Innovation entries related to Research

The EU and its Member States investment in R&D is a vital, long-term investment in our collective future. In coming years, Europe’s prosperity, competitiveness and social cohesion will depend far more on its intellectual capital than on any other form of wealth; to starve its education, research or innovation base now will set back Europe’s global competitiveness by years.

A six year research project leads to a major result for mathematics and computer science, highlighting the benefits of academia-industry partnership.

The decade of genomic revolution following the complete determination of the human DNA sequence, has produced significant medical advances, and yet again, revealed how complicated human biology is, and how much more remains to be understood. Biology is an extraordinary complicated puzzle; we may know some of its pieces but have no clue how they are assembled to orchestrate the symphony of life, which...

The first Innovation Convention and the publication of Horizon 2020 – the Framework Programme for Research and Innovation – last December were an essential part of the Innovation Union flagship initiative, as well as an important milestone in the development of the Europe 2020 strategy. The Innovation Convention brought new energy to the discussion of how Europe can become even more...

The Global Innovation Index (GII) project was launched by INSEAD business school in 2007 with the goal of determining metrics and approaches to better capture the richness of innovation in society and go beyond traditional measures of innovation such as the number of PhDs, the number of research articles produced, research centres created, patents issued, and research and development expenditures.

“Report issues with city infrastructure in real-time” StreetCare is a Citizen Service Platform solution which enables governments to do more with less, meeting their citizens’ needs to participate and connect with their local government.

VENUS-C is a pioneering, multidisciplinary initiative between industrial partners and scientific user communities that enables cloud computing for research and industry applications. Microsoft invests in Windows Azure resources and manpower through Redmond and its European research centers. VENUS-C is co-funded by the GÉANT and e-Infrastructure Unit and DG Information Society and Media of the...

Firstline Doctor/Patient Demonstration is an intelligent exchange platform developed specifically for the healthcare sector. By automating the communications flow between doctors and patients, the system will result in a number of important benefits for both providers and consumers of healthcare services. Simple but often time-consuming tasks such as making appointments, writing prescriptions and accessing...

Public 360° is a leading application suite for integrated Case, Document & Records Management designed specifically for public administrations.

Organisations of all types are adopting cloud computing technologies to gain flexibility and strategic advantage in their environments.

Educate, inspire, connect – three words that describe the unique summit taking place this year: the 61st annual Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting.  It is an exceptional conference which illustrates just how meaningful and fascinating science is for society.

Microsoft and the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) recently announced the latest awardees for the joint Microsoft-NSF research partnership in cloud computing. As part of this agreement with the NSF, Microsoft is making available access to Windows Azure , Microsoft's cloud computing platform. In addition, a support team of Microsoft researchers and developers is working with grant...

Early May, European Commissioner for Research and Innovation Máire Geoghegan-Quinn re-stated her desire to go further in cutting red tape and for the Commission to be innovative itself to release the full potential of EU funded research and innovation. She encouraged interested parties who had not yet given their views to respond to the consultation on the Common Strategic Framework for Research and...

The European Commission has placed innovation at the heart of the Europe 2020 strategy, encouraging large companies to play a key role through investing in research and development (R&D), as well as through public-private partnerships. 

Finland has set out to create a university that has innovation built into its foundations, merging three institutions into one along the way.  Is Aalto a model for universities in other countries?

Are our schools and universities teaching the right skills to enable a new generation of IT practitioners to drive forward innovation? The question has to be asked, since everyone accepts that IT has a critical part to play in an innovation-based economy. It’s not just about companies selling IT products and services, but about how industries wield information technology to innovate in...

In this case study, you can read about how the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) collaborated with Microsoft in developing an interactive application to engage citizens in the exploration of Mars.

Following the interview with Craig Mundie we posted last week, I’d like to dig a little bit more on the idea of turning ideas into products. We get a lot of questions about what Microsoft does with the more than €6.5 billion we invest in R&D every year.

During the decade I spent at Microsoft Research in Cambridge I’ve witnessed numerous technology transfers from our basic research facility to various business units in the company (for instance F#, TrueSkill, Kinect). There was certainly no unique recipe to make them happen but at high level, there are few principles we can extract.

Cloud computing will dramatically lower the barriers many researchers face accessing and generating life science data. This shift is not unlike the one that occurred in the 1970s when the first personal computers were sold.

Benjamin Cohen of Channel 4 News in the UK visited Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, Washington, recently and my colleague Steve Clayton took him on a tour to see the people who are building the future and the places where they're building it.   

Did you ever wonder what mathematics has to do with saving the planet? Well a group in France has been working on things like “multi-objective and stochastic constraint programming” for optimising resource usage. This sounds very technical but a lot of the innovative  solutions being looked at today will require smarter methods to make new environmental technologies work.

