Entries tagged with microsoft research - Channel 10

Tag Your Friends on Facebook…For Science

sarahintampa — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 12:34:00 GMT

This summer, Microsoft Researcher Desney Tan led a team that created a Facebook app called Collabio to investigate a new way of applying meta-tags to people – by using the power of crowdsourcing. In the game, friends label each other with descriptive tags that can include anything from physical or personality descriptions (curly-haired, organized, smart) to geographic locations to professional titles and more. When playing the game, you see a blanked-out tag cloud for a friend. By guessing which tags have been applied, you get points. Two or more people have to agree on a tag in order for you to receive those points.

While it’s fun for friends to play Collabio and see how they perceive each other, the researchers are more interested in how the knowledge contained in social networks can be tapped into and utilized for applications like personalization, expert matching, and so on. They plan to analyze the patterns revealed by this data to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of using games like Collabio to harness that knowledge. Using games to gather data can make social networks more of a useful and productive tool while still appearing to be a just be a place for simple, fun activities.

You can learn more about this project and their findings at http://research.microsoft.com/cue/collabio. To play Collabio on Facebook, go here: http://apps.facebook.com/collabio

Vídeo - A Microsoft Live Labs lança o Photosynth

Galileu — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 00:04:00 GMT

O Live Labs é o braço da Microsoft Research que faz pesquisa e desenvolvimento especificamente para a Internet. Do pessoal do Live Labs já saiu, por exemplo, o Deep Zoom, um componente de destaque do Silverlight 2.0. Agora, mais uma novidade do pessoal do Live Labs – o Photosynth está aberto para o uso de todos.

Para quem não conhece, o Photosynth é uma forma completamente inovadora de vivenciar as suas fotos digitais. Em vez de ver fotos individuais tiradas no mesmo local, o Photosynth consegue encaixar todas as fotos no seu lugar correto num espaço tridimensional. A tecnologia analisa as suas fotos, identifica os pontos de sobreposição e utiliza essa informação para reconstruir um espaço gráfico 3D e nele encaixar cada foto em seu devido lugar. O usuário não precisa fazer nada além de alimentar as suas fotos – o Photosynth cuida de tudo.

Existem algumas regras básicas para criar um bom synth, por isso recomendo ver o vídeo legendado desse post que mostra os passos iniciais. Depois, baixe o guia em português que entra em maiores detalhes com dicas importantes e assuntos para fotógrafos avançados.

O site do Photosynth utiliza Live ID para autenticação. Se você tem Hotmail ou usa o Windows Live Messenger, é o mesmo login e senha desses serviços. Lá, você terá direito a 20GB de espaço para armazenar os seus synths. Para usar o Photosynth é preciso instalar um plug-in de 8MB que roda em Internet Explorer 6 e 7 ou Firefox 2 e 3 para Windows XP e Windows Vista. O site permite comentários dos usuários, compartilhamento via link direto para o synth e, o mais bacana, você pode embed, ou incorporar, o synth no seu próprio site via iframe. É só copiar e colar o código.

Para o lançamento, estamos com vários parceiros produzindo conteúdo interessante. National Geographic, o governo federal americano, o governo nacional da Turquia, NASCAR, entre outros. Aqui no Brasil a Microsoft trabalhou com a agência Megaphoto e seu fotógrafo Rodrigo Acedo para testar a tecnologia. Eles produziram uns synths bem bacanas da Catedral da Sé e do Monumento às Bandeiras.

Catedral da Sé - São Paulo

Monumento às Bandeiras - São Paulo

Acho que todos vão achar o Photosynth bacana. Não se esqueçam de colocar tags nas suas fotos, e coloquem a tag Brasil para que o mundo possa encontrar nosso conteúdo bem fácil. Mais um detalhe, você pode marcar o geoposicionamento dos seus synths. Depois do synth aparecer no site, entre nele para editá-lo e lá aparecerá um ícone de um globo. Clique nele para ver o Virtual Earth e apontar no mapa o local de seu synth.

Dê um pulo no www.photosynth.com, veja os synths que estão lá e crie os seus próprios synths. Se encontrar ou criar algo bacana, mande aqui pra mim!

