TechFest Live! : Rick Rashid

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.

Tiny Web Services

robk — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 01:31:00 GMT

I mentioned the other day that I had run into Feng Zhao, principal researcher in the Networked Embedded Computing group, who was looking particularly happy at the moment. Well, Feng has been demonstrating the reason for his delight over the past three days: a set of small, wireless sensor devices, branded with the Microsoft Research logo, that he and his group plan to utilize in a variety of settings.

"This is an example of a sensor that we use for research and we plan to put into a data center," Zhao says, holding one of the devices up for inspection. "The sensors currently in data centers are a different form factor. This one just got designed. It senses temperature and humidity, the kinds of parameters one cares about in a data center."

The sensors are special, Zhao says, because of their size, their functionality, and their energy efficiency.

"We're working on making sensors easier to manage and interoperable with other devices," he says, "and to make the devices speak the kinds of language and protocols that computers on the Internet speak. For example, on the Internet, computers talk in terms of Web services, TCP/IP, HTTP. But these are designed for much bigger machines, and this one only has 4K of memory. We want to shrink these very big things onto this device with a very small memory and processor, and, furthermore, use as little energy as possible: two AA batteries for a year."

It's part of a research project called Tiny Web Services, designed to develop sensor nets and Web-service techniques that can fit onto these tiny 4K sensors. The sensors are programmed to go to sleep when not needed to send information.

"Web servers anticipate a set of requests, and they have to respond immediately," Zhao explains, "so they stay on all the time, waiting for requests. This one uses AC currency, and Web services can register events to make it turn itself on. A number of these techniques are being used to make the footprint of Web-service processing much smaller and simpler but still comply with the standards of the Internet so the device can talk to other devices."

Zhao's group is one of the first to address this area, and its devices are among the smallest--and least expensive--to talk in terms Web services can understand. Beyond their small footprint, they also contain technology that is advancing the state of the art.

"By building our own devices," Zhao says, "we actually are building a stack of software. We own all the drivers, and we can program. Our goal is to develop this into a reliable system, and we're also interested in making them available to academics, to help people building applications for the environment, for conservation, or for energy savings. If you look at what's currently available, some of those devices are not as reliable or as easy to program as we'd like."

With that, he was smiling again. These days, it seems, Feng Zhao just can't help himself.

Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research, shows one of Feng Zhao's new wireless sensors to an audience of invited guests during Tuesday's TechFest keynote speech.

Rashid keynote

robk — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 21:15:00 GMT

TechFest 2008 began promptly at 9:30 a.m. today, with a five-minute video about Microsoft Research's mission, featuring Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research, along with Tony Hey, corporate vice president of External Research, and the directors of the organization's six labs across the world, Rico Malvar of Microsoft Research Redmond; Andrew Herbert of Microsoft Research Cambridge; Hsiao-Wuen Hon of Microsoft Research Asia; Roy Levin of Microsoft Research Silicon Valley; P. Anandan of Microsoft Research India; and Jennifer Chayes of the just-announced Microsoft Research New England.

After the video concluded, Rashid gave a 45-minute keynote address in which he discussed the growth of Microsoft Research, underscored its core mission, and talked about its academic-like model and its history of technology transfer into Microsoft products.

One of the most interesting portions of Rashid's talk came when he mentioned the value Microsoft Research brings to the company.

"You do research because you don't know what the future's going to hold," Rashid told a gathering that packed the expansive Kodiak Room at the Microsoft Conference Center. "You don't know what's coming around the corner. You don't know who your next big competitor is, what the next big technology is, what the next problem that you're going to have to solve is going to be. Research creates the reservoir of technology, of ideas, of people that can be brought to bear when times are bad, when things go wrong. Research gives you an ability to survive when things change. It gives you agility.

"If you look back at Vannevar Bush, who was influential in creating the National Science Foundation, he talks about this. He says, 'We should invest in basic research, not because it's going to have all these outcomes. We'll get these great outcomes. But if we have a famine or if we have a disease or if we have a war, we need to have this in reserve. We need to be ready.'

"That," Rashid said, "is why you do basic research."

He also discussed the breadth of the work undertaken in Microsoft Research, pointing out projects bearing fruit in proving properties in software and in wireless sensing. Rashid brought out Merrie Morris, a researcher in the Adaptive Systems and Interaction group, to demonstrate work in collaborative Web search.

And he discussed WorldWide Telescope, recently unveiled technology from Curtis Wong and Jonathan Fay that stitches together imagery from the world's most advanced telescopes to present a seamless, immersive view of the universe. An accompanying film clip quoted Roy Gould, a researcher at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics, as saying that WorldWide Telescope "is going to have as profound an impact on the way we view the universe as Galileo did four centuries ago."

Such comments about the technology on display during TechFest make Rashid proud.

"This," he said, "is one of the most fun weeks out of the year,"