Microsoft Research Silicon Valley Roadshow

Every other year, Microsoft brings innovation roadshow to Silicon Valley and puts projects and their researchers on display at the Mountain View facility. This year's SV Roadshow was held on May 22. After some brief presentations from MSFT management, researchers demonstrated projects, fielded questions and exchanged thoughts during the remainder of the afternoon.

To start, Rick Rashid, the senior vice president of Microsoft Research, gave a short presentation about the company’s different areas of research. Rashid said “The reason you do basic research is for survival, it gives you the ability to change when change is critical... that is true for society and humanity more broadly, like if something really bad happens--war, famine, Google--you can respond.” He prefaced this by saying "...it's not because research can lead to profitable, innovative products although that’s a nice consequence."

Roy Levin who directs the research group in Mountain View indicated they focus on distributed computing and work on improving the delivery of Web search results and the sponsored links that are associated with the to search results.

Botnet Detection for Microsoft's Hotmail

This facility is a target for Botnet attacks. The researchers, Yinglian Xie and Fang Yu developed a technique for automatically detecting servers, or dynamic IP addresses, that send spam by focusing on addresses which change frequently (a traditional email server would have a more or less stable IP address). Their research suggests that 96% of mail servers on dynamic IP addresses actually send only spam.

InkSeine

Raman Sarin demonstrated the InkSeine (not the river, instead the fishing net) software that lets tablet computers be controlled pens instead of keyboards or a mouse and at the same time completely rethinks the user interface. The software and a tutorial can be downloaded from http://research.microsoft.com/inkseine/ .

LaserTouch

LaserTouch uses an overhead infrared camera and two laser to enable surface computing on any flat screen which could potentially make it more affordable than other solutions in this realm. Andy Wilson developed the sensing software than enables the interface; it is the same technology as the TouchWall, a surface computing whiteboard that MSFT introduced to the market earlier this month. There are no plans as of this time to commercialize the prototype seen here.

Translation Technology

Andrea Jessee demonstrated a Windows Live application of their language translation technology. I've used it several times, from Japanese to English or from German to English and it works better than others that I have tried. Also the user interface is quite good. It works very well for reading news stories and has a feature where you can tell it that you are translating something "technical". You can try it at translator.live.com . Remember that text embedded in a graphic does not translate!

Boku is a lightweight programming language for children (it's being tested by 9-12 year age group). It is carried out on the Xbox 360 3D gaming environment and controlled by the Xbox game controller and should be available sometime in 2009.

Several projects addressed parallel programming and multicore computing challenges including DryadLINQ - a programming environment for large scale data parallel computing. It combines .NET Language Integration Query (LINQ) and the Dryad distribution engine engine and Automatic Mutual Exclusion employing a new technique, "transactional memory" to help manage execution threads and simplify the process of writing synchronized concurrent programs.

The goal of Keyword Generation and Query Classification is to produce a list of keywords associated with specific topics. Applications include improving ranking and relevance for search and presenting more relevant online advertising associated with a query.

The WOW project is the WorldWide Telescope, a rich visualization environment that functions as a virtual telescope and integrates imagery collected from the best ground- and space-based telescopes in order to create guided explorations of the universe, The Visual Experience Engine which enables seamless panning and zooming allows anyone to create and present media-rich immersive experiences to share with others.

Other projects of a more academic nature include Chuck Thacker's BEE3 to revitalize architecture research in chip design at the university level and Catherine van Ingen's E-Science in the Cloud to help eco-science researchers deal with the massive amounts of data that is and will be generated by ubiquitous sensors.