New 3D Photo Viewer From Microsoft Research

sarahintampa — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 13:23:00 GMT

If you thought Photosynth was cool, you haven’t seen anything yet! On his blog, Long Zheng shares with us an amazing video out of Microsoft Research that focuses on a new immersive 3D technology for manipulating digital photos. The technology, which appears to be an advancement of an older technology called Photo Tourism, allows for browsing through photo collections in 3D. In the video, the photos used to demonstrate the technology in action are taken from the flickr website. However, the technology could be used with a collection of images out of your own personal photo collection, too.

Like Photosynth, photos of the same object or location are stitched together, but this new technology goes beyond that to allow for a 3D model of the scene through seamless transitions between the photos as you move through them. In addition, the system also corrects the color balance and stabilizes the transitions as you zoom, rotate, and move through the images. With this system, you can navigate through the photos, zoom in and out, select different orbits, view both daytime or nighttime photos, and so much more. This technology doesn’t seem to have a real name yet – both the video and the website are simply titled “Finding Paths through the World’s Photos.”

This is the sort of thing that’s kind of hard to explain – it has to be seen to be believed. Check it out:

On the website, you can view the video, download the paper, and even download the source code.

UnWrap: 3D Surface Models From Video

sarahintampa — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 13:22:00 GMT

New from Microsoft Research’s UnWrap team (Alex Rav Acha - Weizmann institute of Science and Pushmeet Kohli, Carsten Rother and Andrew Fitzgibbon - Microsoft Research Cambridge), comes a technology which, among other things, allows you to generate 3D surface models from video. That extracted image, called the “unwrap mosaic,” can then be edited, manipulated, and then re-composited back into the original video. This technology could be used for resizing objects, repainting textures, copying/cutting/pasting objects, and deforming objects. To learn more, check out the UnWrap website and video. (via MicroMiel)

HD View Internet Plugin

sarahintampa — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 15:37:00 GMT

HD View is a technology developed by Microsoft Research specifically for the purpose of viewing and interacting with large scale images on the web. As the HD Team describes it, it’s a “camera for the web.” But really what it does is allow you to interact with large, panoramic images that don’t fit on your screen. You can move around the images and zoom in and out, all while still maintaining a high-definition view of what you’re seeing. The technology is still very much of a concept because sites have to be HD View-enabled in order for this to work, but there are still several sites that have done so if you want to check it out. Here’s the plugin for IE. Zooming in on photos reminds me a lot of the capabilities of Silverlight with its deep zoom, so it will be interesting to see how each are used.

Vídeo: Unwrap Mosaics - Editando vídeos como se fossem fotos

Galileu — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 13:34:00 GMT

A Microsoft Research não tem o hábito de produzir produtos finais. As pesquisas que resultam nos softwares e serviços desenvolvidos pela MSR normalmente são embutidas em outros softwares da Microsoft, muitas vezes dentro do próprio sistema operacional Windows. Um exemplo recente é o Deep Zoom, que é um componente do Silverlight 2. O Deep Zoom foi desenvolvido pelo pessoal da Live Labs que é um braço da MSR para pesquisa e desenvolvimento de novas tecnologias para a Web.

Um evento onde sempre aparecem novidades da MSR é o SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques), um evento anual voltado a inovações em gráficos e técnicas de interação. Nesse mesmo evento foram apresentados o Sea Dragon e o Photosynth, além de outros projetos da MSR. Esse ano o projeto da MSR que está chamando atenção é o Unwrap Mosaics. Para simplificar a explicação, o Unwrap Mosaics é um software de edição de vídeo que pega uma imagem 3D e abre ela em um plano 2D para facilitar a edição. Imagine um rosto que foi captado em 3D a qual você quer adicionar uma barba e bigode. Em vez de ter que ficar girando o rosto 3D na ferramenta de edição, o Unwrap Mosaics permite que você exponha o rosto inteiro numa superfície plana (2D) para poder editar a vontade, como se fosse uma foto normal. Após terminar a edição, ele retorna o vídeo a sua representação original em 3D com as novas edições. É mais fácil entender se você assistir o vídeo ao lado. Recomendo ver o vídeo em alta qualidade do Unwrap Mosaics - eles editaram o pescoço de uma girafa para subir e descer, ficou muito engraçado.

