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Microsoft Research Projects Showcased

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the fun-stuff-to-see dept.

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."

12 of 294 comments (clear)

  1. Microsoft Research or Ripoff? by webguru4god · · Score: 5, Informative
    Two of the ideas that Microsoft presented at this expo, both of which are mentioned in the Seattle Times article, are ideas or inventions that have already been invented by other people!

    "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.

    1. Re:Microsoft Research or Ripoff? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      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. Of course, sign language translation goes back a lot further than 2002, as early as 1995 there were working examples of this, as evidenced by the paper here

  2. Re:Wow! I Am So Shocked! by josh+crawley · · Score: 3, Informative

    You've been able to do that ever since Win NT4, maybe even 3.51. Here ya go. Another great innovation, only from Microsoft.

  3. Amazing innovation! by LauraW · · Score: 5, Informative
    Some Microsoft researchers showed off technologies they hope to include in the next version of Windows, code-named Longhorn. 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.

    Wow! Nobody's ever done that that before!

  4. Re:How to make money in the future? not! by 0x0d0a · · Score: 3, Informative

    Not making the stockholders money?

    No, that's not true. It's an investment in a patent portfolio, which is an enormously powerful weapon for an established company.

    I do know a couple people from CMU that did work at MS Research, and it's considered sort of where you go when either you're done doing serious work and want to dick around and draw pay. Lots of old CMU profs headed on up there after they've established themselves.

    --
    May we never see th
  5. Re:end of convention as we know it? by Jade+E.+2 · · Score: 2, Informative
    Was it in Back to School where, during the movie they had a progrsion of students leaving tape recorders in their seat instead of attending of class, and by then end even the proffesor was replaced by a tape recorder?

    Actually, I believe that was from Real Genius...

  6. Re:Remember when everybody bashed Microsoft for... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    You know, Microsoft Research has been around for years, yet they have had very few projects developed into actual Microsoft products. It says something that the most famous product from Microsoft Research is Clippy. I kind of doubt these latest gadgets will do any better.

  7. Re:Digital camera feature I'm waiting for by timeOday · · Score: 2, Informative

    This isn't far off. Not quite, but it might work for some of your applications. (As for understanding maps, aren't most of the words proper nouns?)

  8. Re:MS stability not that far from Linux stability by tgv · · Score: 2, Informative

    I work quite heavily with Linux machines and they only crashed in case of hardware errors. Some machines even continued their server tasks with a totally broken hard disk.

    On the other hand, when I toyed around with Excel and some Visual Basic script under XP the other day, the bl**dy thing refused to shut down properly. Had to kill the "explorer" before it would stop. And don't get me started on NT, or Word for that matter...

    Then again, XP is a whole lot friendlier than any Linux distro I've ever seen, and that probably means more to most people than total stability.

  9. Re:MS style innovation.... by Chatterton · · Score: 2, Informative

    Elevators in big building have this kind of 'intelligence'. They know the pattern of the employes movment at certain time in the day and prepare a bunch of elevators at some strategic point before anyyone have asked for them. They are driven by Fuzzy logic IA in the basement.

  10. Prior Art? by kinaole · · Score: 1, Informative

    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:

    http://www.intel.com/education/sts/2002stswinner .h tm

    http://www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/education/st s/ photos_20020311_winners.htm

    I am curious as to whether Microsoft acknowleges the 'prior art' in this invention.

  11. Enough with the damn fingerspelling recognizers! by grvsmth · · Score: 2, Informative
    As a hearing person who actually took the time to understand something about sign languages, I'm getting really sick of these ignorant techies and their stupid gloves. Get a clue people!
    • 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.