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Roundup of Microsoft Research At TechFest 2009
An anonymous reader writes "Ars Technica has a very thorough post of some of the technologies that Microsoft researchers showed off at TechFest last week. 'The exact number of projects that were demonstrated at TechFest 2009 is not clear, but here's a quick rundown of about 35 research projects that haven't received much coverage, accompanied by links that will let you further explore if your interest is piqued. Remember that these are concepts and prototypes, not finished products, and they may never end up becoming anything significant.'" While Microsoft has been criticized for squandering a fortune on R&D, there can be no doubt that they are showing off some cool tech here.
Some might say that some of what they do is a waste, but there aren't many companies that are able to do such large scale R&D. Yeah its microsoft, but of late it seems they are trying to release sound technology and I for one am all for them being able to continue to do so even in turbulent economic times.
The musings of just another geek and his junk.
Yeah, but can they make something as cool as Windows Mojave?
I don't see bug fixes in that list.
Most of the stuff on
... that some of this research actually helps Microsoft in turning in to a company that derives its revenues from the fruits of its innovations rather than monopoly-based marketing hacks, and lock-ins into poorly written code.
Say what you will about Microsoft's software, Steve Ballmer, etc. - Microsoft Research does some really cool work, and its track record of supporting fundamental math/cs research (and researchers) is quite commendable.
Did we /. arstechnica? I cannot get to it.
Microsoft Research Asia
Researchers: Lei Ma, Qiang Huo, and Frank Soong
What's up with this asian guys trying to write some weirds characters up in the air?
Slashdot ya no es que lo era!
Bob 2.0 is a speech-enabled, touch sensitive Social Networking hypervisor powered by Cloud Computing.
And may I have your attention to the mobile phone over here - *this* isn't your father's Clippy.
The most interesting thing I saw is Social Desktop. Admittedly a basic idea, but oh, the power you can leverage off that... For example you could make a universal file system that you can access anywhere on top of that. It's huge.
This game will waste your life. Don't clicky!
The problem with most of Microsoft's research is, it ends up (usually poorly) imitating a competitor that is obvious in the eyes of a consumer. Someone looks at the Zune and can immediately compare it to the iPod, Live Search to Google, MSN to AIM (or IRC, etc), and the XBox to the PS2. The flaws in all of these products were A) A late deployment (minus the case of MSN), B) No real way to make money on it (the Xbox devision only recently turned a profit), C) In-Your-Face marketing, just compare the commercials for "I'm a PC..." to Apple's recent commercials, Apple's were cleaner, simpler and got the point across, Microsoft's commercials basically stated "Hey, we are still a monopoly!", D) Bundling. Having Windows Messenger (on XP, it was the precursor to MSN messenger) pop up every single time I started Windows didn't exactly persuade me to get MSN anytime soon, neither does the fact that Windows is required for a Zune and all the other MS DRM is Windows only basically alienates me as a Linux (and sometimes OS X) user from spending money on Microsoft hardware.
I'm sure we would all be singing a different tune if MS had launched the Zune back in 2000, or if Live/MSN search had the clean, easy to use, and optimized search engine before Google, but MS didn't launch them so to most customers they look about as appealing as buying a Wal-Mart branded MP3 player when a name-brand iPod costs only a few bucks more. Sure, some will buy them, but they will see them as the "off-brand" something that I don't think MS quite realizes. The MS brand means nothing to consumers, the days where it was considered name-brand are long gone.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Lets start a pool on which of these technologies will be cooler than the SPOT watch. Provided any ever see the light of day as an honest to god product. Or will we just keep hearing about how cool they will be Any Day Now, like a certain table-with-a-projector-and-a-PC-in-it?
Fiat Homos et Pereat Theos
Some might say that some of what they do is a waste, but there aren't many companies that are able to do such large scale R&D.
But that's why it is a huge waste. Not because they do it, but because they can do all this awesome R&D and yet we (the human race) really see nothing from it.
What it derives from is the fundamental reason why Microsoft funds all this R&D - to keep the people doing the R&D happy in the current-day equivalent of the Holodeck, where they can do anything they want yet nothing they do actually matters. Microsoft doesn't care, as long as what they are doing does not help other companies progress then Microsoft looks like they are not moving as slowly as they are by comparison.
It's easy to see how a situation like this can come to pass when a company has a lot of money, the directive to hire and retain smart people, yet has a corporate culture that makes bringing real products to full delivery almost impossible.
