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Microsoft Research Projects Showcased
prostoalex writes "Seattle Times reporter visited the Microsoft Research expo hosted by the company. The inventions of the future include a robot that could attend conferences in your behalf and allow you to communicate via video and audio applications, a software package that translates the sign language into readable English, e-mailable identification documents and some enhancements to Microsoft's operating systems."
Also displayed were the next generation of crashes in the Windows operating system, including those with up to a million shades of blue on a blue screen, those that can crash every computer on a network at the same time (Win, Linux, and MacOS), and a new feature that will cause your heart to stop when Word crashes. ....ok, it's a joke. laugh.
a robot that could attend conferences in your behalf
I thought we had prior art on this one - in the form of the US Senate.
Great way to save on air travel. Shipping has to be cheaper. But why stop at conferences? Some other ideas:
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
Does the Windows extensibility allow you to change the color of the "STOP" screens? That would be innovative (just as much as the iShit^H^H^H^HLoo).
If you do, it's likely Microsoft will find out, and will claim you stole their ideas if you ever do any programming yourself. For the sake of Linux/BSD/whatever, don't look at the Microsoft innovations!
New from Redmond! It's MS Intern! He listens to speakers! He takes notes! He asks them your questions! He does all this while you go to the pub! Get yours today!
[Taxes, title, registration, licensing, support fees, food, water, shelter, companionship not included. Some parts sold separately. Batteries not included.]
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
Wow! I cant wait - Imagine the incovenience of reaching out and pressing a button replaced with patting all your pockets down searching for a phone, pulling it out, typing in your pin code to unlock it and....still pressing a button.
Yup. Sounds like Microsoft style innovation to me.
Here is another link to the Microsoft campus
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
use other's money to play with toys, and get paid! what a job...
Such as security and stability? That would sure be nice.
Thank you for the useful link to this page detailing Microsoft's operating systems. Without your help I would be left wondering: "What operating systems does this Microsoft company make? Do they make the Lunix?"
Again, thank you.
Just to stay on-topic, the meeting robot reminds me of an anecdote by Richard Feynman I believe, where he was talking to a Danish princess after winning the Nobel Prize. Noticing all the people shaking hands at the event, he mused about a "hand-shaking robot" to save time and hand fatigue. He then further postulated that if one person had a hand-shaking robot, all the other hand-shakers would want one too, so at ceremonies such as the Nobel Prize Awarding, one dignitary would send his robot to go shake all the other robot hands waiting in a line.
I'm visualizing 10 robots sitting at a conference table, while the whole board of directors is sitting at home, naked, drinking their morning coffee, etc.
"Robie the Robot" appears to be nothing more than an Evolution ER1 Robotics kit, which Evolution Robotics has been selling for quite a while now. It is a robotics kit that allows you to take an existing laptop and hook it up to some motors and a webcam and control through some command line API's or a nice GUI Evolution has built.
The American Sign Language translation glove was actually introduced at the 2002 Intel Science Talent Search competition by Ryan Patterson of Grand Junction, CO. Patterson's glove uses custom designed electronics to detect hand and finger movements and translate those movements from ASL into their English forms, letters and punctuation.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not bashing Microsoft or saying that they are ripping off other people's ideas, but if they are trying to bill these items as new research developed at MS R&D labs that's wrong. If they are merely taking these ideas and refining them for future use in the consumer/professional world, then I'm sure that these concepts will benefit from having Microsoft's resources. I'm merely trying to point out that these ideas aren't new in any way, and they have already been conceived and engineered by others, who should recieve all due credit.
But I'm blind, you insensitive clod!
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
As pointed out in this post, Microsoft Research's work is primarly designed to maintain oligopolies.
You know how much new tech from Microsoft Research has reached and benefited consumers? Damn little.
I'm remember the Truetype fiasco...
May we never see th
Working with Symantec, Microsoft is creating a new virus development platform.
It's believed that .VIRUS will surpass Outlook as a virus delivery mechanism.
I'd like to see a digital camera with the ability to translate text in foreign languages into English (or your local language). For example, if I'm vacationing in Moscow and can't understand the metro map because it's in Russian, I could snap a picture with my digital camera, ask it to translate it, and bam... it runs an OCR on the image, translates the text into English, and replaces the Russian words with English words so I can zoom in and scroll around. Instant sign translation! Great for menus in foreign restaurants, signs, hotel bills, etc.
