent time buckled up, ready for takeoff, wondering why our plane is stuck on its way between the gate and the runway. Scientists in the United Kingdom are working hard to help untangle these airport operations, to help save fuel, money, and impact on the environment…

February 2, 2016 | Shellfish farmer Bill Dewey remembers the first year he heard of ocean acidification, a phrase that means a change in chemistry for ocean water. It was around 2008, and Dewey worked for Taylor Shellfish, a company that farms oysters in ocean waters off the coast of Washington. That year, thousands of tiny “seed” oysters died off suddenly. Today, a cloud-based predictive system from the University of Washington…

August 28, 2015 | Stuart, a 66-year-old man with diabetes, felt lousy—constantly fatigued, nauseated, and short of breath after just the slightest exertion. His daughter, worried by his increasing frailty, took him to the emergency room at the local hospital. Her concern was amply justified: Stuart was suffering from heart failure. Like 5.1 million other…

April 2, 2015 | More than half of the world’s population now lives in cities and suburbs, and as just about any of these billions of people can tell you, urban traffic can be a nightmare. Cars stack up bumper-to-bumper, clogging our highways, jangling our nerves, taxing our patience, polluting our air, and taking a toll on our productivity. In short, traffic jams impair on our emotional, physical, and economic…

December 16, 2014 | The forests that surround Campos do Jordao are among the foggiest places on Earth. With a canopy shrouded in mist much of time, these are the renowned cloud forests of the Brazilian state of São Paulo. It is here that researchers from the São Paulo Research Foundation—better known by its Portuguese acronym, FAPESP—have partnered with Rafael Olivier, professor of ecology…