And that in the end, is the greatest crime of all. The opportunity cost of what we all have lost from these people slaving away in the golden tower from which nothing returns.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Microsoft has given my university a grant to help develop software in the field of phamacogenetics. It's for developing a program that will identify interactions between a person's individual genetics and the medications they are prescribed. It's supposed to revolutionize the field of pharmacy. I just hope it doesn't have to reboot after every patient.
or Kumo or whatever R&D into how or whoever is going to change our lives. I'll settled for just decent help documentation and semi-usable help search, from any software vendor. Please.
While MS gets heavily criticized, the same can't be said about MSR, which is a highly prestigious industrial research group that harkens to the culture brought about from the early days of Xerox PARC Research. When it comes to research, MSR publishes consistently in extremely competitive and top-rated conferences and journals (e.g., ACM Siggraph, SOSP, OSDI, etc). While these outcomes do not have a tangible "dollar" amount attached to them, they do allow MSR to attract and bring together a tremendous amount of talent coming out of top computer science schools. Increasingly, very few companies out there are willing to commit the resources to research like MS does or truly focus on "pure" research without being tied down to a product group. Some examples would be IBM, Intel, HP Labs, etc. The reality is: research that truly has an impact cannot be tied to product cycles.
As a CS PhD student myself at a "competitive" CS graduate school, many of my peers who are considering academic positions also intend to apply to MSR after graduation. And it's not easy to get in. The interview process is nearly as rigorous as one would undergo if applying for assistant professorship at a top CS school. So, MSR only hires top-rate people, and I think MS's decision to fund MSR will and continue to pay off in the future.
I realize in re-reading my post that I offered a terrible slight to Science Fiction, in saying that Microsoft R&D might as well be SF stories I of course ignored the very useful things that have come from people seeking to make ideas in SF stories a reality. WIth Microsoft there is in fact the exact opposite effect, because anyone who thinks something Microsoft R&D is doing is cool has the exact opposite motivation - who would be crazy enough to work on something that (A) Microsoft might deliver as a product, and (B) has probably patented out the wazoo?
Another reason to really overhaul software patents as far as I'm concerned so that we have the ability to make something of these ideas.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
As far as I can recall, precisely zero of the Microsoft Research projects I've thought were cool ever got into Windows.
Great arguing style, you've got there.
What you are ignoring is that MS researchers publish in journals and conference proceedings accessible to any library and frequently they are on-line for anyone. How is this then mysteriously lost?
What you are objecting to is MS development (not research) never seeing the light of day. I doubt that, I'll bet most of their development goes into small things that go into their OS and other associated malware. It probably won't fix the stinking blob that is Windows, or what their marketing dept. has delivered.
I don't believe you understand research. I think that you think of the fruits of research as being big paradigm changing widgets. Most research, regardless of where its done, is not.
1s44c does have a point that MS seems to buy researchers to keep them away from other companies. However, I think that is mitigated somewhat by them publishing in journals and conference proceedings. MS must believe they get some secret sauce by owning them, but if that were the case, they wouldn't be encouraged to publish.
Gerry
This is just absurd. Tons of people can see and use the R&D that Microsoft produces. Go into virtually any CS conference, from PLDI to SIGGRAPH, and you'll see tons of papers that build on and cite research published by Microsoft. And where was some of the most important research on quantum computing done... well another industry lab, Bell Labs. BTW, Microsoft has also done some great work in quantum computing as well. Here's an example of some of their interesting work in topological quantum computing: http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0802/0802.0279v2.pdf
Now what you probably mean is why can't I just copy their research and sell it as my own product. Well like many colleges and universities (and other research groups like HP, IBM, and Sun's) Microsoft will patent ideas that they think have commercial viability. That is really no different than the hundred+ patents that MIT or Caltech does each year. Or the 500+ patents done by the UC system.
I get that slashdot people are supposed to be gung ho about "freedom", but don't be naive about how the real world works.
They publish extensively. That is quite at odds with your 'never see'.
I suppose you would be better off writing individually to anyone who works there, explaining hoe they are wasting their efforts.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Visual Studio [et al.] is excellent and truly top notch
Last I checked, the only way to move the cursor one unit (line or char) to the left/r/u/d is via the arrow keys.
You can formalize a very simple idea using statically optimal search trees, entropy or what have you, but I'm not gonna. Instead I'm gonna state the simple idea:
In order to minimize total cost, the most common operations should be the cheapest.
