REDMOND: Over 100 innovations were showcased here at the annual TechFest event organized by Microsoft Research Labs, the research wing of Microsoft.

Microsoft Research Labs, which is into basic and applied research in computer science and engineering, has been holding the event for the past six years. The seventh edition of TechFest also marked 15 years of completion for MSR.

The event is usually a closed one, but this year, for the first time, TechFest was opened up for worldwide media, providing them an opportunity to experience the work being done by Microsoft’s five research labs.

TechFest is a forum in which Microsoft employees from across the globe are invited to exchange ideas. It also exhibits the latest innovations being done by the five research labs of Microsoft.

The lab itself has grown tremendously over the past 15 years, having over 55 different research groups across the globe.

The innovations shown at the event were from a wide array of areas, ranging from graphics, multimedia, networking, to even healthcare, physics, astronomy and much more.

The event kicked off with a keynote by Rick Rashid, Microsoft Research’s senior vice president. He moderated some very interesting research projects. For instance, one was the World Wide Telescope or Galactic Scale Storage. This is a project that’s similar to Microsoft’s TerraServer Project, which was the ‘grand daddy’ of Microsoft Virtual Earth.

It basically saved aerial imagery of the Earth and evolved into a geo-spatial site on the Internet. The Galactic Server is similar to TerraServer, only it looks the other way into space. Inputs for the project are taken from the world’s top telescopes, including Sloan Digital Sky Survey/Sky Server, the Hubble space telescope, Chandra X-Ray Telescope, Spitzer Infared telescope, and the PBS-NOVA.

This would allow students, astronomy researchers and amateurs across the world to explore space and share their experiences.

Another interesting project that was shown during the keynote was Boku, an innovative way to teach kids computer programming.

The key concern raised at the keynote was that the number of students opting for computer science engineering has reduced considerably. To revive the interest, work has to start much earlier than college time. It has to start by attracting kids towards computer programming, which is other wise a very intimidating subject with all its coding, syntax errors, debugging, etc.

Boku is a project that will teach kids what programming is all about minus all the intimidating factors. Interestingly, it runs on Microsoft’s Xbox gaming console, thereby combining gaming with coding. Boku, which is a robot is stuck on an island and requires programming to succeed. Kids can define what Boku is supposed to do on the island by drawing out its path and applying logic for various actions that its is supposed to do.

For instance, a kid could place green and red apples across the island’s landscape and put in a logic that Boku should only pick up red apples and ignore the green apples. There’s no coding involved for doing this making it very enjoyable for kids.

Other projects included were on surface computing, a technique using 3D surfaces instead of the mouse and keyboard for input into a PC. Gestures made through hand could be used to operate a computer.

Two other interesting demos were shown on surface computing. In one, racing cars were projected on a surface using a projector. Several pieces of paper were kept on this surface and a 3D webcam was focused on it. The cars were part of a game and could be controlled with a regular Xbox game pad. So instead of looking at a flat 2D screen, the person could look at them on the surface and operate them.

The papers served as uneven land and the cars would move over this uneven surface, topple over, or slow down, as if they were actually moving over an uneven terrain. The gaming pads had force feedback, so every time a car fell off uneven areas, they vibrated.

Another interesting demo was the Yogi project, which is a project to combat the dreaded Windows blue screen of death. The most common cause for the BSOD is faulty device drivers. There are some properties that have to be checked when writing a device driver for any hardware. If these are not adhered to, it can cause Windows to freeze.

The Yogi project aims to check whether a device driver has conformed to all the requirements. This could help hardware manufacturers to ensure that they ship good device drivers, and could even help consumers determine whether a device driver can be safely installed. Microsoft’s Research Lab in Bangalore developed the project.

Some other interesting projects on display included a software to do fault localization by analyzing dependencies on a network; creating record matching queries in SQL; scaling P2P games in a low bandwidth environment; finding information through picture matching; location based enterprise WiFi management; and WiFi ads.

Microsoft’s Research Labs work closely with the product teams and transfer a lot of their work into Microsoft products. Some of their research can already be seen in Windows Vista, Office 2007, Windows Live Search, Visual Studio 2005 Team System and much more.

 

(The writer was in Redmond on Microsoft’s invitation.)

 

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