The Value of TechFest

robk — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 01:57:00 GMT

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.

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,"

TechFest Live! : Roy Levin

The Value of TechFest

Rashid keynote