Channel 9 - Entries tagged with TechFest

Scott Guthrie on Cloud-Powered Revolutions

Scott Guthrie, Jonathan Rozenblit — Fri, 04 May 2012 03:24:34 GMT

Recorded live on location at Vancouver TechFest 2012, Scott talks about revolutions that are made possible by the Cloud. Plus: Scott dives deep into how Windows Azure enables developers to drive those revolutions.

D³: LIVE & INTERACTiVE
In case you haven't heard about the show, Developers, Developers, Developers: LIVE & INTERACTIVE (D³) is a monthly show hosted by Jonathan Rozenblit. The show airs live every first Wednesday of the month at 12:00 PM ET and features the latest updates on what's new and exciting in the world of development; featured presentations; and guests. LIVE and INTERACTIVE means that you'll be part of the show – You're invited to interact with us; ask questions and get them answered; and share your thoughts and opinions.

Join the Canadian Developer Connection LinkedIn group
Follow @devsdevdevs
Like D³ on Facebook
Subscribe to podcasts via iTunes, Zune, or RSS

More D³: L IVE & INTERACTIVE >>

TechFest 2011: Mirage Blocks

Laura Foy — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 23:55:47 GMT

This research demonstrates the use of 3-D projection, combined with a Kinect depth camera to capture and display 3-D objects. Any physical object brought into the demo can be instantaneously digitized and viewed in 3-D. For example, we show a simple modeling application in which complex 3-D models can be constructed with just a few wooden blocks by digitizing and adding one block at the time. This setup also can be used in telepresence scenarios, in which what is real on your collaborator’s table is virtual—3-D projected—on yours, and vice versa. This shows how simulating real-world physics behaviors can be used to manipulate virtual 3-D objects. The research uses a 3-D projector with active shutter glasses.

TechFest 2011: 3D Photo-Realistic Talking Head

Laura Foy — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 02:56:47 GMT

This research showcases a new, 3-D, photo-real talking head with freely controlled head motions and facial expressions. It extends our prior, high-quality, 2-D, photo-real talking head to 3-D. First, we apply a 2-D-to-3-D reconstruction algorithm frame by frame on a 2-D video to construct a 3-D training database. In training, super-feature vectors consisting of 3-D geometry, texture, and speech are formed to train a statistical, multistreamed, Hidden Markov Model (HMM). The HMM then is used to synthesize both the trajectories of geometric animation and dynamic texture. The 3-D talking head can be animated by the geometric trajectory, while the facial expressions and articulator movements are rendered with dynamic texture sequences. Head motions and facial expression also can be separately controlled by manipulating corresponding parameters. The new 3-D talking head has many useful applications, such as voice agents, telepresence, gaming, and speech-to-speech translation.

TechFest 2011: Facial Recognition in Videos

Laura Foy — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 22:49:37 GMT

Face recognition in video is an emerging technology that will have great impact on user experience in fields such as television, gaming, and communication. In the near future, a television or an Xbox will be able to recognize people in the living room, home video will be annotated automatically and become searchable, and TV watchers will be able to get information about an unfamiliar actor, athlete, or singer just by pointing to the person on the screen. Our research showcases the face-recognition technology developed by iLabs. Our technology includes novel algorithms in face detection, recognition, and tracking. The research demonstrates semi-automatic labeling of videos, a novel TV-watching experience using faces in a video as hyperlinks to get more information, and automatic recognition of the person in front of the television, Xbox, or computer.

Click here for a deeper dive and RIN (Rich Interactive Narrative)

TechFest 2011: Mobile Photography- Capture, process and View

Laura Foy — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 21:38:51 GMT

The mobile phone is becoming the most popular consumer camera. While the benefits are quite clear, the mobile scenario presents several challenges. It is not always easy to capture good photos. Image-processing tools can improve photos after capture, but there are few tools tailored to on-phone image manipulation. We present phone-based image enhancement tools that are tightly integrated with cloud services. Heavy computation is off-loaded to the cloud, which enables faster results without impacting the phone’s performance.

Click here for a deeper dive and the RIN (Rich Interactive Narrative).