Microsoft Research Unveils Tools For Knowledge-Sharing Researchers

sarahintampa — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 20:29:00 GMT

At the 9th annual Microsoft Research Faculty Summit, Tony Hey, corporate vice president of Microsoft's External Research Division, revealed some new tools for improving the process of doing research. The tools consist of a set of free software programs that let researchers and scholars seamlessly publish, preserve, and share data. Specifically, this tool set includes the following:

Add-ins
- The Article Authoring Add-in for Word 2007 enables authors and editors to open and save Microsoft Office Word files in the National Library of Medicine's NLM XML format, a file format that is used in the publishing and archiving of scientific and technical articles. It also enables additional metadata to be captured at the authoring stage and enables semantic information to be preserved through the publishing process, which is essential for enabling search and semantic analysis once the articles are archived at information repositories. The add-in also aims at simplifying the authoring, submission, and interaction process between authors and journals.
- The Creative Commons Add-in for Office 2007 is an add-in for Microsoft Office Word 2007, Office PowerPoint 2007, and Office Excel 2007 that enables individuals to embed a Creative Commons license directly into their Microsoft Office documents. The add-in allows an author of a Microsoft Office document to choose a Creative Commons license from those available on the Creative Commons Web site (by using the Creative Commons Web service). The embedded license links directly to its online representation on the Creative Commons Web site while a machine-readable representation is stored in the Office Open XML document. By using Creative Commons licenses, you can express your intentions regarding how others may use your work.
- The Microsoft Math Add-in enhances Microsoft Office Word 2007 with computational and graphing capabilities. With the add-in, you can perform the following: plot a function, equation, or inequality; solve an equation or inequality; calculate a numerical result, and simplify an algebraic expression.
The Microsoft e-Journal Service: The Microsoft eJournal Service will provide a hosted, full-service solution to support scholarly societies, small publishers, and medium-sized publishers in the production of online-only journals. It is designed to simplify the self-publishing of workshop and conference proceedings and smaller journals, as well as online collaboration between authors. The service supports managing the submission and review of articles in any format, and the deposit of final articles in information repositories by using the SWORD protocol. An alpha version, available now, is hosted via Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007—allowing organizations to utilize this functionality without provisioning or maintaining any infrastructure.
Research Output Repository Platform: This platform for building repositories takes advantage of the strengths of Microsoft SQL Server 2008, the Microsoft Entity Framework, and the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5. The technology, to be available through a free download, provides services that are based on open community protocols (such as the Open Archives Initiative–Object Reuse and Exchange [OAI-ORE], SWORD, and so on), which enables interoperability and integration with other tools and services. An included toolkit and code samples will allow developers to present data in original ways, demonstrating, for example, the relationships between a published paper, authors, research data, associated lectures, presentation slides, or PDFs. Currently in a limited alpha release, an open beta version will be available later in 2008. (Links: Community Forum, sample code).
The Research Information Centre: In close partnership with the British Library, this collaborative workspace will be hosted via Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and will allow researchers to collaborate throughout the entire research project workflow, from seeking research funding to searching and collecting information, as well as managing data, papers and other research objects throughout the research process.

How Microsoft's External Research Division works with a new breed of e-scientists

JonUdell — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 16:49:00 GMT

Tony Hey, VP for the External Research Division within Microsoft Research, leads the company's efforts to build external partnerships in key areas of scientific research, education, and computing. He's been a physicist, a computer scientist, and dean of engineering, and for five years ran the UK's e-Science program. These experiences have given him a broad view of the ways in which all the sciences are becoming both computational and data-intensive. Microsoft tools and services, he says, will support and sustain the new breed of scientists riding this new wave.

Audio: WMA, MP3

Tony Hey

JU: For this series of interviews I've spoken to a number of Microsoft folks who are working with external academic partners on projects that fall under your purview. The list includes Pablo Fernicola's Word add-in for scientific publishing, Catharine van Ingen's collaboration with Dennis Baldocchi at Berkeley on the analysis of C02 data, and Kyril Faenov's HPC++ project to bring cluster computing to the classroom. These are all pieces of your puzzle, right?

