Entries tagged with techfest - Channel 10

TechFest 2008: Reliable Wireless Connectivity on the Go

Tina — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 12:23:00 GMT

Many people want to stay connected while traveling and commuting, which is driving the demand for network access from moving vehicles. But the reliability and performance of such connectivity today is severely limited by frequent "blackouts" that the vehicle-to-infrastructure backhaul links suffer. We have designed a system that, unlike existing "commuter networks," such as Sound Transit or the Microsoft Connector system, uses multiple backhaul links for added reliability and performance. Our system fuses these links together using novel striping mechanisms that intelligently decide which link individual packets must use, based on current performance and load. We have instantiated our design in the context of providing CorpNet access on Microsoft shuttles and the Connector service. Unlike the current Wi-Fi service on the Connector, our system does not require users to log in via the RAS service to access internal sites. To them, it appears as if they are directly attached to the corporate wireless network, just as they would be from their offices. We have partnered with the Microsoft shuttle service to demonstrate our system on the shuttles that will ferry TechFest attendees.

TechFest 2008: New Search UIs for Collaboration and Persistence

Tina — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 18:32:00 GMT

SearchBar is a new type of browser history that supports complex Web investigations by assisting with task resumption and information re-finding. SearchBar accomplishes these goals by proactively and persistently storing query histories, browsing histories, notes, and ratings in an interrelated fashion. Current UIs also treat search as a solitary experience, but users often need to collaborate on searches, such as students working together on homework or families jointly planning a vacation. SearchTogether enables groups of remote users to collaborate on Web search, synchronously or asynchronously, by providing group query histories, shared comments and ratings, automatic distribution of search results, session summaries, and integrated chat. CoSearch enables groups of collocated users to collaborate when sharing a single PC, as often occurs in schools and libraries, by enabling group members to use their phones as input devices: Users can send text messages to the computer to queue up query terms and can use their phones’ joysticks to operate cursors on the PC to queue up browser tabs for group viewing. Relevant products: IE, Live, Messenger, Communicator.

TechFest 2008: Lucid Touch

Tina — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 10:45:00 GMT

TechFest 2008 got under way this week on the Microsoft campus and one of the most popular booths at the event was Lucid Touch. Patrick Baudisch with Microsoft research gives us a demo but I'll give you the scoop here as well.

Touch is a compelling input modality for interactive devices, but touch input on the small screen of a mobile device is problematic because a user’s fingers occlude the desired graphical elements. Lucid Touch is a mobile-device interface that addresses this limitation by enabling a user to control an application by touching the back of the device.

The key to making this usable is what we call pseudo-transparency: By overlaying an image of the user’s hands onto the screen, we create an illusion of the mobile device itself being semitransparent. This pseudo-transparency enables users to acquire targets accurately while not occluding the screen with their fingers and hand. Lucid Touch also supports multitouch input, giving users an ability to operate the device simultaneously with all 10 fingers. We will present initial study results that indicate that many users found touching on the back preferable to touching on the front, because of reduced occlusion, higher precision, and an ability to make multifinger input.

Directed Sound: The Personal Audio Space

Laura — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 19:22:00 GMT

We all need our personal space, and now MS Research is working on a way to give us our personal AUDIO space. I chatted with Jasha Droppo at TechFest '07 and he gave me the lowdown on how this speaker of the future works including the creation of constructive and destructive interference and high-end signal processing. It's pretty intense, and hopefully will be in our hands soon because I know a few people who could certainly use some dynamic noise reduction :)

Also-- check out another version of this technology in an earlier report I did.

TechFest '07: Digital effects for internet video clips

Laura — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 20:05:00 GMT

This booth at TechFest was sooooo much fun. It made me want to run home and get on video messenger with my friends. They've taken some advanced digital effect concepts and simplified them so that we can use them in our every day internet life. You can add special effects to your videos, do it live, and fix problems you might have had while shooting. Try it for yourself!

TechFest '07: Kitty Cats and Asirra.com making your internet a safer place!

