Microsoft Research coverage

This month's Scientific American has a brief overview of Microsoft Research, including some of its history. In reading the article, I kept thinking about the contrast between the more traditional way Microsoft structured its research group, mostly isolating it from product development, verses the way Google integrates their PhDs into their development teams, essentially making the entire organization one big research lab.

Another article has tidbits from Microsoft Research's recent Cambridge Science Open Day event, including brief coverage of some techniques for reducing the impact of "search engine spam" and a method for extracting a natural language text summary of a cluster of news articles.