With PARC being a shell of its former self, and other corporate R&D facilites either closed or radically cut back, who else out there is really playing with technologies and trying out new ideas?
While many of the ideas and products mentioned in the article seem silly or useless, its this kind of thinking that leads to inovative products down the road.
Apart from the university setting, who else is out there?
Microsoft Reasearch saves the day!
Ahem, with all due respect, this one is a bit long in the tooth by now. In ages long ago, these thingys were used in Middle Earth. Known as "Palantir", ya know...
Geesh, not only do these folks not read books, they don't even go to the movies anymore either!
A robot running a Microsoft OS? Is that safe?
Diz r0bot iz 0wn3d.
two-way audio and video technology
Runs around the board meeting or the expo shouting obscentities or just emitting a high pitched tone. Maybe if its got one of those r2d2 electro zappers on it...
a self-charging robot...
Oh wait, it does.
working to replace the remote controls lying around the home with one device
You mean like, a, universal remote?
It's Slashdot. No one reads the articles.
"...The inventions of the future include a robot that could attend conferences in your behalf and allow you to communicate via video and audio applications..."
Didn't they have prior art on this in "Real Genius" with the taperecording of the taperecorded lecturer?
Besides, why would you send a physical robot to a physical meeting when you can use software to emulate a meeting? This approach reminds me of the way technology was implemented in "Brazil".
Yes, I do have too many movies. 169 laserdiscs and counting...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Do monopolies innovate ? Not usually. Only companies that fear losing market share innovate .
Wow! Nobody's ever done that that before!
And here I thought that Microsoft Research was a black hole where great minds go to never be heard from again.
I do hate that they are taking credit for Ryan's work, though. But why is this any different than anything else that they do?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
"Welcome to Bobworld! Please don't reboot problematic rides. An assistent will hel&^&#sjgwq#..*"
Table-ized A.I.
Some of the more unusual projects were developed by students Microsoft invited to participate in the research fair. Students from the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands presented the idea of parents keeping in touch with grown children through special bowls with digital cameras in them.
A child could come home and put his keys in the bowl, which would take a picture of the keys and send the image to the parents' bowl. Parents could look into their bowls and feel comforted that their child is home safe.
Why not a motion activated web cam to tak stills of your child actually entering the house? Sometimes I think people look to hard for solutions they skip the most obvious ones.
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
Its only Microsoft style innovation we're talking here (in future referred to as Microvation).
The way you do things is take an existing product or range of products, copy 'em, brand 'em and market 'em to hell.
e.g.
Take NEC's personal robot and call it a Robie.
Take the common idea of controlling another device with a PDA and make it sound like a pocket PC microvation
And of course, you really need an advanced research division to come up with a "a program that acted like a magnifying glass for Web sites"
I was going to have a dig at the "The system uses compression technology to turn photos into data and encryption techniques to make forgery nearly impossible"...but hey - its just waaaaaaaay to easy.
Bottom line. Nothing new to see here.
-Sould
Some of the more unusual projects were developed by students Microsoft invited to participate in the research fair. Students from the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands presented the idea of parents keeping in touch with grown children through special bowls with digital cameras in them.
A child could come home and put his keys in the bowl, which would take a picture of the keys and send the image to the parents' bowl. Parents could look into their bowls and feel comforted that their child is home safe.
(Emphasis added)
I think the title says it all. I mean, BOWLS? Who the hell is on crack at MS (besides the MS Software Security and Ethics divisions, if they even exist)? Excuse me, but why would looking at a picture of keys make a parent feel more comfortable? Me, I'd prefer see the actual child. This is one invention destined to fail.
It seems to me that there would be nothing more useless than a robot attending a conference. Why rent a conference room and fly in a speaker of the audience is going to be inanimate? I think the hotel and covention lobby will make quite sure that such a machine never exists.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Researcher Darko Kirovski is developing a low-cost way for motor-vehicle departments and companies to create identification cards on paper. The system uses compression technology to turn photos into data and encryption techniques to make forgery nearly impossible, Kirovski said.
Someone could receive a driver's license by e-mail and print it out at home, Kirovski said.
While you could add a digital signature so you would know I modified the data, short of equipping every police officer, bouncer, etc with digital readers to validate the signature - every high/college school student in the country would instantly become legal drinking age as they alter the human readable data printed on the license. It looks like someone isn't thinking this through completely.
But maybe that's the plan. After all they need to sell something new...
