Research.Microsoft.Com Refreshed

Over the weekend, the Microsoft Research website was given a new coat of paint. The new home page features a cleaner information layout and two Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) researchers interviews with Drs. Guo Baining and Zhang Dongmei.

• Dr Guo Baining (Interview: Microsoft Research Asia’s Guo Discusses the Future of Graphics) is a computer graphics researcher and also the Assistant Managing Director of the Beijing lab. In his interview, he shared about his passion for geometrical modeling which led him into computer graphics, his Microsoft Research experience and also discussed Internet Graphics group future research directions.

• Dr Zhang Dongmei (Interivew: Chinese Researcher Leaps into Prominence) is a research manager from the User Interface Group. In her interview, she drew similiarities  in the necessary traits that led to her professional success from a long jump child athletic  and what fuels her passion for research today.

The Opening of Microsoft Research New England

Last week, Microsoft Research celebrated the opening of it’s newest lab – Microsoft Research New England with a day-long symposium at MIT on the intersection of computer science and the social sciences. You can now review the symposium individual sessions online.

There were some excellent content presented at the event including:

• Computer Science Is Everywhere
  - Erik Demaine, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT
• Understanding Socio-Technical Phenomena in a Web 2.0 Era
  - Danah Boyd, Fellow, Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society
• Designing Experience/The Experience of Design
  - Bill Buxton, Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research
• The Changing Role of Research Universities and Industrial and National Laboratories in the 21st Century
  - Venkatesh Narayanamurti, Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University

Related links:

• Microsoft Research Lab Opens Quietly Next to MIT, Director Says Area’s Intellectual Climate Like “Dry Timber” Ready to Ignite (Xconomy) (With a list of its founding members)
• Doors Open at Microsoft Research New England (Xconomy)

PhotoSynth 1.0 Avaliable for Download

Remembered the dazzling PhotoSynth 3D-demo of St Mark’s Basilica and the NASA?  Imagine all the photos of your favourite holiday pictures all joined together to form your own 3-D panoramic vistas.

You can now download the officially released Photosynth version 1.0.

PhotoSynth was based on Photo Tourism, a joint research project between University of Washington (UW) and Microsoft Research. You can read more about it’s history from here or watch an early version of this technology presented during the 2006 SIGGRAPH.

Email Prioritizer – An Outlook plug-in developed by Office Labs and Microsoft Research

Download Email Prioritizer prototype.

Email Prioritizer is an free add-in for Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 that helps you manage email overload.  and it prioritizes email to help you focus on the email messages that are most important to you with a 0-3 star rating system. It also provides a “do not disturb” button that temporarily pauses new email arrival.

It does this by using various algorithms to automatically identify the importance or urgency of e-mail messages delivered into an Outlook 2007 in-box. This idea was developed from a research project by Eric Horvitz and Mary Czerwinski.

Click here for a video demo of Email Prioritizer (Soapbox).

Source link: Microsoft Targets E-Mail Overload With Outlook Plug-In (Networking Computing India)

Microsoft Research Asia Researcher Awarded the 2008 MIT TR35 Young Innovator Prize

Dr HUA Xian-Sheng, a lead reseacher from the Internet Media Group (Microsoft Research Asia) was awarded the 2008 MIT Technology Review Young Innovator prize. This award is given in recognition of Hua’s work in the content-based video analysis.

The amount of video on the Web is growing at an ­incredible rate. Effectively searching online video, however, remains difficult.

Hua hopes to crack the problem by teaching computers to recognize objects, scenes, events, and other elements of digital images. He uses machine-learning techniques and annotated videos to train computers to automatically categorize new videos. Click here to view a flowchart explaining Hua’s video search system.

Congrats Xian-Sheng!

Related links:

• The entire recipient list of the 2008 Young Innovators Under 35 award (MIT Technology Review)
• Dr Hua Xian-Sheng’s Citation Profile
• 全球视野下的创新人物 (Microsoft Research Asia Sina Blog)

Bill Gates marks anniversary of Microsoft research arm

On Tuesday (12 Aug 2008), Bill Gates said that the dramatic growth of the Internet would eventually help eliminate “the last constraints we have” and spark a software-writing revolution.