TH: Absolutely.

JU: By way of background, you've been a physicist, then a computer scientist, and then for a time led the UK's e-science program.

TH: Which would be called cyberinfrastructure in the US, yes. I'm on the NSF's advisory committee for cyberinfrastructure, it's a very similar goal.

JU: And then you surprised a lot of people by joining Microsoft. Take us through your initial role leading the TCI [technical computing initiative] and on to your current expanded role leading MSR's external research efforts.

TH: Right. So having been a physicist, and then a computer scientist working on parallel computing for years, and then chair of my computer science department and then dean of engineering, I think I understand the community we're trying to work with pretty well.

Also, as you mentioned, I worked for 5 years running the UK e-science program. That was about huge amounts of distributed data, and collaborative multi-disciplinary research in a variety of fields. The environment, bioinformatics, almost every field of science now has some element of distributed and networked collaboration.

The science agenda was for the tools and technologies to make that collaboration trivial, just as with Web 2.0 your grandmother can do a mashup.

I don't think the UK e-science program achieved that, but I do believe that Microsoft can help make tools and technologies available that will help scientists and researchers do their work.

JU: In your parallel computing phase, you helped write the MPI [message passing interface] specification, correct?

TH: Yes. I've been in this for 30 years, on and off. I have very good friends in the high-performance and parallel computing communities here in the US, and I was involved in European projects. There was a danger that the Europeans would go one way, and the US another, so it was time to see if we could get the community to put together a community standard.

It isn't an ISO standard, there wasn't a big standards body, it was a group of experts who got together with the academics and with the industry players. Rather a small set, and we used to meet every 6 weeks in Dallas airport, so you really had to be dedicated to go there.

JU: [laughs]

TH: But what came out of it was a standard which has stood the test of time. I co-authored and initiated the first draft. It's been much changed since then, and I don't take credit for the final thing, but I did try, with Jack Dongarra, to initiate the standards process, and I think I remember buying the beer at the first session.

JU: What's interesting to me is that despite that, you've been a vocal skeptic regarding raw grid capability. And you've been very careful to stress that in your view, the real challenges have to do with data -- the ability to combine large quantities of data from multiple sources, and enable people to make sense of it.

TH: Yes. I used to work in high-end supercomputing and parallel computing, but what distinguishes this decade is that we'll collect more scientific data than we have collected in the whole of human history. Instead of struggling with the problem of too little data, scientists will be struggling with the problem of huge amounts that they can't process or analyze. And it may be stored in different places, on different continents, so how do you put it together? How do you federate?

That's the real challenge. Very people want to use petaflop computers. Most of the biologists, chemists, and engineers only need lesser capabilities that can be provided by just a simple cluster. And then you put the cluster where the data is, because that's what's difficult to move around.

JU: Yes, Kryil Faenov made this same point in my interview with him. There are only a handful of intergalactic cloud infrastructures of the sort that a Google or Amazon or Microsoft can support, they're one-of-a-kind beasts, and you can't always bring your data to them. So he's interested in enabling organizations to stand up their own more modest clusters at the sites where the data lives.

So, let's discuss the opportunity that you see. In another interview you said:

Rather than wasting the enthusiasm and talents of science graduate students by assigning them the task of building systems capable of handling, analyzing and mining literally petabytes of data, scientists should look to computer scientists and the IT companies to raise the level of abstraction and to provide them with the components of a reliable and functional cyberinfrastructure.

That's the most concise mission statement I've found for what you're doing.

TH: Exactly right. Part of my reason for joining Microsoft was having had a great friendship, and many discussions and arguments, with Jim Gray, from 2001 onwards.

We argued and disagreed on many things, but we also agreed on things, and what we agreed on in particular is that a different paradigm is emerging. So for example there's experimental physics, there's theoretical physics, and now the third paradigm, it's clear, is computational physics based on simulation.

What we're looking at here is data-centric science, where you'll do collections-based research -- like you do in mashups, but now with scientific datasets. And increasingly, you'll use semantics to get from data to information to real knowledge.

