kevinsch

I'll ask Tony and let you know.

Yes, there are privacy questions. They started cropping up day 1, hour 1, minute 1. Which is why there are only twelve SenseCam research prototypes in existence right now, and why some of the first studies they ran were on the privacy issues.

(which in practice turn out not to be that bad)

Most of the people in MSR have PhD's. We do hire a small number of software developers to work on prototypes, but those jobs are pretty scarce.

The Trento center is a collaborative effort with MSR Cambridge and the University of Trento to work on computational biology. It's going to be a small effort focused just on that -- nevertheless we're very excited about it.

We are doing research into finger/gesture navigation.

http://research.microsoft.com/displayArticle.aspx?id=625


http://research.microsoft.com/%7Eawilson/


To answer a couple of points made earlier, we aren't "sitting on" these technologies. MSR works with all of MS's product groups to move technologies and designs over into products. At the same time, they are the experts on building products, not us, and they ar emuch better at the spit-n-polish than we are. While we do user studies, they do full-fledged usability tests as part of their iterative design and development processes. They know how to test products, and they have all the infrastructure to do it well; we don't.

We have to respect their development processes. Sometimes we put out prototypes directly from MSR, but they will never have the professional quality that a MS product has.


It's a good partnership. It works. It just takes longer to do it right than to do it wrong. We prefer to do it right, because that makes our customers happier in the end.

Jim Gray is my source -- he was the one who told me that it takes a petabyte of storage. He is generally a source I would trust.