Channel 9

eScience in the Cloud

TechFest — Thu, 06 May 2010 23:37:00 GMT

Scientific applications have diverse data and computational needs that scale from desktop to supercomputers. Besides the nature of the application and the domain, the resource needs for the applications also vary over time—as the collaboration and the data collections expand, or when seasonal campaigns are undertaken. Cloud computing offers a scalable, economic, on-demand model well-matched to evolving eScience needs. We will present a suite of science applications that leverage the capabilities of Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud-computing platform. We will show tools and patterns we have developed to use the cloud effectively for solving problems in environmental science.

Bing Technology Transfer

TechFest — Thu, 06 May 2010 23:31:00 GMT

Microsoft Research has contributed numerous technologies to the Bing search engine. Years of research efforts on intensive, data-driven problems have resulted in cutting-edge technology transfers. And Microsoft Research’s ongoing collaborations with Bing product teams continue to evolve the search paradigm.

DryadLINQ

TechFest — Thu, 06 May 2010 23:25:00 GMT

In this demo we showcase efforts in MSR to collaborate with external researchers to explore the application of new technologies, specifically Dryad and DryadLINQ, to big data research problems in science. We also highlight our efforts to provide software and services to academics across the world, through the release of Dryad and DryadLINQ free of charge to the research community, along with associated programming guides, user documentation, and code libraries. Dryad is a general-purpose distributed computing engine, more flexible than MapReduce or Hadoop!, that was designed to simplify the task of implementing distributed applications on clusters of Windows computers. DryadLINQ is an abstraction layer which simplifies the process of implementing Dryad-based applications. Microsoft Research is acutely aware of the ubiquity of big data and the challenges this presents. We are offering researchers the tools, resources and collaboration to explore this new area.

Tracking Internet Hosts Using Unreliable IDs

TechFest — Thu, 06 May 2010 19:01:00 GMT

Today's Internet is open and anonymous. While it permits free traffic from any host, attackers that generate malicious traffic typically cannot be held accountable. We will present a system that tracks dynamic bindings between hosts and IP addresses by leveraging application-level data with unreliable IDs. Using a month-long Hotmail user-login trace, we show that this system can attribute most of the activities reliably to the responsible hosts, despite the existence of dynamic IP addresses, proxies, and NATs. With this information, we are able to analyze the host population, to conduct forensic analysis, and to blacklist malicious hosts dynamically.

Mobile Assistance Using Infrastructure (MAUI)

TechFest — Thu, 06 May 2010 18:57:00 GMT

Mobile devices have reached an impasse. Although the resources that can be integrated onto mobile handheld devices will continue to improve, faster CPUs, more RAM, faster wireless NICs, making substantial use of these resources will require a major breakthrough in battery technology. To bypass these limitations, MAUI (Mobile Assistance Using Infrastructure) is a system that enables fine-grained offloading of mobile applications to cloud-based infrastructure. By leveraging nearby infrastructure, MAUI enables a new class of resource-intensive applications, such as augmented reality, to run on mobile handheld devices. With MAUI, we enable resource-intensive .NET applications to run on Windows Mobile smartphones. We will demonstrate: A resource-intensive face-recognition application that consumes an order-of-magnitude less energy. A voice-based translation application that previously could not run using only the limited resources available on today's smartphones.

Mobile-to-Mobile Networking in 3G Networks

TechFest — Thu, 06 May 2010 18:56:00 GMT

Mobile devices increasingly are first-class computing devices, generating large amounts of data. Searching and sharing data securely across multiple devices can be a significant challenge. We have built Contrail, a communication abstraction for P2P communication on mobile phones. Communication in Contrail is purely asynchronous, coping with the fact that phones temporarily are disconnected from the network. Phones set up filters with other phones expressing their interest set. We will demonstrate the usage of Contrail with three applications: P2P content distribution, P2P search, and location-based group communication.