So I came to Microsoft partly because of Jim Gray, but partly because I think companies can help. I struggled mightily with just open source tools. I used to produce open source tools myself, as an academic. MPI has a wonderful open source implementation, and that was one of the key things that we did.

But I also know that open source, particularly when produced by academics like myself, well, it works on my machine, but if you want it to work on your machine, that's your problem.

So one of the things I set up in the UK was, in fact, a software engineering center called the Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute, where I put a lot of money in to get these open source codes tested and documented and made more reliable and sharable.

That's why I think that a judicious mix of open source with commercial -- it could be from IBM, from Oracle, from Microsoft -- is the way to provide a more reliable infrastructure.

That's part of the motivation for the tools we're producing around the technologies that scientists use to do their publication, their data mining, and so on. I think Microsoft can really take a lead here, and that's why I joined.

JU: Elsewhere you've said:

Essentially I match up Microsoft researchers with major scientific problems that computer science technology can help to solve.

What are those major problems?

TH: So, I came with a purely scientific mission with TCI. But now I've moved into Microsoft Research, and we have a bigger agenda. In terms of external research, we focus on four themes.

One is health and wellness. That's bioinformatics, medical solutions, and so on. Really exciting, we've got some good projects in that area.

JU: I've talked to Kris Tolle and have done an interview with George Hripscak who's one of the recipients of funding in the genome-wide association studies program.

TH: Kris is great, she and Simon Mercer are looking at the biomedical area, and they've got a wonderful set of projects ranging from high-tech stuff involving RNA and HIV/AIDS down to the last mile of preventative health care, looking at ways in Latin America to take a smartphone and connect it to a low-cost diagnostic tool, like a blood-pressure monitor, and therefore do health care in these remote places.

The next major area is what we call E3 -- earth, energy, and the environment. That includes the astronomy work that Jim Gray started, which we now have followed up with the WorldWide Telescope, which is a wonderful tool.

JU: It's a brilliant thing. I've actually done two in-depth conversations about it for this series. One with Curtis Wong, and the other with Jonathan Fay.

TH: It does exactly the things we were talking about, it takes lots of distributed data sets, and allow you to search and visualize and do wonderful things.

So that's one example of an E3 project. Catharine van Ingen's project is another, and there are others. There's a project called the Swiss Experiment that's putting sensors all through the Swiss Alps to measure environmental changes.

JU: Before we discuss the other two areas, let me just ask: What is a project? I gather sometimes Microsoft Research puts out an RFP, and somebody like George Hripcsak at Columbia is awarded money to pursue his research. In other cases, though, there isn't necessarily funding, it's more of a collaboration, as with Catharine van Ingen and Dennis Baldocchi.

TH: Yes. In all cases, I want us to focus on genuine partnership with the academics. It has to be win/win on all sides. There are all sorts of ways. RFPs are one. Targeted funding, like we used to do in TCI, maybe sponsoring post-docs. But other things too, like delivering tools, data sets, services.

What can we do for the computer science community? That's another of our themes.

I used to teach in a computer science department, and I assure you my department was not atypical. We taught Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Java, and they used a variety of scripting languages -- Perl, Python, and now Ruby on Rails.

To teach computer science principles it's quite clear you don't necessarily need any Microsoft technology. So the question is, how do we engage with academics in the computer science disciplines?

JU: And what are your thoughts?

TH: We have an opportunity. We need to look at what services, what data, what resources we can give them, so we can partner in a way that they feel is beneficial, so they can do research in the way they want to, and we can find out what services they need, and how we can make our tools more valuable.

Microsoft does now have the beginnings of some exciting service offerings. There's Live Mesh, and we have .NET online services coming along...I liked our internal name, CloudDB, better than SQL Server Data Services, SSDS, but...

JU: ...that's how it always goes.

TH: That's the way of it, yes. So that's in beta at the moment, and I hope by the time of the PDC in October we'll have a lot more concrete things to show. What I need to do is see what we can offer the academic community in terms of resources. Can we help them to explore multi-core? Can we get them data sets at scale that we've anonymized, so they can do research they'd otherwise not be able to do?

