Preview of Future Technologies

TechFest, a yearly event where researchers from Microsoft worldwide Research Labs across the wold gather in Redmond to showcase the futuristic technologies that they have been working upon. Here's a sneak peek at few of them

Wednesday, April 01, 2009

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An event like TechFest is a feast for any technology enthusiast. Technologies varying from next generation of social networking to new age user interactions that remind you of some sci-fi movies and many other innovating projects were demonstrated at this year's event.

This year's event was held on Feb 24th at Microsoft Campus in Redmond, where the researchers demoed around 40 projects that showed the glimpse of what tomorrow's computing would be like. Addressing the media at the event, Craig Mundie, Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer said 'Research is part of Microsoft's DNA and we're committed to this investment in research to enable our researchers and developers to continue advancing the technology for challenging societal problems and pushing the boundaries of computing in exciting ways.' Alongside Mundie, Rick Rashid, the senior vice president of MS Research also reaffirmed the company's commitment towards basic research that has benefited several Microsoft products and said that 'Research projects at TechFest are the technological hints that the future holds. We've shown touch technologies in past which are now part of Microsoft Surface computing, while artificial intelligence projects now enhance the Windows Live search.' And its true, that all projects that are showcased at the event do not end up as a whole new branded product. Some projects get incorporated into existing or an upcoming product and some projects go back to the drawing board for further development or starting anew.

Rick Rashid and Craig Mundie addressing the media persons at the TechFest event.

This year at the TechFest, the focus seemed to be on harnessing social networking better and the expansion of Microsoft's Surface technology. The projects ranged from user interface technologies to new datacenter technologies that may reduce the costs of datacenters. Here are some of the interesting demos:

SecondLight: A new surface computing technology that can project images and detect gestures in mid-air above the display surface. The display surface itself supports the multi-touch interactions. The mid-air projection of images and detecting gestures is somewhat similar from a sci-fi movie like 'Minority Report'. It was the most crowded booth at the event. SecondLight opens a whole new realm of User Interaction, and we have talked more about it and other UI technologies in a separate story in this issue.

Automated Front-Desk Receptionist: Imagine a life-like on-screen avatar on a computer screen that emulates the tasks of a front-desk receptionist like registering visitors and even engage in conversation with visitors. This project know as “Situated Interaction” explores the ways how human and machines can interact.

Researchers of MSR India demonstrate how books can be digitized and with a projector, to the whole class.

The project aims at interactive systems that can reason about their surroundings and interact with natural flow of everyday tasks and activities. The system integrates various AI technologies like speech-recognition, person detection and tracking, intention recognition and modeling, all these into a conversational framework that can engage in interactions with one or multiple persons.

The system can well be suited for a hotel reservation desk where visitors can do check-in for their rooms and also inquire about their booking status for services they asked for like cab booking.

Technology for Rural Education: While other projects demonstrated technologies of higher level, this project from Microsoft Research India focused on using the lowest level of technology that would be required to bring the education to the rural areas. They demonstrated how a single PC in a classroom can be used for better student interaction with the technology-naive teacher. In another education project, they showed how several books can be digitized and played on a standard DVD, using the fast-forward button to move from page to page. Schools that cant afford to have many books can still have a library in form of such DVDs. The students can take such DVDs back home and view them, as even in rural areas more than 70% people have access to TVs and DVD players. Even in a class, such digitized book in form of a DVD can be shared by an entire classroom on a TV. Thus with this limited technology that is pervasive in rural areas today, education can be delivered effectively.

Low-Power Processors in Datacenter: This demo showed a prototype dataceneter based on Intel Atom processors, which resulted in offering 33 to 50 percent of performance of a hig-perfromance processors based datacentrers but consumed just upto 10 percent of the power. This way the costs of datacenters can be brought down and also huge energy can be saved.

Christian Borgs, Dy. MD, MSR, New England explains the Gale-Berlekamp Light-Bulb game to demo time-approximation for approximating problems within a given precision.

There were some other projects like 'Video stitching', whereby in real-time basis the video generated and streamed via mobiles can be stitched together to create a larger frame. This can potentially be used for purpose of citizen journalism or even for social multimedia-sharing sites. There was a Light-Bulb game also which challenged visitors to minimize the number of lit light bulbs by flipping switches. The idea behind was to stress on how algorithms can be useful in such calculations.

Despite being showcased at the event, these innovating technologies aren't guaranteed to see the daylight in form of a product, but may eventually be integrated in some existing lineup of products of Microsoft.

The author was hosted by Microsoft Research at Bellevue for the event.

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