TechFest 2011: ShadowDraw

Laura Foy — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 19:25:20 GMT

Do you want to be able to sketch or draw better? ShadowDraw is an interactive assistant for freehand drawing. It automatically recognizes want you’re trying to draw and suggests new pen strokes for you to trace. As you draw new strokes, ShadowDraw refines its models in real time and provides new suggestions. ShadowDraw contains a large database of images with objects that a user might want to draw. The edges from any images that match the user’s current drawing are merged and shown as suggested “shadow strokes.” The user then can trace these strokes to improve the drawing.

Click here for some more in depth info and RIN (Rich Interactive Narrative)

Cloud Faster: Microsoft Research at TechFest 2010

Laura Foy — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 16:20:00 GMT

To make cloud computing work, we must make applications run substantially faster, both over the Internet and within data centers. Microsoft Researchs 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. Microsoft Research 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.

Techfest: The Future of Looking Back

Larry Larsen — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 14:25:00 GMT

Coming out of Microsoft Research Cambridge we have a project that explores how we might view our past through photos and videos that we've collected. But this is more than just photo collecting and digital frames; it's is a look at the value people place on sets of digital data and why they are attached to the digital bits along with a look at the tools we can help create to let people creatively engage with them.

Techfest: The Future of Looking Back

Larry Larsen — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 23:56:00 GMT

Techfest: NUI Movement

Larry Larsen — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 14:56:00 GMT

At TechFest this year I met with Desney Tan and Dan Morris who showed me several very interesting systems, each of which allows your body to become the input device for hardware. Granted, this hardware was literally put together with tape and exposed wires (that just increases the cool, IMHO), but this proof of concept worked incredibly well considering its fragility. Also, Desney really could use a metronome and some time spent practicing Guitar Hero.

Dan showed us how we might interact with devices by using our body as a control device. By tapping in a specific area on your arm you are able to navigate, read email, or play games.

TechFest 2010: Microsoft ICE - Image Composite Editor

Laura Foy — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:57:00 GMT

Today I'd like to introduce you to another piece of new technology from Microsoft Research Labs – Image Composite Editor (ICE) with Multi-Image Fusion. In the current version of ICE, it provides advanced features for panoramic stitching such as choosing the stitch’s orientation, custom projection, and selecting a 360 stitch’s mid-point, and this tool also integrates nicely as a plug-in into Windows Live Photo Gallery. Here we’ll show you some of the upcoming new features in ICE such as:

Structured Panoramas
Stitching Panoramas from Video
Sharp Panoramas from Blurry Videos
Creating Photographs from Videos
Multi-Image Denoising and Sharpening using Lucky Imaging

Techfest 2010: Mobile Surface

Larry Larsen — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 20:17:00 GMT

Every year at TechFest, Microsoft employees (and a few invited guests) get to take a look at some of the projects out of Microsoft Research. These aren't finished products--you'll see a lot of exposed wires and tape--and in fact, they may never become completed products at all, but each project shows what we're thinking--and maybe where we're going.

This year I met with a team from MSR Asia who have constructed what they hope will eventually be a pico-projector portable computer, and in this project you can see inspiration from Microsoft Surface and Second Light. The possibility I like best about this is the ability to touch your games while still seeing what is there. Additionally, if you use physical controls on apps, such as knobs, you can actually paint labels on the controls themselves.

Techfest 2010: Mobile Surface

Larry Larsen — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:25:00 GMT

Ping 51: TechFest, Ballmer, Xbox, Android & Tina Wood!

Laura Foy — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 22:17:00 GMT

You asked for it, so you got it! This week we have special co-host, Tina Wood bringing all the scoop that 'Softies wanna know about.

TechFest recap
Ballmer Tweets!
Xbox & Facebook
Microsoft & Android..BFF's

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

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.

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.

TechFest 2010: The Translating Telephone

Laura Foy — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 21:20:00 GMT

Soon the language barrier will no longer be an issue. This piece of technology allows two users, speaking different languages, to communicate instantly. The speakers audio is turned into text, then that text is translated into another language and spoken aloud to the other party in the conversation. This could truly change the world.

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.

TechFest 2010: Project Gustav

Laura Foy — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 18:50:00 GMT

TechFest is the time of year when Microsoft Research gets to show off all of the interesting projects they've been working on- and Project Gustav is absolutely incredible. This painting application looks so real I literally had to touch the screen to make sure I wasn't looking at an actual canvas. The tools are intuitive and the UI is natural and easy to use. Check out this hands-on demo and prepare yourself to be amazed.