JU: And Dryad?

TH: Yes. We now have within Microsoft Research some internal resources -- cores -- and I want to make some of that available externally, and put some services around it, such as Dryad or Dryad/LINQ.

At the Faculty Summit I want to ask the community -- and after all, I came from that community -- how can we partner with you so that we can give you things that you value, and get your feedback?

JU: What is the Faculty Summit, who's been invited, and what do you aim to accomplish there?

TH: It's an annual event in the U.S., three or four hundred academics come, mainly computer scientists from the U.S. but there's a sprinkling from around the world -- India, China, Latin America. Really it's an opportunity for us to connect.

I've talked about health and wellness, earth/energy/environment, and computer science. Another area of focus is education and scholarly communication. We'll be unveiling plugins for our tools that make them more useful for scientists to do what they want to do.

JU: The NLM add-in for Word is an obvious example. Are there others?

TH: Yes, we'll announce a Creative Commons plug-in. Many people use Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, and are happy to share their documents. We'd like to give them a plug-in that will help them attach Creative Commons licenses to those documents.

We'll also have a research repository. At the university, I was supposed to monitor the output of my faculty -- 200 academics and 500 post-docs and grad students. What we did was insist on keeping a digital copy of not only publications, but also presentations at conferences, research reports, videos, data...

JU: ...especially data. That's a huge new area.

TH: It is in my view, yes. My undergraduates and engineering faculty never went into the library for traditional library purposes. They went there for a cup of coffee, a chat with their friends, a warm place to work, but not as a library.

So what is the role of the library? My view is very much the MIT DSPACE view that's been promoted. The role of a research library in a university is to be the guardian of the intellectual output of the university. And that needn't just be research, it can be teaching materials.

So we've used SQL Server, and the Entity Framework -- a bit like the RDF model of Tim Berners-Lee and friends -- to capture some semantic knowledge. So it tells you this is a presentation, Tony Hey gave it, the local organizers were so and so, it was done on this date, and so on.

JU: There's also the general notion of wrapping services around raw data sets. I've talked with Timo Hannay at Nature about how often, nowadays, somebody winds up publishing a paper as a "fig leaf of analysis" to cover what's really the publication of some data set.

TH: Timo and I absolutely agree on this. Research repositories which contain text and also data are going to be increasingly important.

JU: Although you're not wild about the term "data services", it's actually useful. I was talking with Jonathan Fay about his discovery of all the astronomical data that's online. On the one hand, it was astonishing to find that it was available at all. On the other hand, in the grand tradition of academia, these were gzipped tarballs that you could only use if you had an extreme amount of specialized knowledge and capability.

What you get, with WorldWide Telescope, is a service layer wrapped around all that raw data that makes it available to a vastly wider audience.

TH: Absolutely. Same with Catharine van Ingen's project. This stuff was locked away in files, and nobody knew what was there. By making it available and exposing it in new ways...you're right, these data services are very important.

And they're the basis of some of our other projects. So for example, Valerie Daggett at the University of Washington does protein folding, but she also does protein unfolding. She regards protein folding ab initio, right from the beginning with just the structure, as too difficult. So she takes the folded structure and unfolds it, and then looks at the possible foldings you can get. She calls this dynameomics. It involves storing detailed simulations, and we've made a database to help her do that.

JU: How would you characterize the nature of the collaboration between Microsoft Research and Valerie Daggett?

So, for example, with Catharine van Ingen and Dennis Baldocchi, it was a really interesting mesh of interests and capabilities. Dennis is a climate scientist who's plugged into a worldwide network of sensors, but he's not an informatician, he's not someone with deep training in how to probe and reshape a body of data. But that's what Catharine brings to the table.

So in this protein-folding collaboration, what's the partnership really about?

TH: It's on two levels. Valerie really is a computational scientist. She does these computationally-intensive calculations, and she uses national supercomputers.

One of the things we've done is give them experimental Windows HPC clusters, so instead of doing it remotely they can actually get a lot of calculations done on local machines.

