It took a bit longer this morning for me to get out of bed but alas.. I’m here at the Los Angeles Convention Center for Day Three of the Microsoft PDC. It looks like today is a focus on Microsoft Research with Rick Rashid giving the keynote,

We’re about to start… again forgive the initial typos. I’m typing as I listen to the keynote here.

So we have Rick Rashid who’s the Senior VP of Microsoft Research. The keynote starts with a video overview of the Microsoft Research division from all the world. Here’s an interesting statistic – there are roughly 850 PhD researchers working at Microsoft.

Rick’s own background is in developing operating systems, programming languages etc. He talks about some of his own accomplishments through the years – as well as noting that if you do use the Mac or the iPhone (and he thinks you really shouldn’t – as the crowd chuckles), you are using code that he helped develop years ago at CMU. Another tidbit – Rick is also the only Microsoft Exec to ever have the same job for such a long period of time (17 years).

For those that are curious, here is the mission statement for Microsoft Research (MSR)

• 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

MSR organization details

• Run as a university organizational model
• Open research environment
• Strong ties to University Research

Additional notes about MSR:

• Offices in Cambridge MA, Silicon Valley CA, Redmond WA, Cambridge UK, Bangalore India, and Beijing China. Bejing is the second largest MSR facility to Redmond.
• MSR has published over 4000 papers over the last 17 years.
• MSR works closely with the academic community. 20 percent of the graduates coming out of CS research programs probably work at MSR at some point in their career.

MSR also drives technologies into products. They have a focused technology transfer effort. Many of today’s products have come out of MSR including DirectX, Windows Media, Tablet PC, the Surface etc. Researchers are on product incubation advisory boards.

Some recent research announcements:

• Robochamps (www.robochamps.com) – MSR working with NASA to allow people to program their own Mars lander.

• CCR and DSS Toolkit 2008 now available on the MSR website.

Other notes about MSR:

• MSR generates around 25% of the MSFT patents and generally MSR patents are more “fundamental”
• MSR helps Microsoft in solving problems and also giving the company an early warning system to new technologies.

Finally, why do research at all? It gives you the ability to survive when things go wrong. It gives you agility. It allows Microsoft to quickly respond to change. Research provides new technologies, new competitors and of course, new business models.

“Basic Research gives Microsoft the ability to change quickly.”

9am now..

Here’s something interesting – the “Terminator” project. MSR is working on ways to prove that applications/programs terminate which is a classic CS problem. They now have a new set of methods that in fact can determine if a program has halted. Terminator itself is best described as a termination/liveness prover for C programs – a first of its kind and they’re working to get this into future products.

Research in software engineering

• - CHESS
• - Code Contracts
• - Pex
• - Z3
• Church’s thesis proven – 70 year old problem

Now a focus on energy efficient computing. Rick invites Feng Zhao, principle researcher at MSFT, to talk about of all things, sensors and how it can be used to make computing more energy efficient.

Feng describes ways we can be more energy efficient:

• Computers can be made more energy efficient
• Computing itself can be used to improve energy efficiency of other tasks and objects/devices.
  • use sensors to sense the environment for better conservation

As an example, Feng displays a handheld sensor deivce that can monitor an area’s temperature and humidity and then send this information back to the cloud. In fact, the hall that we’re all in is littered with sensors located on the ceiling (we can’t see them in the dark here). These sensors help map and monitor temperature changes in the room over time.

He shows an animation of the hall starting at 5am yesterday before the keynote started.

As people start rolling in, the cooling system kicks in (in the blue) and tries to compensate for the rise in temperatures. Then as the keynote starts and proceeds, you see the temperature rise in the hall. This gives building personnel insight into how well the cooling is working in a given area – thus helping someone to be more energy efficient – cooling less when its not needed and cooling more when it is needed in an area.

Approximately 100 MB of data a day is collected to the cloud environment.

Feng now shows how sensors are used in Microsoft’s own datacenters today. Here’s a picture of the temperature readings on a set of racks – front of the rack on top and the back on the bottom.

Data Center Genome Project – combines sensor data on a datacenter and computing operations being performed in the datacenter.  An attempt to see how computational work, hardware load, and sensors can be  used together to gain better insight into the datacenter environment.