I perfer linux over windows but that does not stop me from giving microsoft a chance. All posts have been anti microsoft. Did I see anything interesting in the posts? No. I only saw rantings against microsoft. I find the sign language glove very interesting. I also believe that the confrencing robot would be usefull and save traveling time and fuel. I am not a microsoft zealot, but I don't take any chance that I can to put it down.
That Microsoft Research is just MS trying to buy up the intelligent, the up-and-coming, the potentially dangerous to microsoft and tie them up in busywork projects that go nowhere so they aren't getting plucked up by other companies, who set them up to develop the Next Big Thing?
It really seems to me that MS has a vested interest in research going nowhere, or at least happening under its watchful eye. They tend to not want shake-ups. And from looking at this, none are coming from MS research. I mean, a robot that attends conferences for you? A universal remote? A gadget that previously existed as a plot device in "Congo"? WTF? Where are the real enhancements, the kinds of things, like Opendoc, that used to come out of Apple Research before they got gutted?
I mean, I've seen MS research toss money at some cool people. A number of the Haskell guys are getting money from MS research. But even in those cases they aren't getting any room or money to do anything. They get to put out papers and have fun in academia-world but in the end all MS Resarch's support has done is remove the requirement that their work eventually further some real useful goal in the real world-- which, it isn't, MS really hasn't done anything to make (for example) Haskell any easier to tie to their APIs than any other OS vendor. I can't help but feel even in those cases where they happened to hit someone cool, MS Research's goal is just to keep these minds in a situation where they're doing harmless things...
A program called Fabric would allow a user to drag windows to the side of the computer screen, where they would turn into small icons.
Wow! What a fantastic innovation! I've never seen anything like it!
WTF does "a magnifying glass for webpages" mean?
I'm not sure why Microsoft Research can't produce anything meaningful. Its clearly not starved for funding.
(This comment has been stripped of it's MS-bashing nature, because really, if you don't like them you don't need me to explicitly point out that they're reinventing the wheel, and if you do like them you'll ignore it anyways...)
Yeah, it was probably immortalized by that trolling site known as adequacy.org
Don't know if you've noticed, but in the last ten years after the web browser was introduced and the JVM became common, there really hasn't been any innovation. Just, "hey! Let's take an existing concept and slap internet in it!"
This will probably continue for awhile. Microsoft has no reason to 'innovate', and the two most likely sources for innovation, Apple and the "open source" community, are kind of absorbed right now in just trying to make their own current products not suck.
At one point in the article states that the researchers spend time thinking about how to make "money for Microsoft in the future". No they don't. I worked there for a couple of years and making money is not a priority for Microsoft research. Its pretty obvious when you look at the list of ridiculous stuff they talk about in the article; most of this stuff is completely disconnected from reality.
All the bad stuff you hear about Microsoft research being a black hole from which people are never heard from again is true: the researcher get paid very well and are (imho) motivated by the structure of the organization to never actually do anything worthwhile. Fat and happy doesnt innovate. MS research is a "prestige" organization only. It was designed to make a certain group of people a lot of money and it did its job, but that group of people are not the stockholders.
MS stability isn't all that far from Linux stability. I'd pretty safe-feeling with both the NT kernel and the Linux kernel. GNOME software and Explorer -- *application software* both have instabilities.
Granted, so much crap is tied into Explorer that Explorer dying is generally worse than the GNOME panel crashing, but if you compare each chunk to its Linux equivalent, it's not *that* far away.
If MS hadn't made a couple of totally stupid moves, tying functionality into Explorer instead of doing it the right way, in the kernel, Explorer crashing away wouldn't be such a big deal (Explorer simulates symlinks, Explorer works around stupid MS file-locking semantics in XP, Explorer provides the high-level widgets for many other applications...)
May we never see th
Can it pretend to listen while actually sleeping?
New year Resolution: Don't change sig this year
Microsoft, thou art truly stupid. Robie is the name of a crappy old robot made by Tandy. Or at least sold by them. It was a moderately fun little toy, though. His big brother, Robie Sr., is a little more powerful; rather than being basically a fancy radio controlled car with move forward and turn in reverse control, you can actually program moves into him, and he's got half a walkie talkie built into him/the controller so you can speak through him.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Microsoft, like most successful companies in the United States, is primarily a marketing institution, not a technical one.
May we never see th
Up here at CMU, it's just where you go when you're tired of producing serious work and want to lie back with an easy salary.
