On occasion, TechFest, Microsoft Research’s annual technology extravaganza, seems just like Old Home Week. Researchers from the six Microsoft Research labs worldwide congregate in Redmond in the waning days of winter, renewing acquaintances, comparing notes, swapping stories.

It’s always an affable gathering. Familiar, smiling faces abound. The floor of the Microsoft Conference Center, where TechFest is held, buzzes with anticipation. For many involved in the show, this is the one time over the course of the year when they can touch base with a broad cross-section of talent from across Microsoft Research. The cross-fertilization of ideas is intense.

But for some, the event is brand-new. Such is the case this year with danah boyd.

A recent, high-profile hire for Microsoft Research New England, boyd (left) only started her new job about a month ago, having just completed her doctoral dissertation for UC Berkeley. But while she has never before attended a TechFest event, she certainly has heard tales.

“My understanding,” boyd says, “is that it’s an opportunity for all the researchers to show off what they’re working on, for a couple of different audiences. One is the company itself, and one is the public at large, all of the different people Microsoft works with and some academic audiences.

“But basically, it’s a very large science fair,” she laughs. “I love the science fair!”

Her research has gained renown for its exploration of social media, with a particular focus on how teens use social-network sites and on tensions between public and private data on such sites. While she’s sure to be discussing her work during TechFest, the event also is serving as a debut of sorts for not only boyd’s affiliation with Microsoft Research New England, but also for the lab itself, which opened in July 2008.

“My lab is a new experiment of people doing things from different kinds of fields,” boyd says. “I will be demoing with my group, and I’ll also be talking about my research agenda for where we’re going with social media, different kinds of possibilities of research, and the places of interesting intersections between ethnographically minded research and network modeling and more mathematical-theory modeling of large-scale networks.

“It’s a great opportunity to talk about where we’re going and to interface with all sorts of brilliant people around here.”

Brilliance certainly is abundant during TechFest. Research is, by its very nature, an experimental pursuit. Some research projects pay huge dividends, and some leads to a blind alley. That’s why it’s called computer science.

But, with a company with the breadth and scope of Microsoft, the successful technology Microsoft Research contributes can have monumental consequences.

During TechFest 2006, Rick Szeliski of Microsoft Research Redmond was the lead researcher on a demo entitled 3-D Photo Tourism. The project on display demonstrated how automated image-matching algorithms could be used to recover the 3-D position and orientation of the thousands of photographs of famous landmarks that had been posted on the Web. The positioned images could be combined to create a 3-D representation of the landmark.

That project, handed to colleagues at Microsoft’s Live Labs, eventually was released to the public as Photosynth. On Jan. 20, 2009, in a project called The Moment, CNN.com featured a Photosynth of the moment when new U.S. President Barack Obama raised his hand to take the oath of office. Hundreds of photos were submitted by users to contribute to the synth, and the result was, as Slate describes it, “an incredibly detailed picture of what took place that morning.”

From research project to participant in a presidential inauguration in less than three years—that’s evidence of the kind of powerful technology displayed during TechFest, and this year’s will be no different. While not all the work celebrated during the show will have such dramatic impact, some very well might. It’s all there for the discovering, and in this blog, I will strive to bring to you a representative sample of the innovation on display.

Blog posts, photos, links, interviews, random observations and occurrences: That’s what this space will offer over the next three days. Subscribe to the RSS feed. Bookmark this page. Visit the link on the TechFest 2009 home page. Monitor the excitement however you like, but please, keep checking back. I’ll do my best to make it worth your while.

And, in the meantime, if you’re interested or need a refresher, below are links to the postings on last year’s TechFest Live!