The other part is that they don't have particular expertise in databases. So Stuart Ozer, who used to be in Jim Gray's group and now is back with SQL Server, collaborated with them to set up a data cube.

JU: It seems like the transfer of database expertise is a common thread in a lot of these collaborations. Although many of these folks may be computationally-oriented scientists, and may know how to work with algorithms and with code, the data management is another kind of discipline, and not one that necessarily comes naturally.

TH: That's right. By the way, we're also active in computational education for scientists. When I did that in the 80s and 90s it was about algorithms and parallelism and things like that. But you're quite right, it's now, in addition to those things, about knowing how to deal with data.

We have projects with two Nobel Prize winners, Phil Sharp at MIT, and Carl Wieman at Vancouver, looking at what you teach biologists and physicists about new skills, in order to produce a new generation of computational scientists who understand the data as well as the computation.

And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Stephen Emmott. I emphasize the data, but he'd say that the complexity of the modeling that you have to do with this data is as important. And therefore, some of the abstractions from computer science can really help the modeling side of science.

One of our engagements is a joint bioformatics modeling institute in Trento, and that's an initiative of Stephen Emmott and his team.

JU: I guess that most people know Microsoft has a massive research arm, and there's been a lot said and written about internal technology transfer -- something gets invented in MSR, then it's thrown over the wall into a product group. People have heard that story, but this other story about external collaboration isn't so well known.

TH: That's true, though it does link to our research within MSR. In terms of the computer science and education communities, we have wonderful tools here that actually don't end up in products. One of the things I hope to do is make more of these available.

We now, at Microsoft, have two OSI-approved open source license, Ms-PL and Ms-RL. I'd like to make some of our tools, which aren't going into products, available so that we can build communities and show what great tools there are. Tools that really do things the computer science community and science community want.

So, I talked about our four themes -- health and wellness, earth/energy/environment, computer science, education and scholarly communication. In addition we have what we call ARTS: Advanced Research Tools and Services. There we're trying to develop tools and services that academics and computer scientists will find valuable.

And there are many others. We just did a count, and in total, with RFPs and small projects and big projects, we had, over the whole of Microsoft Research something, like 400 projects with external partners in universities.

My challenge is to focus that a bit more, and make sure we capture and build on the ones that are successful.

JU: Well, very good, Tony. Thanks a lot!

TH: Thanks very much, Jon.

Microsoft Scalable Fabric

sarahintampa — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 16:13:00 GMT

From Microsoft Research, there comes a new UI for your Windows desktop. Instead of simply minimizing applications or switching through them either via Alt+Tab or Windows+Tab as you do now, there’s a new task management called Microsoft Scalable Fabric that lets you interact with your windows in a whole new way. With this app, you define a central focus area for your desktop where the main window that you’re working within will be located. Other windows are visible off in the periphery of the screen. So, instead of minimizing an app, you drag it outside of the central focus area. The closer you drag the app to the edge of your computer screen, the smaller it becomes. (via/img thanks to DownloadSquad)

Cool Microsoft Research Project: mPlatform

sarahintampa — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 14:15:00 GMT

mPlatform is a Microsoft Research project led by Feng Zhao, a principal researcher in the Networked Embedded Computing group within Microsoft Research Redmond. In 2006, he co-authored Bodhi Priyantha, a researcher in Zhao’s group on something called mPlatform, which is basically a proposal to build hardware out of Lego-like modules which would then function as reconfigurable, scalable, and modular sensors that could be used to track real-time developments in areas such as energy, environment, security, healthcare, and more.

A lot of times we forget that there’s really a lot more to computing than just the laptop you use to check your email and posts pictures to Facebook – there’s a whole world of computing that takes place on embedded devices, and that’s what this Microsoft Research group on embedded computing focuses on. Embedded computing through sensor networks has its challenges, though – there are energy and bandwidth resources to think of as well as uncertainty about the systems and the environment they operate in. Additionally, many of the tasks require collaboration among devices. The group is trying to discover new and better ways to do all of these things.