May we never see th
They turn photos into data?!? How the hell did they manage that? Sheer genius! Thank the gods that we have MS around to keep the world in amazingly inventive, original products.
However their incredibly innovative (sorry, Microvative) robot, Robie, seems strangely familiar!
You know they call 'em fingers but I've never seen 'em fing. Oh, there they go.
Honestly, I think we'd all love to forget about the MSN iLoo.
Any secrets you want to share? ;)
A great solution to that is digital ink. E-Ink makes exactly this kind of technology that fits your needs.
Power is only used when parts of the on-screen image is changed. If you're just staring at the screen, lost in thought (for, let's say, a few hours), no battery power is used for the screen itself. Throw in a CPU that puts itself to sleep unless there is activity and you could easily come up with a PDA that is small, light, easily readable in any condition in which you could read a book, and has a *long* battery life.
Unfortunately, E-Ink still seems to be in the beginning stages of working with other manufacturers and OEM's, so you can't exactly buy a 4"x3" screen at your local Fry's to tinker with.
If I send a robot to attend a .NET conference, can I get it to cuss out the speaker whenever they mention Bill Gates while maintaining anonymity, or will it require passport to run?
Will Palladium keep it from booting up at Linux/Java conferences, where it will naturally use GPL? What if it hears a watermarked song that the RIAA keeps in its crotch?
automatically update your computer without even being asked. oh wait, too late.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
...a robot that could attend conferences in your behalf and allow you to communicate via video and audio applications...
I call this a memebite. Oversimplified to the point of absurdity, and then poorly translated by someone in a hurry. It takes all of 2ms to realize that employing a robot to attend a conference is a deeply absurd idea. Microsoft's products do not reflect the epitome of quality one would wish, but don't allow that fact to cause you to think the people working there are really *that* stupid.
Obviously, Microsoft has some sort of tele-presence research going on. The possible applications for tele-presence are many, and hardly absurd. That this got translated into "attending conferences" is the fault of some boothtending microsurf (probably a sexy female, by coincidence) that has spent a little too much time in "business" class flying between "conferences."
If you haven't actually posted some bit on just how stupid this idea actually is, you almost did. Since I have, I'll have a little fun with it;
This robot is going to take the seat on your flights, or just go as baggage?
What happens after hours in a multi-day conference? Imagine a storage room with a dozen remotely operated robots kicking around...
At what point do the presenters decide that in-person attendance is overkill and we find a room of 200+ people (or other bots...) waiting patiently for the bot to adjust the mic properly?
Will conference promoters all have lobotomies and forget that allowing someone to retransmit their product to "who knows where" is probably not going to contribute much revenue?
Will Larry Ellison's "conference bot" be 8' tall and gold plated?
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
...and Clippy replaces the entire Windows User Interface.
Really, I'm not trying to be clever with my signature.
Billions of dollars for this? yup.. more innovation by Billy (the maker of "Bob" and "clippy"). Of course windows wasn't a unique idea (ask mac and xerox), nor was word (ask word perfect), nor was excel (ask lotus 1-2-3)...etc.. maybe someday Microsoft will come up with something worthwhile? Naaa...
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= - The Celtic - =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
There's some hard problems in there, such as maps make use of multiple font sizes, often have text that turns along with the roadways, almost always have abbreviated text, and quite regularly use different colors for text depending on what it's describing. To say nothing of all the non-textual information that the OCR would somehow have to recognize as non-textual.
And that's just one map. Another map of the same area might use entirely different fonts, sizes, colors, etc.
Menus aren't a whole lot easier, since the number of font styles that are used by various independant restaurants is huge.
Keen idea, but there are some hard problems in there.
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
Not shown, the version for the disgruntled employee...
...not doing its own research? "Oh. That's just typical Microsoft, yanno. They stand there in abush position and wait. Then when someone actually innovates something, if it cannot be efficiently stolen, Microsoft will buy it."
Come to think of it, I suppose it is more frightening now that Microsoft might actually be inventing something. Do you suppose? Whatever Microsoft comes up with on its own Microsoft can, well, EMBRACE AND EXTEND! Ack! For now I am tempted to drift off to sleep with comfortable thoughts like the August 1995 billboard outside the local yokel Mac vendor: "Windows 95 is Mac '89!"
no, companies scared of loosing market share claim an open source OS stole their code and start suing.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
There's an awful lot of bashing going on here about the quality of the research. Certainly it isn't all great (and some of it is probably re-hashed), but you've got to remember that this is being reported by the Seattle Times, not a research journal. The reporter is not necessarily going to report the research contribution of a particular project... They're going to report what their readers will understand. In my experience, these things are rarely the same.
