Microsoft's Festival of Research

New ways to organize information, protect your computer, and improve electronic and visual communication were among the highlights of projects shown at Microsoft's annual TechFest last week in Redmond, Washington.

TechFest is Microsoft Research's yearly gathering of its researchers from around the world. The company now has researchers in Redmond, Silicon Valley in California, Cambridge, England, and Beijing. This event gives the researchers a chance to show their work to the various product teams at Microsoft, and as such, it's an indication of work that may someday move beyond the research stage and into the hands of businesses and consumers. The Importance of Research The diversity of projects struck a chord with Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research. "It feels like we've branched out so much more than I remember," he said. Part of it was sheer numbers—Microsoft Research has now grown to more than 700 people. But some of it, he said, reflected the increasingly extended reach of computing.

Rashid cited a cooperative project with the University of Washington as one example. The joint endeavor is using machine learning to isolate compact candidates for HIV vaccines. The number of HIV strains creates an impediment to effectively combating the disease. The experimenters are applying machine learning to the task of isolating parts of the virus that are most important and consistent across variants.

Kevin Schofield, general manager of strategy and communications at Microsoft Research, echoed Rashid's thoughts. While touring university computer science programs the week before TechFest, Schofield and Microsoft chairman Bill Gates noticed how much interdisciplinary work was being done in computer science, and how much computer science was becoming part of other disciplines, from astronomy and physics to computational biology (Bio-IT).

At Microsoft, "Research now touches everyone and everything," Rashid said, pointing to projects including MSN Search, Longhorn, Windows Server, and the upcoming "Whidbey" release of Visual Studio.

Your Life, On Screen

Some of the more interesting demonstrations dealt with new ways of organizing all the things on your computer, or in your life.

Senior researcher Susan Dumais's Stuff I've Seen (SIS) project, which Gates highlighted during his Comdex keynote this year, is a new way of organizing all the e-mail, Web pages, documents, and other material that has crossed your computer screen. It is designed to be run as a service under Windows, continually indexing all the information. In some respects, SIS is quite similar to commercial products such as X1 and askSam, but SIS is designed more for research purposes, even though 1,500 people at Microsoft are running the software. One thing researchers are trying to discover is what searching might be like if there were no file folders. She talked about "implicit queries," where a system might automatically pull up information relevant to what you're already seeing. "The notion that you'll call up a separate search thing" will disappear in the next five to 10 years, she predicts.

Gordon Bell's MyLifeBits, also shown at last year's show, is another intriguing organization project. The famed researcher is trying to digitize his entire life by putting all his papers, photos, e-mails, articles, and the like, on a computer.

Another exploration involves a device called SenseCam—more or less a "black box recorder for human beings." British researcher Lyndsay Williams carries around a sensor-driven camera all day long. The camera snaps a photo when sensors detect changes in light level, temperature, tilt, and other parameters. The system is designed to provide a visual record of a person's whole day. Such a camera would theoretically create about a million images a year.

With SenseCam and the other projects, researchers are focusing on how people might use the new technologies, and what kind of user interfaces would make these devices and ideas more useful.

More Data, More Ways

Several other projects dealt with finding information. Fishnet, for example, involved navigating Web pages on large displays. Researcher Patrick Baudisch said the project concentrates on giving you a "fisheye view" of information, allowing you to see an entire Web page by compressing content above and below the area you're focusing on.

He also showed a very useful volume control utility designed to unify all the various sound-level controls on a typical PC. This could address the frustration a Windows user faces when trying to change the volume in one application, not realizing that the sound is muted somewhere else.

Clearer Communications

Several projects were designed to make computer-based audio and video communications clearer.

Researchers showed an air- and bone-conductive integrated microphone designed to make speech recognition easier. The normal microphone near your mouth is supplemented by an additional microphone that presses against the side of your head, picking up vibrations in the bone while you're talking. This helps filter outside noise, so a speech recognition program or a person on the other end of an audio conversation hears only what you are saying, not the background noise.

Another project that makes conversation clearer is called i2i. It's designed to improve video for instant messaging and uses a dual-camera setup that lets the computer do "smart framing" so you always appear in the center of the screen. The technology includes eye-gaze correction and has the ability to blur the background, to substitute a different background behind the speaker, or even to include 3D emoticons, according to researcher Antonio Criminisi. Better Personalization, Protection One project addressed the complexity of today's phone systems, which have lots of options that employees don't take advantage of. Using a technology called collaborative filtering for software personalization, the phone system would learn a group's typical usage patterns and then set rules accordingly—such as when to allow a phone interruption. A new employee in a group could choose to follow the average setting for the group, then customize it later. It's easy to see how this might be applied to other applications as well.

Finally, a number of the demonstrations revolved around protecting systems from attack and unwanted e-mail. One project showed a new way of shielding systems before a patch was installed; while others looked at new ways of identifying and blocking spam.

This article was originally published on pcmag.com

Copyright © 2004 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in Dev Source.