As far as mPlatform goes, Zhao says, “it’s all about tinkering. Instead of trying to write software to live with existing hardware limitations, researchers ought to be able to aggregate hardware to suit their software needs and debug the application logic before fabricating and deploying these devices at scale…People can start using these platforms to build interesting applications quickly. We take some of the common things out of these different applications, embedded application prototypes in the main, and let users focus more on thinking about the sort of applications they want to build.”

So far, Zhao has built 6 different types of modules, with 2 more radio modules and 1 more processor module on the way.

(Bodhi Priyantha is pictured holding one of the mPlatform modules).

Microsoft Research Building Star Trek Future

sarahintampa — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 12:13:00 GMT

Robert Scoble, currently with FastCompany TV, recently interviewed Microsoft’s own Rick Rashid, head of Microsoft's Research labs. The video is available here. Rashid, a huge Star Trek fan equates some of the work coming out of the R&D labs as almost like building a “Star Trek” future. The video references some of the advancements that Microsoft R&D is works on like computer vision, text to speech, natural language processing, and machine translation, as well as some of the amazing technologies that have launched out of R&D like the WorldWide Telescope, InkSeine, and Surface. It’s a great video about technology and its impact on our future – definitely worth a look!

Collaborative SearchTogether Plug-In Available

sarahintampa — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 04:46:00 GMT

Fresh from Microsoft’s Research Group comes a new IE7 plug-in called SearchTogether, which lets you browse the web with your friends. With SearchTogether, groups can chat while they search and annotate the results with comments and ratings via a thumbs up / thumbs down button. The plug-in can also be used to do “split searching,” which is when a set of search results is split among the team, with each user working on a subset of the results. All the activity – chat, queries, comments, and ratings – are saved so that group members can later return to the search session and view the results. If you want to try SearchTogether, you can download the plug-in from here.

WorldWide Telescope Launched

sarahintampa — Tue, 13 May 2008 01:53:00 GMT

Today, the WorldWide Telescope has been made available to the general public. You may remember the WorldWide Telescope as the technology that made Scoble cry, but even without that hype, the project stands on its own as an amazing platform for scientific exploration and discovery. This virtual telescope is actually comprised of terabytes of imagery, collected and combined from the best ground and space-based telescopes in the world. Using Microsoft's Visual Experience Engine, you can use the telescope to pan and zoom through the night sky, moving in and around planets, stars, and even galaxies. Of course you can view the moon and the planets with WWT, but the imagery from this telescope also lets you do things you've never been able to before from your computer - like watching stars being born or galaxies collide.

For both scientists and educators, the WorldWide Telescope will help to teach astronomy, computational science, and even provide opportunities for scientific discovery. For users of the telescope, there are rich media tours to that offer narration, music, text, and graphics to guide you through the night sky. It's like going to the planetarium without leaving your home! You can also make your own tours to share with others - a feature that teachers will really enjoy.

I've been playing with WWT tonight and it really is amazing to see the galaxies in their actual positions in the universe and be able to zoom and move them around on the screen. There are several different collections of images to explore - constellations, Hubble images, planets, and many more that I wasn't familiar with but were just as amazing. Click on one of the items from the collection zooms you right to the object in the sky. WWT is rich with technology that will appeal to astronomers, but it's still simple enough for the everyday user.

The telescope is based on technology that came out of Microsoft Research, an area of the company that has operated for 16 years which focuses on long-term, broad-based projects such as this. It's built on work that began with Jim Gray’s SkyServer and contributions to Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

You can view the WorldWide Telescope now from here: www.worldwidetelescope.org.

Force Sensing Technology

sarahintampa — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 14:42:00 GMT

An article on BBC News blog, dot.life, features an interesting project from Microsoft Research: force sensing technology. In a research paper cleverly titled "I Sense a Disturbance in the Force" (available here), researchers from Microsoft's Cambridge Lab -James Scott, Lorna Brown and Mike Molloy - describe how force sensing technology could be used to perform actions on mobile devices. Using a prototype made from a Samsung UMPC, the researchers created a way for people to interact with the mobile device by tilting, twisting, bending, or squeezing it. These movements let the device's users perform actions like flipping a page in a document or switching between applications. No word as to when we'll see this technology in our handhelds, but it definitely opens up some possibilities for future research in this area.