TechFest 2008 began promptly at 9:30 a.m. today, with a five-minute video about Microsoft Research's mission, featuring Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research, along with Tony Hey, corporate vice president of External Research, and the directors of the organization's six labs across the world, Rico Malvar of Microsoft Research Redmond; Andrew Herbert of Microsoft Research Cambridge; Hsiao-Wuen Hon of Microsoft Research Asia; Roy Levin of Microsoft Research Silicon Valley; P. Anandan of Microsoft Research India; and Jennifer Chayes of the just-announced Microsoft Research New England.

After the video concluded, Rashid gave a 45-minute keynote address in which he discussed the growth of Microsoft Research, underscored its core mission, and talked about its academic-like model and its history of technology transfer into Microsoft products.

One of the most interesting portions of Rashid's talk came when he mentioned the value Microsoft Research brings to the company.

"You do research because you don't know what the future's going to hold," Rashid told a gathering that packed the expansive Kodiak Room at the Microsoft Conference Center. "You don't know what's coming around the corner. You don't know who your next big competitor is, what the next big technology is, what the next problem that you're going to have to solve is going to be. Research creates the reservoir of technology, of ideas, of people that can be brought to bear when times are bad, when things go wrong. Research gives you an ability to survive when things change. It gives you agility.

"If you look back at Vannevar Bush, who was influential in creating the National Science Foundation, he talks about this. He says, 'We should invest in basic research, not because it's going to have all these outcomes. We'll get these great outcomes. But if we have a famine or if we have a disease or if we have a war, we need to have this in reserve. We need to be ready.'

"That," Rashid said, "is why you do basic research."

He also discussed the breadth of the work undertaken in Microsoft Research, pointing out projects bearing fruit in proving properties in software and in wireless sensing. Rashid brought out Merrie Morris, a researcher in the Adaptive Systems and Interaction group, to demonstrate work in collaborative Web search.

And he discussed WorldWide Telescope, recently unveiled technology from Curtis Wong and Jonathan Fay that stitches together imagery from the world's most advanced telescopes to present a seamless, immersive view of the universe. An accompanying film clip quoted Roy Gould, a researcher at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics, as saying that WorldWide Telescope "is going to have as profound an impact on the way we view the universe as Galileo did four centuries ago."

Such comments about the technology on display during TechFest make Rashid proud.

"This," he said, "is one of the most fun weeks out of the year,"