An implication: what you do quite often is inserting text; probably you're also a touch typist, so your hands are going to rest on "asdfjkl;" (or "aoeuhtns"). I think it's safe to say that the three most common things are insertion, navigation and deletion (combine all three to get "editing").
If your hands are resting on the letter keys, it makes sense to put navigation and deletion commands on the letters keys too.
Note how (x?)emacs got that right (you hold ctrl), and how vi(m?) got that right (you press escape), and how (to my knowledge) Visual Studio still hasn't gotten that right despite having the benefits of two good role models.
(that they're bad role models in other ways is not terribly important; VS ought to imitate the good parts but not the bad parts, which is possible to a large extent).
Just so that I'm not bashing MS only: GNOME has pretty lame text input boxes as well. They try to imitate emacs key bindings, but they suck: ctrl-t doesn't swap adjacent characters, ctrl-q doesn't quote the next character, ctrl-w doesn't cut the marked region, meh! A little similarity is a dangerous thing, if I'm tricked into pressing "dangerous" keys by accidentally bating out my habitual response.
To get your pretty blue screens back, change the recovery settings to disable automatic rebooting: [list of steps]
Couldn't you just have posted a command I can copy-paste into my shell? Clicking around seems like a waste of time...
(no, I'm not blaming you for the faults of windows; or rather, only ironically) ;-)
However, we tend to infer the instability of Microsoft code from the number of times Internet Explorer crashes in a 24-hour period, and how many BSODs we get in a month
So, if we are to judge Linux by the same standard, would it be fair to rip how often people have to hit CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE to kill their super stable X session. Can we rip that brand by all the terrible things that happen when ever ubuntu pushes out a kernel update to Hardy Heron when you have nVidia drivers? That desktop gets blown away back to 800x600 ever time I download an update. What a crock.
I like Linux in some ways more than I like Windows, but, Vista is way more consumer stable than even my mighty Ubuntu. It just is.
This is my sig.
Last several years MSR has co-authored as many as 20% of the main papers. This is remarkable considering the main paper track has a 85% rejection rate. Some of the rejects go to secondary tracks, but only their abstracts are published then and not really science then (reproduceable).
The sad thing is I see so little of this research making it in main stream MSFT commercial products. I hear from mainstream MSFT developers of a cultural rift between them and the "effete research snobs". Stockholders are starting to grumble about the drain of multi-billion dollar research lab on company returns.
"Big money companies can't do research, it's against their nature and a huge waste of cash."
Sure, just consider AT&T, Xerox, and IBM. Nothing useful ever came from these big companies' research.
What you are ignoring is that MS researchers publish in journals and conference proceedings accessible to any library and frequently they are on-line for anyone. How is this then mysteriously lost?
The people reading it now will discontinue work on a project, because Microsoft is doing it.
If Microsoft does not then really develop an idea, chances are slim indeed it will be found later to revisit.
What you are objecting to is MS development (not research) never seeing the light of day. I doubt that, I'll bet most of their development goes into small things that go into their OS and other associated malware.
I see, and you think Microsoft R&D has much contact at all with the peons working on real code. Read some of the Microsoft management books or blogs some time. Read what the project details are and I defy you to find many at all that are anywhere close to things that might be used in Word or the OS (really the WinFS stuff being rolled somewhat into SQL server was the only example I ever knew of and I have heavy doubts how much of that was actually used, as you'll see below).
I don't believe you understand research. I think that you think of the fruits of research as being big paradigm changing widgets. Most research, regardless of where its done, is not.
I don't think *you* understand how things are divided at large companies. I have done software R&D for large companies and seen exactly how it can be discarded. You people keep coming down on me for being against R&D when I have stated repeatedly I am totally for R&D, but not for a giant waste that hardly sees any output.
I would bet that most of the improvements in the OS have come from people actually working on the OS, not the RD department. Because I have been on both sides and that is simply how things work in real life.
Also I would argue that while lots of R&D may produce incremental improvements, if you *never* see any kind of large gain also, you probably have a pretty ineffective R&D department.
1s44c does have a point that MS seems to buy researchers to keep them away from other companies. However, I think that is mitigated somewhat by them publishing in journals and conference proceedings.
I would argue that the value of the publishing is offset by the aspect I mentioned before, that people seeing Microsoft is working on something specific will flee any work on that very area themselves.
But again the true loss is an opportunity cost, of having basically brilliant people working on stuff that will never see practical output. Thankfully Google partially plugged that leak, and to boot has the 20% program to let the world have random output from the smartest people there.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley