Eric Horvitz - Better communication productivity

Posted: Jul 07, 2006 at 11:07 AM

By: Charles

5,347 Views

Video format

Option selected may change based on video formats available and browser capability.

Auto

Use our suggested format for this video.

Smooth Streaming

Adaptive bitrate streaming - little buffering but lower video quality at times of low bandwidth. Silverlight 5 required

Progressive

Traditional buffered video format. Silverlight 5 required

HTML5

For browsers that support H.264 MP4 or WebM video playback such as:
IE9+, Firefox 4+, Chrome 5+, or Safari 4+.

Flash

For browsers that have the Adobe Flash Player plugin installed.

In this video, Robert and Charles drop in on Eric Horvitz at Microsoft Research. It’s always great to get an update on things he’s been up to.

This time, we focus on technologies aimed at making it easier for people to communicate with each other, but we have a freewheeling discussion.

We hear about research on the Bestcom project. Bestcom is short for “best-means communication”. With Bestcom, smart computer agents try to figure out the context of people and decide how best to hook them up… based their own preferences and situations.

Eric shows us a prototype named Bestcom-ET which has been used by many people inside Microsoft. This prototype led to the Communicator product.

Eric also talks about Bayesphone, a really smart smartphone—and he also shows us some of the output of the Coordinate prototype. Coordinate does “presence and availability forecasting”. Coordinate uses machine learning to make forecasts about things like when someone will next be in their office, when they will next read email, and next be free for some time to chat. Sounds eerie…but not to worry—people have nice privacy controls to decide which people (or agents) they want to share these kinds of forecasts with.

Fun stuff!

Follow the Discussion

Oops, something didn't work.

Try again?

Getting "follow" information

Stop following these comments

Start following these comments

Removing your "follow"

Setting up your "follow"

Subscribe to this comments

Follow
Oops, something didn't work.

Try again?

Sign In to be begin to follow these comments

What does this mean?
Following an item on Channel 9 allows you to watch for new content and comments that you are interested in. You need to be signed in to Channel 9 to use this feature.

Getting "follow" information

Stop following these comments

Start following these comments

What does this mean?
Following an item on Channel 9 allows you to watch for new content and comments that you are interested in and view them all on your notifications page.

Removing your "follow"

Setting up your "follow"

Did you know you can
sign up for email notifications?
- Subscribe to this comments

Comments Closed

Comments have been closed since this content was published more than 30 days ago, but if you'd like to continue the conversation, please create a new thread in our Forums,
or Contact Us and let us know.