. A program called Fabric would allow a user to drag windows to the side of the computer screen, where they would turn into small icons.
My god, this will revolutionize the world we live in!
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
You know, I'm sick and tired of everyone on slashdot always jumping on the bandwagon and insulting Microsoft! Just kidding. What a bunch of useless shit.
My Blog
A keynote one year at ALS, 98 I think, was done by someone from ATT's research group. He showed off a RC car they had modified with cameras, speakers, and a mike. The car was controlled via the wireless network. They used them to attend meetings remotely. I guess the biggest problem is the elevators, they had to hang around till someone came by to push the button.
I guess they put together a plane as well, but management didn't like that one too much.
Well since the article didn't mention anything that sounded like more than a science fair project I went directly to research.microsoft.com. What I found there didn't look much different than it did 2 years ago. In particular I looked at the "Social Computing Group" because I had paid particular attention to that on my last visit. Last thing they published was in 2002, last thing before that was 2001, followed by a series of things in 2000, 1999, back to 1995.
/scripts/people/gogroup.asp, line 14
It looks like there are about half as many people as before, however they had individual web pages before, and most of them looked pretty much abandoned, now there are no personal web pages.
They talk about work they did in the distant past using Comic Chat and V-Chat as well as something called Hutchworld, but all of this was there and past-tense when I checked it more than a year ago.
So in this area of 3D Virtual reality interactions they are basically doing nothing. Their research department is for-show-only. If they are doing any fundamental scientific research, or even true research in algorithm theory I'd like to hear about it.
I don't personally care whether they do research or not, but I hate when they are compared with other companies that actually DO research as though they are in the same category. I'd put them in the same category as Radio Shack maybe.
At least they are using their own products these days, click around the site too much and you get things like this:
Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80004005'
[Microsoft][ODBC Driver Manager] Data source name not found and no default driver specified
Attention Gort
please attend conference in Redmond..stop
Use any means necessary to stop software piracy by major software firm and individuals...stop
Clatu
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
This is a pointless post, but I found this funny:
"A campus map is available for those of you who wish to visit. Guided tours are irrelevant. Parking is futile. You will be assimilated."
Remminds me of my time at the University of Texas...
Especially the thing that transmits signs into plain english. I wonder what else they might have in store. Is it the first time MS does such a thing?
From DSTC is the Voyager robot, powered by a GPL'd Java API. </PLUG>
Maybe it might be useful with a web based interface so a parent could keep in touch with a 12 year old from work, but projecting to another bowl in another home suggests seperate resedences and therefore an independant person on the child end
I'm 19 now (you may have guessed I was less than 20 because of my teen movie quote sig) and am considered an adult in my native Australia, but a child in some other countries, I left home a few months ago and presumably I would be included in the group "grown up children" but my parents really don't want to know what I am doing, and I don't really want them to know either, they figure that I have to grow up and have an independant life some time. My parents know I read slashdot, so they know that I am not having large amounts of promiscuous, unprotected sex.
I guess in the netherlands one can legally get up to more things than I can, and most dutch people I have met have a stronger notion of family than we have in Australia, but generally, if a person is old enough to have their own bowl to put there own keys to their own house, apartment or collage room and be sufficiently far enough from their parents bowl to justify internet based comunication, the parents don't need to keep an eye on them.
And if I had one I would make a point to use it to store empty condom wrappers, syringes and cigarette boxes (and therefore proving my immaturity in a confusing paradoxial way).
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
Douglas Adams did a lot of evangelising for Apple. I should think an elevator that asks "Where do you you want to go today?" probably infringes on Adams' copyright. Apple should sue MS on his behalf. Besides, iElevator 1.0 will look cooler, use less power, and it will actually work from day one instead of crashing through the basement every time someone prsses the wrong button on the cellphone.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Now, for real fun, get a list of elevator numbers in your financial district and have your computer dial those numbers. The challenge to you and every other hacker in the city is to get all of the elevators in the basement at the same time. You get extra points for every CEO who misses a meeting because he is stuck in the cabin next to the heating room...
Oh, to be young again...
Suddenly, ten flights of stairs doesn't seem so bad. ;-)
How do you restart it (explorer) from the task manager?
