TechFest Live!

The Ghost of TechFest Future

Somewhere this moment--in Beijing or Bangalore, in Cambridge, Mass., or Cambridge, U.K., in Silicon Valley or the Silicon Forest--some brilliant young researcher just had a light bulb appear atop his or her head. Some sticky problem had been resolved...

Published 02-26-2009 9:56 PM by robk

Digital Past to Digital Presence

Of the 150-odd demos in TechFest 2009, the best-named is Digital Past to Digital Presence, a collection of concepts from the Socio-Digital Systems group at Microsoft Research Cambridge . David Kirk , a post-doctoral researcher in the group, explains what...

Published 02-26-2009 7:08 PM by robk

Filed under: Research, TechFest, Microsoft, Cambridge, 2009, Richard Banks, David Kirk, Wayve, Family Archive, Socio-Digital Systems, Time Card, CellFrame, Sean Lindley

Specification Inference for Security

Aditya Nori , a researcher in the Rigorous Software Engineering team at Microsoft Research India , just gave me a brief overview of his demo, entitled Specification Inference for Security, and as he made repeated references to the poster in his TechFest...

Published 02-26-2009 4:04 PM by robk

Filed under: Research, TechFest, Microsoft, 2009, infer, security, code, India, Aditya Nori, specification, Rigorous Software Engineering

Language-Agnostic Search

Some of the demos featured in TechFest 2009 were submitted by the Cairo Microsoft Innovation Center , and i got a chance to speak with a couple of Cairo researchers, Kareem Darwish and Motaz El-Saban, about their work. "We're trying to enable...

Published 02-26-2009 1:56 PM by robk

Filed under: Research, TechFest, Microsoft, 2009, Cairo, Trans-Bulletization, Motaz El-Saban, Center, Kareen Darwish, OCRLess, Innovation

Meeting of the Minds

TechFest riddle: What's big and blue and has 200 heads ? (Great!) Photo by Brandon Casazza

Published 02-26-2009 1:31 PM by robk

Mining Personal Relationships

Zaiqing Nie of the Web Search & Mining Group at Microsoft Research Asia is demonstrating a project called EntityCube , an English-language version of a wildly popular Chinese project called Renlifang . In Mandarin, "renlifang" means "three...

Published 02-26-2009 10:09 AM by robk

Filed under: Research, TechFest, Microsoft, 2009, search, Asia, Renlifang, Web, EntityCube, Zaiqing Nie, Web Search & Mining, summarization

Avatar Revealed!

To be honest, it wasn't too difficult to track down the woman who served as the model for the virtual receptionist in the Situated Interaction demo. Her name is Andrea, and she works as a group assistant in Building 99, the headquarters of Microsoft...

Published 02-25-2009 3:21 PM by robk

Filed under: Research, TechFest, Microsoft, 2009, virtual receptionist, Eric Horvitz, Situated Interaction

The Virtual Receptionist

One of the more intriguing demos on display during TechFest 2009 is called Situated Interaction, a project by Eric Horvitz and Dan Bohus of Microsoft Research Redmond that aims to enable a new generation of interactive systems that can reason about their...

Published 02-25-2009 1:07 PM by robk

Filed under: Research, TechFest, Microsoft, 2009, Dan Bohus, Situated Interactions, virtual receptionist, Eric Horvitz, Adaptive Systems and Interaction

Managing Audio in Wheel Time

Ivan Tashev (right) shows the Commute UX demo to Rick Rashid ( left ), senior vice president of Microsoft Research, and Craig Mundie, Microsoft chief research and strategy officer. Ivan Tashev, principal architect in the Speech Technology group at Microsoft...

Published 02-25-2009 10:13 AM by robk

Filed under: Research, TechFest, Microsoft, Redmond, 2009, phone, recognizer, infotainment, call, Y.C. Ju, speech, audio, car, Mike Seltzer, automobile, Speech Technology, Commute UX, Ivan Tashev, automotive, song

The Value of TechFest

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...

Published 02-24-2009 4:57 PM by robk

Filed under: Research, TechFest, Microsoft, Roy Levin, Silicon Valley, 2009, Xian-Sheng Hua, distributed computing

Research Support

A few weeks ago, 10 women were named recipients of the inaugural Microsoft Research Graduate Women's Scholarships . Among the 10 was Dafna Shahaf, whom I got to meet a little while ago. Shahaf, an engaging second-year Ph.D. candidate at Carnegie Mellon...

Published 02-24-2009 3:21 PM by robk

Improving Data-Center Performance

Moises Goldszmidt ( above ), principal researcher at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley , is showing a pair of demos, in conjunction with lab colleague Mihai Budiu , that examines performance in data centers. "The challenge," Goldszmidt says...

Published 02-24-2009 12:50 PM by robk

Filed under: Research, TechFest, Microsoft, Silicon Valley, 2009, distributed systems, Moises Goldszmidt, Mihai Budiu

TechFest Theater

Take a look at some of these cool video demonstrations of the projects being shown during TechFest 2009.

Published 02-24-2009 12:42 PM by robk

Introductory Keynote

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 ...

Published 02-24-2009 10:50 AM by robk

Filed under: Research, TechFest, Microsoft, Rick Rashid, Craig Mundie, keynote, 2009

Homecoming

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...

Published 02-23-2009 5:27 PM by robk

Filed under: Research, TechFest, Microsoft, 2009, teen, CNN, New England, The Moment, Photo Tourism, social media, Photosynth, danah boyd, Rick Szeliski

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