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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.
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.
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.
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
You've been able to do that ever since Win NT4, maybe even 3.51. Here ya go. Another great innovation, only from Microsoft.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
(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...)
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
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.
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
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!
Too paranoid. That'd be way too expensive.
MS just wants lots and lots of patents that they can use to club other companies to death if they have to.
May we never see th
...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!"
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.
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!
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...
- 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.Next thing you know they'll be designing beer mugs that tell you when they're empty.
"Microsoft Research" is the industry term more commonly known as the "Purchasing Department".
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
- 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.
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