Manual Deskterity : An Exploration of Simultaneous Pen + Touch Direct Input

TechFest — Thu, 06 May 2010 05:23:00 GMT

Our research showcases a conceptual model for bimanual input that spans a wide range of form-factors including smart phones, slates, and tabletop systems using a combination of pen, touch, motion sensing, and voice input modalities. The pen writes, the hands manipulate, and the combination of modalities yields new tools – as well as compelling over-the-shoulder playback experiences for human-human communication.

New Technologies for Multi-Image Fusion

TechFest — Wed, 05 May 2010 22:05:00 GMT

As video and still cameras have become almost ubiquitous, people are taking increasingly more photographs and videos of the world around them. Often, the photographer's intent is to capture more than what can be seen in a single photograph, and he or she instead takes a large set of images or a video clip to capture a large scene or a moment that extends over time. One can combine these images to produce an output that improves the input images, such as creating an image with a large field of view, a panorama, or a composite image that takes the best parts of the image, a photo montage. But creating these results is still non-trivial for many users. One challenge is in creating large-scale panoramas, for which the capture and stitching times can be long. In addition, when using consumer-level point-and-shoot cameras and camera phones, artifacts such as motion blur appear. Another challenge is combining large image sets from photos or videos to produce results that use the best parts of the images to create an enhanced photograph. We will present several new technologies that advance the state of the art in these areas and create improved user experiences. For panorama generation, we will demonstrate: ICE 2.0. Stitching of panoramas from video. Generating sharp panoramas from blurry videos. For generating composites, we will demonstrate: Video to snapshots. De-noising and sharpening using lucky imaging.

The Translating! Telephone

TechFest — Wed, 05 May 2010 22:05:00 GMT

Douglas Adams' Babelfish inspired dreams of unfettered universal communication. Though we are still far from achieving that goal, there are scenarios in which today's limited accuracy can create value. Our goal in the telephone-call scenario is to provide an aid for cross-language communication in the event that no other means of communication exists. The system we will show makes extensive use of speaker-adaptation technologies to achieve reasonable, real-time speech-to-text transcription accuracy. This is then translated live using machine translation to provide speech-to-text translation and further fed into a text-to-speech system to realize speech-to-speech translation. The speech-to-text transcript and the translated transcript are shown to the users to enable validation of their intentions.

Greening Corporate Networks with Sleep Proxy

TechFest — Wed, 05 May 2010 22:04:00 GMT

In a corporate network, most desktop machines always are left on, even when they are not in use for extended periods, such as at night. This is wasteful, bad for the environment, and bad for the corporate treasury. While Win7 provides aggressive sleep functionality, most users override it because they occasionally might want to access their machine remotely. Ideally, a desktop would go to sleep when not in use and awaken seamlessly when the user tries to access it. We have built a system to enable this. Our system consists of a sleep server that maintains the network presence of the sleeping machine and seamlessly awakens it on remote access. We do not require special hardware or changes to existing software. Our system is operational in Building 99 and has resulted in substantial savings in terms of money, power consumption, and carbon-dioxide emissions.

TechFest 2010 Keynote

TechFest — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 09:08:00 GMT

Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research, addresses an audience of Microsoft customers and partners, at Microsoft Research TechFest 2010.

Cloud Faster

TechFest — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 09:02:00 GMT

To make cloud computing work, we must make applications run substantially faster, both over the Internet and within data centers. Our measurements of real applications show that today's protocols fall short, leading to slow page-load times across the Internet and congestion collapses inside the data center. We have developed a new suite of architectures and protocols that boost performance and the robustness of communications to overcome these problems. The results are backed by real measurements and a new theory describing protocol dynamics that enables us to remedy fundamental problems in the Transmission Control Protocol. We will demo the experience users will have with Bing Web sites, both with and without our improvements. The difference is stunning. We also will show visualizations of intra-data-center communication problems and our changes that fix them. This work stems from collaborations with Bing and Windows Core Operating System Networking.

New Technologies for Multi-Image Fusion

TechFest — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 08:59:00 GMT

Inside the Cloud: New Cloud-Computing Interaction

TechFest — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 23:29:00 GMT

With cloud computing, users can access their personal data anywhere and anytime. Cloud computing also will enable new forms of data to be provided for users, with applications ranging from Web data mining to social networks. But cloud computing necessitates new interaction metaphors and input-output technology. The cloud mouse is one such technology. Every user will have one. It will be a secure key to every user’s cloud data. And, with six degrees of freedom and with tactile feedback, the cloud mouse will enable users to orchestrate, interact with, and engage with their data as if they were inside the cloud.

OneAlbum

TechFest — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 21:00:00 GMT

Today, my album refers to a collection of photos I have taken. But many photos relevant to me -- such as photos of me or my children—are in my friends' albums. OneAlbum automatically finds relevant photos in my friends' albums on social networks or in shared albums, brings them to my album, and shows them side-by-side with the photos I've taken. For example, if I was at a party, I'll see all photos from that party—those I've taken and those my friends took. The technology behind OneAlbum is a novel, unsupervised face-recognition algorithm. It analyzes the photos in my album to find automatically the faces of people I most care about, based on frequency of their appearance; no tagging is required. Then, using the social-network graph and other information, OneAlbum crawls my friend's albums looking for photos of people that interest me. The algorithm was tested on real large-scale albums including tens of thousands of photos and achieved accuracy rates as high as 90 percent.

The Translating! Telephone

TechFest — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 20:58:00 GMT

Douglas Adams’ Babelfish inspired dreams of unfettered universal communication. Though we are still far from achieving that goal, there are scenarios in which today's limited accuracy can create value. Our goal in the telephone-call scenario is to provide an aid for cross-language communication in the event that no other means of communication exists. The system makes extensive use of speaker-adaptation technologies to achieve reasonable, real-time speech-to-text transcription accuracy. This is then translated live using machine translation to provide speech-to-text translation and further fed into a text-to-speech system to realize speech-to-speech translation. The speech-to-text transcript and the translated transcript are shown to the users to enable validation of their intentions.

Natural User Interfaces with Physiological Sensing

TechFest — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 21:45:00 GMT

Microsoft has innovated continually in developing novel interaction modalities, or natural user interfaces. Surface and Project Natal are two examples. While these modalities rely on sensors and devices situated in the environment, we believe there is a need for new modalities that enhance the mobile experience. We take advantage of sensing technologies that enable us to decode the signals generated by the body. We will demo muscle-computer interfaces, electromyography-based armbands that sense muscular activation directly to infer finger gestures on surfaces and in free space, and bio-acoustic interfaces, mechanical sensors on the body that enable us to turn the entire body into a tap-based input device.

Mobile Surface

TechFest — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 21:44:00 GMT

Mobile Surface is a novel interaction system for mobile computing. Our goal is to bring the Microsoft Surface experience to mobile scenarios and, more importantly, to enable 3-D interaction with mobile devices. We will demonstrate how to transform any surface, such as a coffee table or a piece of paper, into a Mobile Surface by using a mobile device and a camera-projector system. Besides the Surface, we will show 3-D object imaging, augmented reality, and multiple-layer 3-D information visualization. In particular, we have developed a system with the camera-projector component to scan 3-D objects in real time while doing normal projection. To visualize, 3-D data can be projected onto a surface formed by a piece of paper while maintaining the original scale as if it were printed on that paper, and a user can interact with the projected content with a hand. Mobile Surface enables you to interact with digital contents and information around you from anywhere.

Project Gustav: Immersive Digital Painting

TechFest — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 21:43:00 GMT

Project Gustav is a realistic painting-system prototype that enables artists to become immersed in the digital painting experience. The natural interface makes Project Gustav ideal for hobbyists and professional artists alike. Project Gustav achieves a high level of interactivity and realism by leveraging the computing power of modern GPUs, taking full advantage of multitouch and tablet input technology and our novel, natural media-modeling and brush-simulation algorithms. Our prototype provides convincingly realistic models for pastel and oil media, with more to come.

Rick Rashid introduces TechFest 2010

TechFest — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 11:58:00 GMT

Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research, and Kevin Schofield, general manager of the organization’s Strategy and Communications group, explains the value of TechFest during a video introduction to Rashid’s March 2 keynote address for the 2010 event.