In October I shared my excitement about the VENUS-C project which is actively developing a cloud computing infrastructure for researcher enterprises at EU level thanks to the funding of the European Union.

Billy Boyle is the kind of entrepreneur European policy makers would love to clone. Working out of a basement lab at Cambridge University, Boyle and two fellow chemical engineers pioneered a sensor system on a microchip to detect toxic gases and compounds used in explosives.

As the President of Microsoft International I had the honour of hosting the Government Leadership Forum (GLF) in London.

European governments that cut spending on research and innovation to help rein in budget deficits risk sacrificing the EU’s future prosperity, warns an independent panel of senior policy makers and business leaders.

Distributed computing has become very common in large scientific communities because of the needs of exchanging scientific data and sharing computing resources which would otherwise not be affordable by a single research institute. Cloud computing brings a number of advantages (cost being one) that now makes it a platform of choice for many research activities.

The new EU Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science is starting her term with a strong statement; at a time when many European governments struggle with debt, Máire Geoghegan-Quinn announced the biggest package ever for European research: €6.4 billion!

This is another really nice piece on the power of cloud computing. My colleague Mark Drapeau, Director of Social Engagement talks about the massive energy boost this ‘pay as you go’ approach to IT offers anyone moving to the cloud. And he literally means anyone: from the one-man start-up, through to small and medium size businesses, universities and schools, as well as public administration....

For the second year Microsoft Research in Cambridge opened its doors to an audience of press, academics, industry and policymakers for an event called “Enabling Innovation Through Research”.

Microsoft Innovation Centres around Europe aim to help harness great ideas and turn them into successful businesses while creating jobs, helping people and contributing to both Microsoft’s success and local European economies along the way.

The Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC) is taking part in a pioneering EU Framework Programme 7 project on cloud computing , Venus-C - a project that aims to foster the development of a cloud computing platform based on virtualisation technologies not for individuals, but for industry and the scientific community.

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and Microsoft joined forces in 2008 to create the BSC-Microsoft Research Centre.

Sahara dust forecasting, cancer genome sequencing or the design of computer’s next generation of microprocessors are among the scientific challenges that the BSC’s 63 teraflop (equivalent to the power of 210,000 standard PCs) MareNostrum is tackling at the moment.

It’s been all change in Brussels, and innovation now has a new Commissioner. And Máire Geoghegan-Quinn has made it crystal clear that she intends to be her own woman.

A converted chapel in Barcelona is the home for a supercomputing centre that is helping to revolutionise the way we will use cloud computing.

Biologists have long had to fight against the idea that theirs is a ‘soft’ science. Now, armed with tools from computer science, they are changing our ideas about life itself.

Andrew Herbert has always been fascinated by computing, completing his first degree in computational science in 1975 and since then gaining a PhD from Cambridge University, founding a couple of companies and later joining Microsoft Research Cambridge in the UK, where he is now managing director.

As part of its drive to foster innovation and the knowledge economy in Europe, the Commission has designated 2009 as the Year of Creativity & Innovation.

Take an ancient town, a new university, Microsoft Research and a fresh approach to computational systems biology. Mix well. Then apply…

Environmental scientists face many challenges in monitoring and understanding our planet’s changing climate.

Peer Bork, who heads a team of bioinformatic researchers at the Heidelberg, Germany- based European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), has been recognised for his outstanding contributions to the field by winning the fourth annual Royal Society and Académie des Sciences Microsoft Award

On 16 June 2009, the King of Belgium, Albert II, visited one of Belgium’s innovation hotspots, the Digital Innovation Valley in Mons. During the visit the King, Walloon Minister for Economy Jean-Claude Marcourt and Mons mayor Elio Di Rupo stopped by the Microsoft Innovation Centre in Mons.

Fifty-five researchers met in Trento, Italy, in October to look for collaborative solutions to the limitations that are emerging in the way that models of complex biological systems are created and managed.

John Wood, Chair of the European Research Area Board, gives a personal assessment of how research needs to change and adapt to face the future.

European Microsoft Innovation Centre leads a EU Cofunded project that aims to tackle information overload. Microsoft partnerships with Univeristies, industry & SMEs.

As concerns about global warming grow, scientists are turning to sophisticated computational models to better understand and ultimately predict the impact of climate change and human activity on biodiversity.

A joint venture between Microsoft Research and the British Library is looking to address the needs of researchers as ‘extreme information users'.

Search is increasingly becoming the main way in which people interact with information online, no matter what form it takes or where it is stored – be it on an intranet or on the Web. According to information technology analysts Gartner, by the end of 2012 more than 75 per cent of applications will use a “search/explore” field as a primary user interface.

On 18 January 2008, Microsoft and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) announced the creation of the BSC – Microsoft Research Centre, which focuses on the way microprocessors and software for the mobile and desktop market segments will be designed and interact over the next 10 years and beyond.