Microsoft Live Labs was a partnership between MSN

MSN

MSN is a collection of Internet sites and services provided by Microsoft. The Microsoft Network debuted as an online service and Internet service provider on August 24, 1995, to coincide with the release of the Windows 95 operating system.The range of services offered by MSN has changed since its...

 and Microsoft Research

Microsoft Research

Microsoft Research is the research division of Microsoft created in 1991 for developing various computer science ideas and integrating them into Microsoft products. It currently employs Turing Award winners C.A.R. Hoare, Butler Lampson, and Charles P...

 that focused on applied research for Internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

 products and services at Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

. Live Labs was headed by Dr. Gary William Flake

Gary William Flake

Gary William Flake is an ex-Technical Fellow at Microsoft and author of the book, The Computational Beauty of Nature , which is used in college courses worldwide. He has numerous publications spanning over 15 years which have focused on machine learning, data mining, and self-organization...

, who prior to joining Microsoft was a principal scientist at Yahoo!

Yahoo!

Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, United States. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine , Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping ,...

 Research Lab and former head of research at the Web portal's Overture

Yahoo! Search Marketing

Yahoo! Search Marketing is a keyword-based "Pay per click" or "Sponsored search" Internet advertising service provided by Yahoo!.Yahoo began offering this service after acquiring Overture Services, Inc....

 Services division.

Live Labs' focus was on applied research and practical applications of computer science

Computer science

Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...

 areas including natural language processing

Natural language processing

Natural language processing is a field of computer science and linguistics concerned with the interactions between computers and human languages; it began as a branch of artificial intelligence....

, machine learning

Machine learning

Machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence, is a scientific discipline concerned with the design and development of algorithms that allow computers to evolve behaviors based on empirical data, such as from sensor data or databases...

, information retrieval

Information retrieval

Information retrieval is the area of study concerned with searching for documents, for information within documents, and for metadata about documents, as well as that of searching structured storage, relational databases, and the World Wide Web...

, data mining

Data mining

Data mining , a relatively young and interdisciplinary field of computer science is the process of discovering new patterns from large data sets involving methods at the intersection of artificial intelligence, machine learning, statistics and database systems...

, computational linguistics

Computational linguistics

Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the statistical or rule-based modeling of natural language from a computational perspective....

, distributed computing

Distributed computing

Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems. A distributed system consists of multiple autonomous computers that communicate through a computer network. The computers interact with each other in order to achieve a common goal...

, etc.

Microsoft Live Labs was formed on January 24, 2006. On October 8, 2010, Microsoft announced the shutdown of Live Labs and the transition of its remaining team of 68 to Microsoft Bing. As a consequence Live Labs' original founder and leader Dr. Gary William Flake

Gary William Flake

Gary William Flake is an ex-Technical Fellow at Microsoft and author of the book, The Computational Beauty of Nature , which is used in college courses worldwide. He has numerous publications spanning over 15 years which have focused on machine learning, data mining, and self-organization...

 has resigned from Microsoft.

Projects

The following table shows all of the projects that had been initiated by Microsoft Live Labs:

Service	Website	Description	Status
Deepfish		Allow users to display and zoom into web contents on their Windows Mobile devices similar to the desktop format without requiring additional work by the site author	Discontinued
Entity Extraction		Using machine learning to identify meaningful text in documents and turn the unstructured web into a rich set of tagged documents	Discontinued
Listas Microsoft Live Labs Listas Listas was a tool for the creation, management and sharing of lists, notes, and favorites, being developed at Microsoft Live labs. It allowed users to quickly and easily edit lists, share them with others for reading or wiki-style editing, and discover the public lists of other users.The Listas...		Allow users to create and share lists (text, images, links, RSS feeds, etc.)	Discontinued
Pivot Microsoft Live Labs Pivot Pivot is a software application from Microsoft Live Labs that allows users to interact with and search large amounts of data. It is based on Microsoft's Seadragon. It's been described as allowing users to view the web as a web rather than as isolated pages....		Allows users to interact with and search large amounts of data. Based on DeepZoom and Seadragon technologies.	Discontinued
PivotViewer Microsoft Silverlight Microsoft Silverlight is an application framework for writing and running rich Internet applications, with features and purposes similar to those of Adobe Flash. The run-time environment for Silverlight is available as a plug-in for web browsers running under Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X...	http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/pivotviewer/	Silverlight version of the Pivot prototype.
Photosynth Microsoft Photosynth Photosynth is a software application from Microsoft Live Labs and the University of Washington that analyzes digital photographs and generates a three-dimensional model of the photos and a point cloud of a photographed object. Pattern recognition components compare portions of images to create...	http://www.photosynth.net	Displays a large collection of photos in a reconstructed three-dimensional space.
Social Streams		Conducts data mining on social media including blogs, newsgroups and websites, and allows users to see whether the stories are increasing or decreasing in popularity and frequency at a glance using graphs showing the real time movement of the number of mentions of both the people and the places mentioned in the highlighted story	Discontinued
Thumbtack		Allow users to collect contents across different websites and put it into a Thumbtack collection. This collection can then be shared with others or kept private. Gadgets in Thumbtack allows users to compare items in the collection and arrange them according to their needs. The service also utilizes machine learning and natural language techniques to extract information and display them in these gadgets in a meaningful way.	Discontinued
Relay Service		Allow users to expose a Windows Communication Foundation based service to the Internet from behind a firewall or NAT	Discontinued
Seadragon Seadragon Software Seadragon was a team within the Microsoft Live Labs. Seadragon is a web optimized visualization technology that allows graphics and photos to be smoothly browsed, regardless of their size...	http://www.seadragon.com	Smooth, seamless browsing of vast quantities of visual information, on wall sized diplays or mobile devices, regardless of the amount of data.
Security Token Service		Online identity management service that provides an Information Card Windows CardSpace Windows CardSpace , is Microsoft's now-canceled client software for the Identity Metasystem. CardSpace is an instance of a class of identity client software called an Identity Selector. CardSpace stores references to users' digital identities for them, presenting them to users as visual...  that enables offloading authentication Authentication Authentication is the act of confirming the truth of an attribute of a datum or entity...  functions, irrespective of the agent signing in is a user logging-in to web sites and services or a site or service owner to authenticate users. Requires an Information Card compliant store and identity selector to use	Discontinued
Volta Microsoft Live Labs Volta Volta is an experimental developer toolset for building multi-tier web applications, developed at Microsoft Live Labs. It allows developers to split their application easily into different client and server parts throughout the development lifecycle. Volta integrates with Microsoft Visual Studio...		Developer toolset that enables multi-tier web applications by splitting it into different client and server parts	Discontinued
Web Sandbox	http://websandbox.livelabs.com	Provides website builders a virtualization platform to test the Sandbox and find out whether it prevents the attacks web users most concerned about
zoom.it	http://zoom.it	Service for viewing and sharing high-resolution imagery, based on DeepZoom.