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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."
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.
Also, imagine the possiblities if you could teach in your own signs, as a method of interacting with the program of your choice.....
Quack!Quack!.....QUACK!!
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...
(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...)
But what about clippy! that's a big innovation! it's so hard to think of keywords like "margins" and search for them, I like to type in "how do I change the margins?" instead. It's so much quicker!
Clippy is definitely not for geeks. However, there is a large segment population that wouldn't know what the help menu was if it bit their ass, and who also don't look at things in terms of "input keyword - get results". They think in terms of "ask a question, get an answer." Also, bear in mind that clippy was a combination of two pieces; online help with "natural language" search, as well as a bayesian reasoning piece (the whole "It looks like you're writing a letter..." bit). The suggestion piece also doesn't go very far with geeks, since they generally know (or think they know) what they're doing, whereas that other segment of the population welcomes the help in many cases.
Also, bear in mind that as annoying as Clippy and the pop-up bits are, there are still some people who just can't grasp the concept of "asking Clippy" before they go elsewhere. I'd imagine because it still isn't "personable" enough to engage these novice users in the same way a helpful person would.
There's something about the paradigm of text on a screen, and the psychological experience of using a computer that just hasn't been understood yet in interface design. It's something more than a tool-using experience, but less than a "person to person" experience. Hence, the whole argument about "the only intuitive interface is the nipple".
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
Apart from the university setting, who else is out there?
Not many others. IBM Research is still going strong, but it's generally more focused on shorter term research goals than PARC/Bell Labs. But that's probably why it hasn't gone the way of PARC & Bell Labs...
Umm, you pre-order the elevator already, when you press the button in the waiting area. The only problem is that you're only telling the micro-processor that controls it "up or down". If I'm on the 5th, and going to the 10th, and there's an elevator on the 4th floor which already has 5 people in it who are going to the 10th, and 2 others for the 15th, it would make sense for that elevator to stop, rather than another elevator at the 4th which has 3 people destined for the 11th and 12th. Right now your average elevator just says "people who want to go up should get on elevators that are already going up, and vice versa". Now, we could have the same capability by just having the floor number buttons in the elevator waiting atrium, but the cell-phone capability has two potentials:
...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!"
Check out the SLAM toolkit. It is far from complete and others are doing related work, but still MS is clearly researching some very interesting ideas here.
Basically (and a bit oversimplified) what they try to do is create software that can reasonably well check if a given device driver could ever deadlock. If you can tell that before even compiling the driver, I'd say thats pretty innovative (;