Kevin Schofield - Tour of Microsoft Research, Part I (graphic and developer tool research) | TheChannel9Team

Minh
WOOH! WOOH!

That's a pretty sweet place in MS to work at. Scoble forgot to ask:

"What type do you need to be to work at Research? A professor type? An out-of-the-box type? A developer type? What?"

rhm

Interesting stuff with the bug finding tool. Sounds like the old idea of programming by contract, but extending that to stateful interfaces (tranditionally specifications just checked individual invocations).

On the subject of specifying concurrent systems at a higher level, I believe there is a big future for statecharts. These allow the specification of systems with realistic complexity (as compared their more more simplistic cousin the finite state machine) and are a lot clearer than procedural descriptions.

On the video front: why have the last few videos been in a wide aspect ratio with black bars at the sides?

scobleizer
I'm the video guy

Sorry about that. I accidentally switched the mode in the camera and didn't realize it until this week.

littleguru
<3 Seattle

I heard about students that work with the research... I'm sorry that there is nothing like this here. It would be really great and I would always try to get somehow in contact with the guys.

I heard that Microsoft is going to open a Lab at Trento, that would be nearby. But I have also read that they do not research in the software sector...

Sad

Charles
Welcome Change

For those who may not understand what the concurrency problem is, click here.

scobleizer
I'm the video guy

Minh: pretty much most of the researchers at Microsoft have PHd's.

kevinsch

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.

dantheman82

Awesome presentation. Could have hoped for more in the graphics department...

Great part on the developer tool research. Seemed to be a great professor in his day. Here's his recent research article on Formalizing Counterexample-driven Refinement with Weakest Preconditions.

androidi

What kind of work MS is doing on making it more easy to write more robust code that will make use of the multi-core computers of tomorrow? There's a lot of talk about the pitfalls of concurrency today and the message seems to be that even if you're a C# programmer you have to know a ton of very low level stuff and you still are likely to get it wrong or play (lock) too safe and get no benefits.

I understand that the C++ compiler has some sort of flag that makes the compiler take use of MP on marked code. It would be great if you could give the compiler a better sense of what your up to and have it figure the best places to lock and what not ..