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Microsoft Research Turns 10

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the smart-people dept.

Alec Muzzy writes: "Did you know that Microsoft Research, the first research laboratory started by a software company, just turned 10 years old? Their website is currently featuring some highlights of their research in the past 10 years and how it is applying to the new products Microsoft is making today - for instance their work in Real-Time Fur will be used in some XBox games, and Speech Recognition may be in future Pocket PC's. Reading these pages gives you a real insight into what new technologies Microsoft is working on."

6 of 302 comments (clear)

  1. sounds like Apple's ATG... by green+pizza · · Score: 5, Interesting

    In the late 1990s the college of engineering at my university would have reps and engineers from Apple's ATG (Advanced Technology Group) visit to judge projects, talk about the industry, and share stories over a BBQ. From what I understand, the ATG was a research group that had free reign to experiment with software and hardware projects, some of which were eventually wrapped into shipping Apple products. In about 1994 I remember a demo/presentation that included some neat webserver CGIs for "intelligent" searching and document organzation (cool for that time period). We were also shown a cool speech recognition + text-to-speech utility that utilized facial recognition as well as displaying a spooky relaistic animated talking face. I also recall a semi-working mockup of a 3D version of the Macintosh Finder (Apple's Macintosh desktop / file manager). One of the coolest things I remember was that not all of their projects were on Apple Macintosh hardware. Most were, but a few were on IBM RS/6000 (AIX) and SGI Indigo (IRIX) workstations.

    Cool stuff.

    1. Re:sounds like Apple's ATG... by sakusha · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Yep, ATG was amazing, I attended one lecture where they described their work in future computing trends. Back in the 80s, they were trying to see what you could do with the kinds of processors available today. The only way they could do that was to use their Cray as a single-user computer. In the day, they used it for chip design, at night the ATG came in and used it as a single user PC. And you know, their predictions about what kind of horsepower would be on our desktops was pretty accurate.

      Alas, ATG was disbanded and the group folded into other development orgs at Apple.

  2. They also gave us Bob by MagikSlinger · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Let us not forgive or forget that. :-)



    The sad thing is Microsoft has spent a pretty penny on research, but because of Microsoft's internal structure and development philosophy, the research doesn't get to do more than provide a gimick or two. E.g., Microsoft research spent a lot of time and money to develop a technique using Baysean probability to analyze what a user was doing and figure out what they were trying to do. The end result of that was the mother-#$! Office Paperclip that popped up whenever you typed the words, "Dear John".



    Microsoft Research should be figuring out how to improve the performance of NT's Microkernel architecture, improve virtual memory management on multi-media machines and a host of other useful technologies. But they don't. Go figure.


    --
    The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
  3. NT source code by shd99004 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I didn't know about this site. But it looks really very interesting, and something that is even more interesting is that they have special licensees for universities and other non profit research institutes to have access to the source code for NT and CE. This is some of the most interesting things I've seen.

    Here is a link.

    --
    Will work for bandwidth
  4. Microsoft Research HAS done some good by MtViewGuy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I think despite what most people here on /. think about Microsoft as a company, :) you have to admit a lot of their research has created some very good ideas.

    For example, the Microsoft Natural Keyboard and the improvements in the design of the Microsoft Mouse came out of this group. And MS Research has done a lot to dramatically improve the look and feel of Windows, especially the placement of menus, icons, etc.

    I believe that the Linux supporters and developers should seriously look at creating an Open Source equivalent of Microsoft Research (companies like Dell and IBM could provide the initial seed money for such a lab). Imagine tightly-controlled research that could result in dramatic improvements in the usability of Linux on both the graphical and command line level, and developing keyboards and mouse pointers geared towards the needs of Linux users.

  5. Re:Credit where credit is due by furiousgeorge · · Score: 4, Interesting

    You're an idiot - LOTS of people came up with fur algorithms before R&H. E.g. Jim Kajiya who WORKS at MSResearch and wrote one of the seminal papers about it:

    Kajiya, James T. and Timothy L. Kay, ``Rendering fur with three dimensional textures,'' in Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 1989, ACM SIGGRAPH, 1989, pp. 271-280.

    Have a clue about the topic before you post. Just look at the list of staff at MSR - it's a 'who's who' of various fields........ CGI included...... Jim Blinn, Hughes Hoppe, Michael Cohen... etc etc etc........

    Welcome to Slashdot - blind microsoft bashing. MSResearch is doing some damn good work - look at any set of the conference proceedings from SIGGRAPH for the past 5 years and see the published work.........