Dan Rigsby – Coding Up Style

Rick Rashid, Senior Vice President of Microsoft Research, took the stage at 8:39 AM PST and introduced both himself and the purpose of Microsoft Research (MSR).  Rick has been with Microsoft since 1991 where he setup MSR and remains to this day.  This was during a time when other organizations were cutting back on R&D.  Rick has been in

MSR Mission Statement:

• Expand the “state of the art” in each of the areas in which we do research
• Rapidly transfer innovative technologies into Microsoft products
• Ensure that Microsoft products have a future

This mission statement has remained unchanged since its inception in 1991.  The division is run much like a computer science department at a university.  It has an open research environment, ties to other universities, keeps rotating interns, welcomes visitors, etc. MSR has an army of 850 PhD researchers spread out across the globe.  Many of these researchers have amazing resumes including three of which who have Turing awards. Over 4000 peer-reviewed publications have gone out this year alone.  Many of the innovations from MSR have made it into products such as TabletPC, Robotics Studio, Surface, Office, Vista, etc. And almost every Microsoft product has some tie back to MSR in some level.

Research departments are really about “Agility”.  They give an organization the ability to rapidly change to the environment and continue to push the barrier and adjust to a changing environment. MSR adds value to Microsoft in many ways:

• Source of IP and new product technologies: MSR generates roughly 25% of the company’s patents and generally MSR patents are more fundamental
• Problem solving: ability to bring smart people to bear rapidly on hard problems confronting products
• Early warning system: ears to the ground in new areas across technologies

Rick discussed a few things that have been going on over the years and new things coming down the pipe. On area that is gaining momentum is cluster computing. One of the key items here is the Dryad stack. DryadLINQ  is used to automatically generate query plans at run time, and Dryad itself is the distributed execution of the code. This can execute on 1000s of notes and terabytes of data.

Sensor Research: Energy Efficiency

Computers can be made more efficient, and computers can be used to make other things more efficient. A tiny sensor device was introduced that can collect humidity and temperature and transmit the data via radio waves back to a central hub.  These can be thought of as “mini weather stations”.  Dozens of these have strung around the Los Angeles convention center to monitor the environmental conditions at PDC 2008 throughout the week.  This is a great experiment to run at an event like this. Throughout the day, some areas are more populated that others. The demo showed in accelerated time a map of the convention center and how the temperature and humidity changed throughout the week.  There is about 100 meg of data pulled per day from the convention center.

SensorMap
SensorMap is a Live Maps application that pulls data from sensors that have been placed in various areas around the world.  This data is stored in the cloud on the SensorWeb.  This data is humidity, wind speed, snow height, air temperature, surface temperature, radiation, etc.  This data can be used to map correlations over time and in various areas.

HealthCare

Computer Science isn’t usually thought of as a cutting edge research area for fighting disease.  However, the underling structure of life is information technology. For $100 today, we can measure 1 million points of variation in a person’s DNA.  There is currently an X-Prize to try to get the entire genome of an individual done for only $1000.  This is really only 2-3 years away.  This data opens huge doors for data mining of both diseases and gain a better understanding of the mysteries of life. 

Fighting HIV/AIDs with machine learning
As we know, the HIV virus mutates at a staggering rate which makes it hard to fight.  However, these mutations are not random and respond to the human immune system.  There is reason to believe that based on this, we could mind the data to find trends and help better treatments or a long term cure.

Worldwide Telescope

Worldwide Telescope (WWT) is a virtual observatory which has  over 1.5 million active users from hobbyist to professional astronomers. Releasing today is the next version of WWT called the Equinox Beta.  This release over doubles the amount of data and will allow you to zoom out to the entire known universe.  This software has amazing potential for both learning and discovery.

Education

General programming only really requires basic arithmetic and could be picked up by very young children.

Boku
Boku is a lightweight programming environment for children. It is a game development platform that is programmed through the XBox controller.  The game itself is a virtual world where you control the main avatar and the objects and actors around it. It uses an iconic based language that is expressed with visual representations of concepts that can be combined together to create meaning. The general format is “When” –> “Do”. Such as, “If you [see fruit], then [eat]”.  Using these activities you are programming how characters in the game interact with through environment.  Concepts such as variable and functions are in the game, but are shown in a intuitive way. You can also program the controls on the gamepad.

SecondLight: Interaction Beyond the Surface

The last topic of the keynote was a technology called SecondLight.  This is a new multi-touch technology that allows you to project through the display and onto other surfaces.  This display is independent and invisible to the primary surface. This can lead to “hidden” information and opens up new doors in interaction with the device. The technology offers pre-distortion so that it will still work with unlevel objects or those that may move. Since the infrared camera is in the device itself it could potentially be used to touch enable the displays above it.