I’m in the talk with Microsoft Research’s senior VP Rick Rashid and he’s talking about how he started his research career as a graduate student, then professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and then his stint at Microsoft Research. MSR’s mission statement is to expand the state of the art in each of the areas in which they do research, rapidly transfer innovative technologies into Microsoft products, and ensure that Microsoft products have a future. MSR is adapting the academic model, they are an open research environment and have strong ties to University Research. 25% of all PhD graduates will have worked at MSR at some time during their PhD. MSR has just announced a 6th lab in Cambridge, MA to be close to MIT which will open in July 2008. MSR has almost 1000 interns a year and many postdocs. The key mission is to move the state-of-the-art forward and measure themselves with publications, MSR has over 3700 peer-reviewed publications, 13% at 2001 CHI. MSR has prestigious senior researchers like Gordon Bell, creator of the VAX and Rick Rashid with work on the NUMA architecture.
The second part of the mission statement is to drive technologies into Microsoft products and Rick showed that with the Tablet PC which was invented in Cambridge, UK and the codecs for Microsoft Windows Media Player. What’s the value of MSR to Microsoft? MSR is a source of IP and new technologies and to act as an early warning system to Microsoft as to what technologies and areas to focus on. A basic research group allows a company to respond more rapidly to change and to solve hard technical problems which advances the company and makes it one step above the competitors. If you want to survive, you have to invest in the future. MSR is also delving into research areas that you wouldn’t think Microsoft would be in, like for example, computational biology.
Rick is now talking about what the future will look like in 10 years. Rick gave a slide about the "Wallet PC" vision in 1993 where now this has developed in Windows Mobile. So, what will the future to 2018 will look like? Microsoft Surface is a tabletop system where you can manipulate digital objects as physical objects, kind of similar to tabletop work from DGP at University of Toronto. A new large research project at MSR is the singularity research project for proving very large systems and doing a better job of specification for software. Now, the specifications are actionable and can be verified through proofs that will change the software development process. Another project which became an actual product is TerraServer which was one of the earliest terabyte servers on the web, and was the basis for Microsoft Virtual Earth, and was started by Jim Gray (who is missing since last year from on a sailing trip). This delves into data mining and web services area.
One cool thing that Rick is showing is the WorldWide Telescope, which is like a space-version of Microsoft Virtual Earth but applied to space and the sky where you can navigate and also search. This is an example of galactic space storage. We are now entering into the age of human scale storage, where you could theoretically store all data, images, and video of your entire life. This is the premise of a MSR project with Gordon Bell called MyLifeBits. Another MSR project is the SenseCam which takes video of wherever you are while walking. A practical application of SenseCam to aid in memory loss where it would record images and video, and then the patient could review it to help remember. In an experiment comparing with a diary and no aid, the SenseCam device performed significantly better than the other methods where the ability to remember after 1 month was higher than with the other methods. Another research project is to manipulate images and improve on them (very relevant especially with wedding photos!), MSR have created technologies that allow you to remove certain objects and manipulate images using curves. One product that stitches a whole bunch of photos together to reconstruct a 3D virtual environment, called Microsoft PhotoSynth.
Another research area is streaming intelligence where we now are beginning to have sensors being deployed in the environment. Eric Horvitz is doing statistical analysis and modeling to do traffic prediction and modeling the user in order to predict better ways of driving through traffic.
On Technorati: Microsoft Research, Rick Rashi
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