Web search engines like Bing and Google have amassed a tremendous amount of data assets. These include query-click logs, web crawl corpus, an entity knowledge graph and geographic/maps data. In the Data Management, Exploration and Mining (DMX) group at Microsoft Research, we investigate ways to mine the above data assets to derive new data that can provide new value to a wide variety of applica...

Cloud computing and cloud storage services, in particular, pose a new challenge to digital forensic investigations. Currently, evidence acquisition for such services still follows the traditional method of collecting artifacts on a client device. This approach requires labor-intensive reverse engineering efforts, and ultimately result in an acquisition that is inherently incomplete. Specificall...

e Bay’s launch of its API in November 2000 marked the beginning of an era in which Web applications offer services for third-party application integration. The rapid growth of programmatic interfaces for Web applications has recently revolutionized online content integration and created new opportunities for vendors to build developer ecosystems. According to ProgrammableWeb, a leading service ...

Instagram is a popular social networking application that allows users to express themselves through the uploaded content and the different filters they can apply. In this study we look at the relationship between the content of the uploaded Instagram pictures and the personality traits of users. To collect data, we conducted an online survey where we asked participants to fill in a personality...

We have implemented and evaluated a method to populate a company ontology, focusing on hierarchical relations such as acquisitions or subsidiaries. Our method searches for information about user-specified companies on the Internet using a search engine API (Google Custom Search API). From the resulted snippets we identify companies using machine learning and extract relations between them using...

Formal policies allow the non-ambiguous definition of situations in which usage of certain entities are allowed, and enable the automatic evaluation whether a situation is compliant. This is useful for example in applications using data provided via standardized interfaces. The low technical barriers of integrating such data sources is in contrast to the manual evaluation of natural language po...

Geo-tags from micro-blog posts have been shown to be useful in many data mining applications. This work seeks to find out if the location type derived from these geo-tags can benefit input methods, which attempts to predict the next word a user will input during typing. If a correlation between different location types and a change in word distribution can be found, the location type informatio...

Not so long ago, using maps on the Web was difficult. If you could find them at all, they were ugly and slow to load and came with clunky user interfaces. This has all changed thanks to the Google Map service. In recent years, commercial sites such as Amazon, eBay, and Google have increasingly become platforms that support complex user ecosystems. Using openly published APIs, you can look up an...

Software developers often need to port applications written for a source platform to a target platform. One of the key tasks here is to find matching API calls in the target platform for the given API calls in the source platform. This task involves exhaustive reading in target platform API (Application Programming Interface) documentation to identify API methods corresponding to the given API ...