Today is Public Day, when a select group of partners, customers, and media get an opportunity to view a few dozen of the demos on display during TechFest 2009.

The day's events began promptly at 10 a.m. with introductory remarks from Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research, and Craig Mundie, Microsoft chief research and strategy officer.

Rashid began by noting the excitement in the air.

"TechFest for us is a really fun week," Rashid told the assemblage in the Kodiak Room of the Microsoft Conference Center. "We started it in 2001, and I was particularly surprised--because I was not really a big fan of the idea--at how much  fun the TechFest event was, not just for the employees who would come in and see the technologies and the displays, but it also was a lot of fun for the researchers."

TechFest also gives researchers an achievable goal for which to strive.

"It's interesting," Rashid said, "that there's a huge competition among the researchers for actually getting into TechFest every year. It's probably reviewed more rigorously than most conferences and journals, because we try to make sure that we're going to get things that are interesting to our employees, that are interesting to the people who are outside."

In Mundie's opening remarks, he addressed the question of why Microsoft considers it imperative to pursue research, particularly in perilous economic times.

"It's oftentime companies that have doubled down on their R&D during that period that have really prospered on the way out," Mundie said, "in fact, have actually developed the products or technologies that tend to lead the economy or society forward in some new way."

And  he made it clear that Microsoft looks to its research organization to help generate those innovations.

"The work that comes out of Microsoft Research is truly extraordinary," Mundie said. "There's really no company in the world today, certainly in the field of computing, that is spending what we spend on research and development. There are very, very few companies that are left that do any substantive pure research in this field at all. When you factor out the hardware world and look at software more exclusively, we clearly are way out in front in terms of our commitment to that investment."

During a Q&A session that followed the opening statements, Rashid was asked how Microsoft Research prioritizes its research.

"I don't prioritize research within the organization," he replied. "We don't try to do that. What we do is to try to prioritize people. It's a very people-intensive activity, and the goal is to hire the best people we possibly can, to give them an environment and other people that will allow them to be productive and to be able to do interesting work, and to set very high standards of performance for these people so we can continue to have the best group that we possibly can."

All with the goal of pushing forward the state of the art in computer science--and  contributing to Microsoft products.

"Interestingly enough," Rashid added, "new technology transfers come out of TechFest every year."

Let's see what the candidates might be this time around.