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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."
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.
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.
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.
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?
It's Slashdot. No one reads the articles.
Wow! Nobody's ever done that that before!
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
(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
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.
...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!
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
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...