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
In my experience, XP becomes unstable in at least two situations: you are running Office XP or you use a ADSL/cable-modem. :-(
At our office Office XP crashes a lot and yes, it is restarted automatically but it still sucks. Of course this isn't a Windows thing but often Windows XP crashes too if Outlook goes down.
Moreover, i've had a lot of trouble with Windows XP and a cable-modem. Both me and a friend had a Windows XP that refused to connect to the internet or timed out 90% of the connections. Installing W2000, W98 or Linux solved the problem immediately. Very strange..
So you might have guessed, I don't like XP. And most of my colleagues hate it too..
Linux turned out to be much more stable (but sometimes slow) in my case.
History matters..
This just shows that ideas are so much more important than money.
You just can't buy innovation.
Sign Language -> English : Done in the late 80s early 90s, hell I knew someone who did it as his 3rd Year project in the early 90s. Also there are PDA based products that do this for road signs et al. Like this which isn't as complex as sign-language but is indicative of how pre-commercialised this space already is.
Communicate via audio and video Hell they mean its like having a moving monitor and microphone.... or of course a better approach would be to have each room containing monitors and videos rather than having 00s of robots walking around, that way you can move from room to room much quicker and you don't suffer from multiple people trying to speak at once.
And best of the bunch
Emailable identification documents Bloody hell X500 certs and PGP in a shiny new wrapper.
Microsoft's "innovation" continues to be 10 years behind the rest of the world.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
One thing that jumped out at me was the 'sign-language glove'. A nearly identical invention won an Intel scholarship award more than a year ago. see:
r .h tm
t s/ photos_20020311_winners.htm
http://www.intel.com/education/sts/2002stswinne
http://www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/education/s
I am curious as to whether Microsoft acknowleges the 'prior art' in this invention.
What? What is next, a robot that can eat ice cream in my place, and a robot that can have sex in my place?
Geesh. Did they have any useful 'inventions' at all?
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
Pastry, another one of their research projects
My server
- Fingerspelling is not sign language
- Sign language translation is really complicated (think of all the problems with machine translation, compounded by a language that's very different from well-known Western European spoken languages, and that no one writes)
- Have you ever tried asking a real live Deaf person what kind of technology they could actually use?
For more info, see some of my papers.ok, so maybe the robot is pretty cool - but the rest...
...has been working to replace the remote controls lying around the home with one device, such as a cellphone or a personal digital assistant. Eventually, he said, appliances could be equipped with technology to receive the commands.
...is working on a glove that could translate sign language into digitized letters...
your mean the philips pronto and X10?
you mean this?
Those included a rebuilt task bar that could sort onscreen files, and a program that acted like a magnifying glass for Web sites. A program called Fabric would allow a user to drag windows to the side of the computer screen, where they would turn into small icons.
what? an onscreen magnifying glass?
and dockable applications? er OSX?
Next thing you know they'll be designing beer mugs that tell you when they're empty.
Which rock has he been living under? Combined remotes have been around for, what, 10 years or so, and remote control software is readily available for PDAs with IR ports.
...And think "Wow, they've invented a Segway for notebook computers!"
"Microsoft Research" is the industry term more commonly known as the "Purchasing Department".
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
When I was at Uni in the early 90s one of my fellow 3rd Year students did sign-language recognition using a VR glove, this included basics like the language and more complex elements like "Bacon" "Sea" and a few others.
Shows how little people invest in accesibility if 10 years on this is still considered "new".
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
MS Research is a label for a bunch of funded groups by Microsoft. They are not necessarily anything useful, just scientific groups desiging ideas of stuff that may be useful in other forms.
MS Research is basically just a network of think tanks.
That's what we have speaker phones for! I would totally laugh my ass off if Bob's robot showed up to a meeting without instead of Bob. And who's going to sit around a table talking to Bob's robot like it's really Bob sitting there?
On second thought, I could use one of these, just program it to say "Sure, that will take 3 weeks" every five min or so. Then I could totally skip out on all of my meetings.
T
Duct tape a RFID tags to the little punks before they leave the house. Set up a read in the door jam and you'll be able to cout the times they enter and exit. Heck, have them surgically implanted. You have total informational awareness!
SD
âoeWho knew something as harmless as willful ignorance could end up having real consequences?â
...Microsoft researchers have been publishing a great deal of material in the programming languages/compilers field.
