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A treasuretrove of technologies at MS TechFest

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CIOL Bureau
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REDMOND, USA: Imagine being able to explore heavenly bodies in the sky and discover new worlds just like professional astronomers do, but without having any knowledge of astronomy.

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Or how about being able to search the Internet together with your colleagues, friends, or family members, but from different desktops that could be anywhere across the world?

How about being able to instantly search for any object in a video without having to run it manually?

Those were just three of the 35+ projects that were showcased at Microsoft’s TechFest 2008, the annual event organized by Microsoft Research (MSR).

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“This is the only time of the year when we get all of our research labs to show their developments,” said Rick Rashid, senior VP of Microsoft Research during the keynote.

“We’ve grown to 800 PHD researchers around the world,” he added.

There are hundreds of visiting faculties and interns at these labs, and 15 per cent of MSR’s budgets are invested in universities for labs grants, research grants, fellowship programs, etc.

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Over 3700 peer reviewed papers have been published by these labs so far. While the activities of MSR do help foster a healthy research environment in academia around the world, they also help transfer new technologies into Microsoft products themselves.

Just about every MS product has benefited from this research, whether it’s Vista that got its sidebar among other things or Excel 2007, which uses smart chart labels.

There’s a considerable amount of technology transfer that happens from MSR into MS products. Besides technology transfers, MSR labs are also involved in doing research to discover how IT can help resolve some of the world’s most pressing concerns, be it discovering an AIDS vaccine, combating epidemics, enhancing socio-economic development, and much more.

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This was very clearly reflected by the discussion that ensued on stage between Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft and Allen Alda, actor well known for his role in the popular TV series M*A*S*H.

Alan currently hosts the Scientific American Frontiers. It was also made more clear in a separate discussion with P Anandan, MD of MSR India, who himself was an Asst. Professor at Yale University, before joining MSR.

He said that you’re not working on a feature for a product when you join MSR. In fact, you’re not given a specific problem to work on at all.

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Instead, you’re given the freedom to pursue your own ideas, regardless of whether they have an impact on a product or not.

“That’s how the research environment is different,” he said.

The Demos

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Before opening up the hall where all the projects were showcased, Rashid gave a taste of a few on the stage itself. These included the World Wide Telescope, collaborative Internet search, and a new prototype OS called Singularity.

World Wide Telescope

This is a completely new way of looking at the sky. It’s basically a rich visualization environment, a virtual telescope created with data gathered from the world’s biggest terrestrial and space telescopes.

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A user can pan and zoom across the night sky to identify constellations, galaxies, black holes, nebulae, etc. The best part is that there’s no rocket science in using it, even a child will be able to use it. The desktop version of this virtual telescope is expected to be made available for download soon.

Collaborative Internet Search

Today, most Internet search tools you access from a web browser are meant to be used by a single person only.

This becomes a real challenge when people need to collaborate. What if you’re working on a business project with your colleagues and you need to search for something together?

Or you’re planning a family vacation and would like your partner’s help while looking for the best airlines, hotels, etc?

The solution today is to either use separate machines for the job, or fight it out on a single machine. Separate machines duplicate efforts, while a single machine makes it difficult to work together because everyone wants to follow their own approach, which reduces productivity.

So there are two approaches that have been created to resolve both of these issues.

One is called Search Together that allows each collaborator to use his or her own computer, and the other is CoSearch where multiple people can collaborate on the same machine.

In Search Together, each computer has a side bar that runs as a plug-in. From this, you can invite your IM chat buddies to your search and then collaborate with different sets of people on different topics.

You can split search results for any query, so that search results get distributed across multiple people.

You can also see a summary of others’ search comments. You can even click on what each person in the group has been searching, and even send emails to each other.

You can even peek into what the others' actual search screens to see what they’re working on (with the other person’s permission of course).

In CoSearch, there’s a single machine running a special web browser. This can be accessed with multiple mice or even from a handheld device over Bluetooth.

Singularity

This is a prototype for the computer science research environment. It’s available for academic and non-commercial use.

The Research Development Kit is available for download from CodePlex, Microsoft’s open source project hosting website.

Lastly, the ultimate outcome of all these projects is not defined by design, as it defeats the whole purpose of research otherwise.

“You’re seeing the raw material at TechFest, that’s what we create,” said Rashid.

The final usage of this raw material could be anything, right from being incorporated into a MS product to reaching the academia for further research to nothing at all.

(The author was hosted at Redmond by Microsoft Research)

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