Entries tagged with research project - Channel 10

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.

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.

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).

MySong: Sing to Your Computer to Write Music

sarahintampa — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 09:09:00 GMT

Writing music used to take years of experience, but not anymore. With MySong, a Microsoft Research Project, you can sing into a microphone and the software will automatically generates instrumental accompaniment for your song. As you sing, MySong chooses chords to match your melody, so you can write musical compositions, even if you don't have formal musical training. The technology was created by Ian Simon from University of Washington in collaboration with Dan Morris and Summit Basu from Microsoft Research and it is still under development, so you can't play with it just yet. However, you can visit the MySong web site and watch a video of the software in action. (via istartedsomething)