Sensors are great for businesses but they’re also great for the environment. Feng shows how sensors can be used in the wild to monitor temperature and humidity changes. There’s the SenseWeb platform – a wikipedia of sensors

• Allows sharing of deployed instrumentation and data for communities of scientists and hobbyists. It allows people to share sensors and share data. SensorMap as the portal – http://atom.research.microsoft.com/sensormap

SensorMap is also being used to monitor glaciers in Alaska. Through the website, you can pan and tilt through the terrain and look at the readings of the sensors.

Now back to Rick:

MSR is actively working in the healthcare industry – looking to fight HIV/AIDS through Machine Learning Techniques.

Now switch to Education.

Some of the research performed by MSR in the areas of education include:

• Tablet PC technologies to help students and teacher to learn
• Robotics work in the CS Classroom
• World Wide Telescope release (this was a follow on to sky server) – 24/7 virtual observatory. Now has 1.5 million active users
  • as of today, Microsoft is releasing the Equinox release of the World Wide Telescope. Now a demo of the new version:

Some of the new features in the Equinox WWT beta:

• 3D view of the solar system
• See orbital locations of planets in past present and future
• Right click on a star and see their location
• Move to the star and the constellations change
• Double the total number of data in initial release
• 55 new panoramic images
• See new image sets from various telescopes
• New sky surveys
• New animations and hyperlinks added into the program
• You can zoom out and actually view the known universe

21 giga-parsecs of data and a view of the universe. Half a million galaxies in the program.

Rick now shows a picture of his two sons and how one of his sons (age 9) is now learning how to program in C# within Visual Studio 2008. He’s currently developing a game for his brother! However, he also points out that this possible because of the fact that both parents happen to be CS majors. Unfortunately most kids don’t have parents that have CS degrees – hence learning to program or learning anything about computing needs to be simpler.

Hence.. they are introducing Boku. Boku is best described as lightweight programming for kids. He brings out Matt MacLaurin to talk about Boku – a system for allowing kids to learn and program on their own.

All programming is performed using an Xbox 360 controller – there is no keyboard involved here. You simply move a cursor around and select objects to build rules.

Matt shows the equivalent of creating a Boku hello world program. The design goal of Boku is to keep programming constructs simple and visual.

Boku is all about creating programming rules that are designed for objects to follow. The kid uses pictures to help construct these rules. Once the rules are created, you can watch the character move about the world performing the rules. All rules are evaluated and performed at the same time. Notice that there’s no mention of variables or constructs etc. Things are kept simple. Here the character is roaming around collecting apples.

The application is coming out next year. Boku can be used to design games. You can program the game to respond to movements of the controller.

You can program practically everything in the world – even the cloud.

Boku provides kids a way to learn how to program AND make it fun. Examples of what people can do with Boku

Pretty cool stuff..

Back to Rick:

Finally Rick brings the focus to surface computing, He starts things off by showing what the Microsoft Surface looked like in the prototype days of the project.

This leads us into Rick talking about a new project underway at Microsoft called SecondLight.

Stevce Hodges comes out to talk about SecondLight. SecondLight is about figuring out new ways of interacting with displays and computers – extending the reach of surface computing. SecondLight is in a stage similar to where the Surface was in the protype days.

The begin by showing a demo of SecondLight.

They show that SecondLight supports all the things that the Surface supports – moving objects around, using gesture and multi-touch to interact and resize objects.

But SecondLight isn’t just about interacting with the surface – it’s about interacting with the area above the surface.

The demo-er than waves a simple piece of tracing paper above the display to reveal additional information about the object. He waves the paper over a star map to reveal star names and constellation information.

He waves a paper above a street map to reveal additional information about the streets

And he shows a picture of a cow.. and as he hovers over the cow, textual information about the cow is revealed (sorry no pictures of the inside of the cow are shown here)

In fact, he can use any cheap piece of plastic to place above the display. A scroll is pulled across the display to reveal additional hidden information.

So how does this work exactly?

There are actually two displays being projected within this system. An electric charge applied against a display can reveal a hidden underlying image that’s also being projected underneath the screen. When the display is diffuse, one projection is shown. When the display is transparent, a secondary projection is revealed.

Here’s a demo of SecondLight with a magic display that’s being waved above the surface.  You can also interact with the secondary display with support for gestures and multi-touch capabilities – just like the primary display.

For the first time they have integrated this technology into surface computing. Bringing the display out of the computer. Enabling secondary displays on external displays above the surface. You can read more about SecondLight in the whitepaper here.

that’s a wrap!

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