Bill was at a forum in Hong Kong to mark the 10th anniversary of the software giant’s Asian research arm (Microsoft Research Asia). He added that technology currently being developed would transform the way people use computers, expanding their ability to interact with the machines.

Gates also praised the work of his company’s Asian research division and voiced confidence in the power of science and technology as a force for positive change. “Whether it’s software or energy or agriculture, the promise of science is … much greater than ever before and that’s why I’m so optimistic,” he said.”

Read the full article “Gates marks anniversary of Microsoft research arm” (IHT)

Related link: Gates: Privacy an ‘interesting challenge’ (ZDNet Asia)

Synchronous Web Search: Microsoft SearchTogether

 

Download SearchTogether (beta)

Microsoft SearchTogether is a free Internet Explorer plug-in that allows groups of people to collaborate on Web searches.

SearchTogether can benefit any group of people who are interested in investigating a topic together, such as students working on a group report, colleagues working on a joint project, or friends planning a shared vacation or other social activities. SearchTogether supports both synchronous and asynchronous collaboration styles.

SearchTogether allows each group member to customize their search preferences; choices include Windows Live Search, Yahoo!, and Google.

SearchTogether is a project from Microsoft Research. See SearchTogether page for more details.

Download and Explore the Universe from your Desktop – Microsoft WorldWide Telescope

Today, Microsoft Research announced the availability of the public beta of WorldWide Telescope.

“The WorldWide Telescope is a powerful tool for science and education that makes it possible for everyone to explore the universe,” said Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft.

“By combining terabytes of incredible imagery and data with easy-to-use software for viewing and moving through all that information, the WorldWide Telescope opens the door to new ways to see and experience the wonders of space. Our hope is that it will inspire young people to explore astronomy and science, and help researchers in their quest to better understand the universe.”

I encourage all of you to try it at http://www.worldwidetelescope.org

Related link: Capturing screenshots from Worldwide Telescope (Long Zheng, istartedsomething.com)

Microsoft Research TechFest 2008 Online

Microsoft TechFest 2008, the internal ”Microsoft Science Fair” was held 5 Mar 2008. You can now re-live the experience online.

Start off with the keynote led by Rick Rashid (or watch wmv) and Craig Mundie, watch all the interesting video demos from all 5 labs around the world include Music Steering (Lie Lu and Frank Seide, Speech Group, Microsoft Research Asia), WorldWide Telescope (The demo that made Scoble teary) and add your comments on the TechFest Live! blog.

Related link

• TechFest Videos on Channel 9

Beyond Search – Semantic Computing and Internet Economics: Microsoft Research Request for Proposals

Microsoft Research is pleased to announce a new worldwide Request for Proposals (RFP):  Beyond Search – Semantic Computing and Internet Economics. For full details, guidelines, and instructions, please visit http://research.microsoft.com/ur/us/fundingopps/RFPs/BeyondSearch_RFP.aspx

This Request for Proposals is done in partnership with Microsoft adCenter in support of its collaboration with the academic research community. The RFP due date is November 1, 2007, 5pm PDT (-8 UTC/GMT)

Awards
The total amount available under this request for proposals (RFP) is $1,000,000. Microsoft anticipates making approximately 20 awards averaging $50,000, with a maximum of $100,000 for any single award.

RFP highlights
To advance academic research and publication in the area of Internet Research and, in particular in data mining, information finding, information supply, and internet economics, Microsoft intends to make available to the RFP awardees a Microsoft adCenter Search query log excerpt with 100 million search queries along with ad click logs sampled over a few months, and a Live Search query log excerpt with 15 million search queries with per-query search result click-throughs. In addition, Microsoft adCenter will provide advertiser accounts to all winners.

This RFP has two tracks:
Track 1 – Semantic Computing
Track 2 – Internet Economics
Microsoft encourages proposals for either track which describe innovative research using the adCenter, Live Search, and SDK assets in bold, novel, and unconventional approaches to further Internet Research and related technologies, including interdisciplinary research.

AUS, NZ or Singapore applicants, please CC:  in your application so that I can know who in these region respond to this RFP.