While M$ does buy up many companies, a lot of fascinating original research goes on there too and they have a huge research division. I'm not sure if this is co

While M$ does buy up many companies, a lot of fascinating original research goes on there too and they have a huge research division. I'm not sure if this is completely related but you can take a look at some of these papers published by Paul Viola regarding research done at Microsoft on ink group recognition and content parsing. http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/viola/ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/viola/ (scroll down) Dr. Paul Viola is also the guy created the first realtime face detector ( the one in openCV ).