Laura — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 16:52:00 GMT

We've all gone to some website where is wants you to write in some scrambled letters into a text box. Well, that technology is boring and sometimes flawed so along came Microsoft Research to bring you asirra.com. They have joined with Petfinder to bring us the next (adorable) wave in internet security. Meow.

TechFest '07: PlayAnywhere meets PlayTogether!

Laura — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 17:39:00 GMT

A few months ago Dr. Bill Crounse and I reported to you about PlayAnywhere. Well Microsoft research does not rest on its laurels, let me assure you. They've been hard at work incorporating multiple PlayAnywhere machines together for an experience they call PlayTogether. And beyond that thay have taken their projection technology from 2D to 3D and show it off with these badass video game trucks climbing over real life obstacles. THIS is interactive gaming.

TechFest '07: HD Viewer!

Laura — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 18:05:00 GMT

I couldn't resist stopping at the HD view booth at TechFest '07 because of the sheer magnitude of the camera on display. But, to my surprise and excitement - that huge camera is NOT necessary to pull off the amazing technology HD View is giving us. I chatted up Michael Cohen and he gave a quick demo where you can zoom out to almost satellite distance and then zoom right into detailed ground level on these pictures. You have to see it to believe it...so go see it.

TechFest '07: Boku : Video Games that teach you how to program!

Laura — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 19:47:00 GMT

Boku is currently in pre beta stage but it's still incredibly impressive. It's a video game designed to teach children how to program. It runs off an xbox 360 controller and has adorable animations to keep the kids interested- but it teaches REAL programming from coding to debugging. The goal is to attract kids as young as 5 years old by exciting them about the concept and emotional experience of programming. If you have a kid (or perhaps are at the coding level of one) you're going to want to check out Boku!

Microsoft TechFest 2007 Wrap-up

Jesse — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 00:07:00 GMT

Microsoft’s Conference Center has been buzzing this week and we’re going to bring you up to speed for all of your weekend dinner party banter. The boffins from MS Research were on campus to peel back the curtain on all of their latest and greatest and they came nowhere near disappointing. Tuesday the show was also open to public press for the first time in the event’s 15 year history.

Rory Blyth published his videos to Channel 9, the first featuring DynaVis and FastDash and the second focusing on technology on the wall. Both videos give you a great idea of the vibe in the room, as well as Rory’s unique style if you haven’t ever sampled it.

Scott Beale of Laughing Squid shot gorgeous photos (as usual), featuring Lego workfolk, Windows Vista soda, and of course kittens. Brady Forrest came down from O’Reilly and was smitten by Asirra (a crowdsource service that helps cats and dogs find new homes) and how some Microsoft Researchers are able to move gigapixel images across the web with their HDView technology. Scoble experienced TechFest by viewing everything through the LCD on his PodTech camera. He also determined that using Twitter to publish updates of Rick Rashid’s keynote, available in webcast and transcript forms, was the right tool for the job--a decision probably best described as, “permalinks schmermalinks.”

Bre Pettis was reporting for Make Magazine and talked to MSR boffins about Personal Audio Spaces (think grooving to Sketches of Spain where you’re sitting, but the person next to you is rocking to Now Here Is Nowhere). And of course Engadget’s Ryan Block was there to photograph his fingers on everything.

All told it was quite a whirlwind tour. We here at the 10 HQ have certainly got ourselves a new list of people and projects to follow as we hunt for the cool inside of Microsoft, in this Year of our Bond.

Photo credit: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid.

TechFest 2007: The geek candy shop

Larry — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 22:32:00 GMT

Yesterday I got a chance to experience TechFest 2007, an annual look into what Microsoft Research is working on. For those of us who love cutting-edge technology, it’s a golden ticket to Wonka-land. In the last 16 years, Microsoft Research has become the unseen hand guiding some of the coolest technologies we use every day. Speech recognition, Vista and Office UI elements, even the fur on animals in Xbox games all started in a Microsoft lab.