Microsoft has had quite a few PLDI papers; I think they won the best paper award in 2001, so they are at least contributing to compiler research.
There's also a POPL paper here and there.
Of course, with all those big names there, they should be doing something like the Manhattan Project for CS.
Maybe they are?
"I'm an old-fashioned type of guy. I worship the Sun and Moon as gods. And fear them."
Couldn't refuse the request. :)
Oooo, sounds more prestigious. Better than mere Sign Language. THE Sign Language. Like how Ohio State University is insisting that people call it "The Ohio State University". I like it. Makes anything lowbrow sound pretentious. English->"The English". "The NASCAR". "The Cockfighting". "The Beer Brawl". "The Slashdot".
Signed,
The Anonymous Coward
The robotic camera they are using on the laptop robot is a smilecam from sintec from Korea. We are using the same camera in a php camera server app you can demo here
user/pass=guest/guest if someone is already logged in make a new user, email address not required but it asks, so that if you forget your pass it can email it to you..
It's called the "rooting reflex." ...
It's not so much intutive as instinct.
There's gotta be some way to make a pun about root users and nipples, but I may be in over my head.
...include a robot that could attend conferences in your behalf...
My goodness, what ever happened to Netmeeting? With the robots you still need to book a place for it in a large conference room, maybe even a special hotel - you know, for recharging.
Wouldn't it be more efficient and cost effective to have a nice camera/mike setup, and a computer with a decent 'net connection?
Imagine the savings in shipping costs for the robot - or would that be savings on the first class plane ticket (you might need an electric outlet to keep your builtin GBA running).
I use 2k at work and every time explorer crashes (which is at least once or twice a month, usually more) it hangs on a site and then pops up a pretty-looking dialog box about an error occurring and offers to send the log file to Microsoft (as if it doesn't just go straight to the big Recycle Bin in Redmond). Then it quits and I lose all my explorer windows. If that's not a big deal for you, then fine. I think it sucks.
Without your help I would be left wondering: "What operating systems does this Microsoft company make? Do they make the Lunix?"
Wha!?! The creater of my favorite Basic interpreter has moved into the buisness of operating systems?!? Or is this "microsoft" different than the Micro-Soft we all know and love. Maybe they would be interested in creating a new Operating system to work my company's responce to the Apple II. If only there was a way to license it from them without getting exclusive rights. But How? Maybe if I invented a death clock of some sort.....
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
That sounds like a very realistic scenario.
What is the plan for preventing this "Denial of Service" attack?
Typical Microsoft. The functionality goes in before the security is considered.
- a robot that could attend conferences in your behalf and allow you to communicate via video and audio applications - Asimo with a video camera.
- a software package that translates the sign language into readable English - A U-Force with a modified OCS.
- e-mailable identification documents - PGP signatures.
- some enhancements to Microsoft's operating systems - which usually either amounts to further cadging of features in other OSs or further restrictions on what you are allowed to do with your computer
$40 billion and this is the best they can do?Do not touch -Willie
What happens when you've got 50 people waiting in the lobby, four elevators to service them all, they're all going to a different floor and hear a *ding?* Who's elevator is it? Do people want to have to stop and look to see if the elevator door that just opened is going to their floor? Or do they just want to get in and start going up? You're right. It's an interesting idea, but not without some 'human nature' flaws that need to be ironed out first.
This Anonymous Coward makes a good point. Deaf people can use keyboards much easier than these fingerspelling recognizers. The only value in fingerspelling recognition is that it shows promise for the handshape component of a full sign recognition system.
Now we just have to figure out what the point of a sign recognition system is...
If you're going to be in attendance over a videocamera + sound anyway, why not do it in a virtual-reality kind of interface, where the "meeting" takes place on an LCD monitor, with each "virtual" attendee represented by their avatar.
Didn't they do this same thing in "Demolition Man", where the entire meeting was attended by a bunch of people on tall LCD monitors on popsicle stick chairs?
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
... for Bell Labs. Ok, it's still around, but it has an it's-days-are-numbered look to it ever since AT&T spun off Lucent.
:(
Not to mention the other AT&T research facilities that have been closing... (like the one that was making the CORBA omniorb)
why did you bring that up. VMs were old hat by then.
-pyrrho
1. Find a good idea.
2. Copy it (but call this part "Microsoft Research")
3. ???
