Introductory Keynote

robk — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 19:50:00 GMT

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.

Alan Alda Talks with Craig Mundie

robk — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 21:54:00 GMT

After Rashid's keynote, Craig Mundie, Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer, engaged in a freewheeling technology discussion with Alan Alda, famed television and movie star and host of PBS' Scientific American Frontiers. The pair sat informally, and after a brief intro in which Mundie explained how the two first met in Beijing five years ago, they were off and running.

The discussion ranged far and wide. Alda, it turns out, is quite the technophile, and he held his own quite well with Mundie. Their discussion touched on, among other topics, WorldWide Telescope, search collaboration, user interfaces, cellular modeling, algorithms, the differences between serial and parallel computing, and quantum computing.

When it came to the latter, a most interesting exchange occurred toward the end of the hour-long chat:

Alda: You know what worries me about this? Because of my history in entertainment, I think about the first film was nitrate, and it disintegrated and sometimes went up in flames. But then, when they changed the technology, they copied a lot of the old films and brought them forward, and we have them today because they did that. And then, as we got digital, they did the same thing. But every time the technology changes, they have to make a decision. They cull; it's like culling a herd. And the ones that they transfer--that decision is made on the basis of the culture at the time: What seems important, what do we want to send into the future? They're constantly making these capsules for the future, every time the technology changes. And when we go from ones and zeros to a completely different way of computing, there's going to be a gigantic culling of all knowledge, not just of movies. What's going to happen?

Mundie: I don't actually think about it in that way, in part because I tend to think of the information which gets represented as something slightly different than the model of computation that we apply to the information.

Alda: Will this new way of computing be so smart that it can take everything that already exists and learn how to translate it?

Mundie: Yes. That I actually think we'll see. But there is another fascinating thing that is happening now that wasn't happening that many years ago, and it's another area where some of Tony Hey's projects at Microsoft Research are involved today, and it is with this question of digital libraries and the whole question of archiving the digital history. When people were making these decisions step-by-step as a business decision, they were guided by one thing. But of course, society has always depended on archivists whose mission wasn't to preserve everything but at least preserve a representative sample. One thing I think is really interesting today is that our ability to store things has grown in capacity to such a degree that we're really getting close to approaching a time where almost nothing needs to be forgotten.

Alda: And then you're story is how to search through it.

Mundie: And to some extent, we're also getting to the point where we can find anything we remember. At least at the scale of the Web, with billions and billions of pages of information, we not only remember all those things, but we can find every one.

TechFest Live! : Craig Mundie

Introductory Keynote

Alan Alda Talks with Craig Mundie