The New Concepts for the Home booth included a “digital postcard” gadget for the living room, a “visual answering machine” for the kitchen, but most interesting to me was a system to send short clips of the TV shows you are watching to the mobile phone of your friends. In the Graphics and Media section I saw software that automatically removes “um’s” and other extraneous parts from your Podcast as well as processes for keywords or automatic summaries (VERY COOL!) There was an HD plug-in for viewing gigapixel images online and 360-degree panoramic video in Internet Explorer. There is also a prototype authoring tool that generates content for this plug-in.

There was an Xbox 360 game called Boku that teaches high level programming concepts to kids who may not be ready to grasp the complexity of a computer language. It uses behavior arbitration (set a character to move toward or avoid others, or just wander around), and real time feedback using sensors, physics, and message passing. There was a booth for directed sound (ala the ads in Minority Report) that would allow officemates to both be on speakerphone calls without interrupting each other and a dynamic noise reduction system for making it easier to hear audio in a restaurant or in traffic.

There was a system for taking a picture of a DVD, painting, or band poster on a telephone pole using a Smartphone that brings up dynamic information like reviews or more information about the product. A “Surface Computing Innovation” booth had the most buzz with real-time interaction between people at distance playing chess with real pieces on one side and projected pieces on your opponent’s side. There was also a demo of a projected car on a table top that would drive around hopping over paper ramps and hills that were actually on the table.

And those are just the things I can talk about. :) Laura Foy was there with a camera, so stay tuned for more on TechFest 2007.

More on TechFest 2007: Wired, Engadget, CNN, Don Dodge, My Geek News. And of course, don't forget to check out Channel 9's coverage.

American Idol for the rest of us

bcrounse — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 21:34:00 GMT

This morning, Rick Rashid, Senior VP for Microsoft Research kicked off our annual TechFest; an event here on the Redmond campus that celebrates the genius of Microsoft Research's worldwide labs by presenting more than 150 demos and 24 lectures. Think of it as a kind of exhibition of cutting-edge technologies from some of the best and brightest computer scientists and engineers from around the world all in one place. I always enjoy this event because it gives me a lot of insight to what's coming down the line and how it might be applied to my own industry, healthcare. One of the technologies Rick highlighted in his keynote this year was SenseCam, a little wearable device capable of digitizing audio, video and other data from every second of your life and storing it forever. When I first saw this technology more than a year ago, it got me to thinking about how it might impact future versions of the electronic or personal health record, or how this technology might be useful to patients with chronic disease. There are already promising results from small studies with people suffering from dementia and other cognitive disorders.

But there was something else Rick talked about this morning that has far more profound implications for our industry, and certainly for our country. He reported that only about 1 in 100 college freshman today are selecting computer science and engineering as a major, a trend that has been on a downward spiral for the last several years and has reached its lowest point ever. In my own travels I’ve been hearing colleagues, and deans of medical schools, bemoaning the quality and quantity of young people seeking careers in medicine today. Yet surprisingly both fields, IT and medicine, are forecasted to be leading industries for new job creation far into the future. Clearly, the number of jobs will far outstrip the supply of qualified candidates.

What's going on here? Somehow I think we are failing to instill a work ethic in our youth. Perhaps I can't blame them when all they see on television, magazines and the Net are glorifications of the rich and famous among us; movie icons, sports stars, rockers, rappers, instant celebrities and wanna-be's. Math and science are hard. It takes time to build a fortune the old fashioned way. Who wouldn't want to rake in millions for singing on the radio, blasting a home run, or acting on the silver screen? But you need only watch American Idol to confront the hard fact that the odds of that happening are solidly stacked against you. It's also interesting to note that even those American Idols generally got there by working very very hard, and often for many years in poverty and total obscurity, before hitting it big.

Yes, majoring in computer science is hard. Becoming a doctor is perhaps even harder. There are years of self sacrifice, delayed gratification, and countless hours studying and taking tests. But doing anything really worthwhile in life takes an equal amount of effort. That's why they call it "work". It's a message that seems to be getting lost on an entire generation of young people. And, it's a loss for which we will all pay dearly.

What do you think? Let us know.

Bill Crounse, MD Worldwide Health Director Microsoft