4. Profit!
The next MS "feature" will be a way to pay the RIAA everytime they sue you ... or anyone with the same XP hardware hash numbers --- oooops
This story made me visualize the Danish Princess naked. Silly me.
Current software packages apparently translate sign language into illegible English, thereby making them useful only in doctors' offices
Certainly some of these things they really do believe they invented, but it isn't because they're a big pack of liars. It's because the whole Not Invented Here attitude is endemic to the MS culture. If it doesn't come from them, it doesn't exist (or is inferior) as far as they are concerned. There is a hell of a lot of duplicated effort going on at the Redmond campus.
MS employees are often arrogant to the point of obnoxiousness about their company and software. I am almost convinced that it's a contract clause that they cannot say anything bad about their employer or products. Criticism simply isn't allowed it seems, unless it's of another company or product.
Contract employees tend to be a little more liberal though. Some of them have pretty good stories about their employer and don't always subscribe to the MS Knows Best mentality. Buy one of them a beer sometime. :)
Canada (ryerson ?uni) has a project like this for school children who're sick. Includes a hand that can be raised remotely to speak.
Cool thing? You can make it so that unruly kids can't hit each other, or speak without permission. Nor, if they don't previously know each other (if you do find a different way to ascertain identity, it would be easy to irc/aim notes behind teacher's back) pass notes.
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
I can see it now. A robot that will automatically download updates to itself nightly. It'll be managing my conference call for me and suddenly the phone will go dead with an operating telling me "General Protection Fault. A fatal exception has occured in module robot.dll. You're fucked."
Wonder if it'll have gaping holes in its structure to signify the gapin holes in its underlying OS.
"It compiles, SHIP IT!" -Overheard at Microsoft's development lab
Sofware Engineers know nothing about hardware design. They are dangerous with hardware.
Microsoft would fail in robotics, mechanical, electrical design or research. They are a software company only.
Software folks are failures at hardware design.
I can't believe it came from a dept called "Advanced Research!" But then again its from Microsoft.
why not just do video streaming of the conference? If every body sends a robot to the conference whats the point? No advantage over streaming video! If theres going to be a human being in the conference, I'm sure he'll be a happy user stealing away a truck load of robots, etc.
C'mon, this is not the type of ideas I expect from a "Advanced Research" group.
Sofware Engineers know nothing about hardware design. They are dangerous with hardware. Microsoft would fail in robotics, mechanical, electrical design or research. They are a software company only. Software folks are failures at hardware design.
A previous reply had a link to a page with a glove form Mattel - from reading the page, it looks like the glove has some technical difficulties, and that it recognizes a limited set of commands, nothing as wide as what you would need for ASL.
For the record, my sister-in-law and her brother are deaf - I'd like to think I know a bit about how signing works from the experiences I've had with them:)
Quack!Quack!.....QUACK!!
if you notice on towards the end of the video they show that OneNote can copy of HTML but actually appears that they did not copy the HTML but simply dragged over the graphic (JPEG or HTML) yet they go on and on about how OneNote does HTML
Sorry, that wasn't clear. I agreed with your earlier post, and was just adding my own $.02. It's the gee-whiz clueless developers at Microsoft and the judges at the Siemens science fair that I have a beef with.
Thank you for your public agreement. Its appreciated:)
Thanks,
EnlightenedDuck
p.s. Posting as AC so as few other people will be bothered by this as possible - couldn't e-mail it directly to you, so I figured I'd abuse slashdot some more:)
That's the heading of the first item on the Windows website when clicking the last Hyperlink of the original message:
Action: Read Security Bulletin MS03-026 and Install the Security Patch Immediately
Microsoft urges users of Microsoft Windows NT(R) 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server(TM) 2003 to install this critical security patch immediately.
It's taken me years, YEARS, to escape the torment that was Sim Tower and just when I was coming around to making a full recovery, you had to drudge up the past!
...FINE! IT WAS THE ELEVATORS! ARE YOU HAPPY?!
...and I'll thank you not to ask why I had such a torrid past with Sim Tower.
Seriously, though, I never though about communication back to the phone. That's not a bad idea!
been there, done that (warning: big jpg). We had a pioneer p2at for outdoor mobility, eye-level conferencing screen, 802.11b teleconferencing (admittedly, we usually ran netmeeting), about 2 years ago. Berkeley had stuff before that. HP labs has done some actually interesting stuff in this area.
I'm really hoping that ms reasearch does have some cool stuff and that this is just a testament to the power of stupid PR drones.