I just ran into Roy Levin, Microsoft distinguished engineer and managing director of Microsoft Research Silicon Valley, in the Rainier/St. Helens Room at the Microsoft Conference Center. We found ourselves marveling at Commute UX, one of the TechFest 2009 demos I'll be posting about soon, and I asked him about what TechFest means for him and his lab.

"The value of TechFest," Levin said, "is for people to get a feel for the breadth and the depth of the innovation that goes on in Microsoft Research. In the room we're in right now, there is a sampler, really, of the larger event, and just wandering around this room, you see stuff from so many different areas of computer science and their applications to so many different areas of real life. For me, that's where the real impact of this event is: just feeling-- in a very direct way, a very visceral way--how the work that we do can make the world better through computing."

Levin's Silicon Valley lab specializes in research on distributed computing, and that means TechFest plays a particularly valuable role.

"There are a couple of demos here, in this room, from our lab that focus on understanding and modifying the way that complicated distributed systems work, in data centers in particular," he said. "The benefit, from my point of view, from participating in this event is that people get a glimpse at the problems, the very difficult problems, that we face in trying to harness the world of parallel computing and make it useful, in the form of cloud services, trying to operate these very large services and provide things on a global scale."

Finally, Levin noted, there's a special quality to the event that makes it loom large on researchers' annual calendars.

"There's a special place in my heart for TechFest," he stated, "because, obviously, it's a hometown event, compared to going to a conference or some other meeting. It also is 'hometown' in a different way, because members of Microsoft Research come in from all over the world. We get to meet with people that we don't get to see the rest of the year. That's really great."

Roy Levin (left) and Xian-Sheng Hua of Microsoft Research Asia chat during TechFest.