Kevin Schofield - Tour of Microsoft Research, Part III (SmartPhone, Search, and HIV research)

Posted By: The Channel 9 Team | Feb 8th, 2005 @ 1:00 AM | 38,944 Views | 16 Comments
The tour of Microsoft Research continues...this is the final of three parts.

Here we meet Raman Sarin, who was part of the team that did a cool little Seattle-area traffic reporting and prediction application (we're dogfooding it here at Channel 9 and it saves us hours every month!). The other developers were Johnson Apacible and Eric Horvitz.

Also in the first part of the video is Eric and Susan Dumais, senior researcher. Susan and Raman worked on the search technology that's part of MSN's Desktop Toolbar Suite (really cool for searching everything on your machine).

Later you meet David Heckerman who is working on HIV research (HIV is the virus that causes AIDS), among other things.

Both David and Eric are actually medical doctors and met at Stanford. David, Eric, and others developed the spam filtering technology that's used by Hotmail. More details on that are here.

The two monitors on Raman's desk are two of the nicest monitors we've seen at Microsoft. Neat setup Raman!

If you missed the previous parts of the tour, here they are:

Part I - Graphic and Developer Tool Research.

Part II - Machine Learning and Information Overload Research.

By the way, Eric Horvitz has more information on his home page and has a survey on "consiousness in computing." That is a popular page and has gotten people to think in different ways about what consciousness.
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#Feb 8th, 2005 @ 7:41 AM
Minh
Minh
WOOH! WOOH!
Any Research product going into Longhorn?
#Feb 8th, 2005 @ 7:43 AM
scobleizer
scobleizer
I'm the video guy
Of course! But we'll talk more about that when Beta 1 comes out.
#Feb 8th, 2005 @ 8:00 AM
Minh
Minh
WOOH! WOOH!
It's inspiring to see David Heckerman using technology to develop something that can have such great effect in daily life. It's great PR currency, but don't show a abstract advert of a flowing wheat field w/ a voice-over going "we're curing AIDS". Buy a 21 minutes spot on TV & show this video.
#Feb 8th, 2005 @ 8:38 AM
BinaryBoy
BinaryBoy
Will these systems consider the effects of their own advice, especially if they become widely used?  For example, if they say a traffic jam is about to clear, won't that draw more traffic to that location and make the situation worse?  Or if everyones device says you're most likely to answer the phone at 12:35pm, wouldn't it almost guarantee that 12:35pm is a bad time to call.  Seems like people would learn to do the opposite of what's recommended.
#Feb 8th, 2005 @ 11:03 AM
Charles
Charles
Welcome Change
Where can we learn more about the HIV vaccine project? The cellular approach to vaccination is incredibly compelling. I'm almost certain that something similar has been tried before in cancer research. I know FHCRC ("The Hutch") was working on ways to make cancerous cells somehow express themselves as being non-self, which would encourage killer T cells to destroy malignant cells. This is grossly over-simplified, of course. I'd imagine you are working with these teams on this project.

Incredible work, Dr. Heckerman. Thank you.

#Feb 8th, 2005 @ 11:04 AM
work4bandwidth
work4bandwidth
David Heckerman presented a side of Microsoft that I think the general public knows absolutely nothing about and certainly should.  Someone buy him a better monitor set up. He deserves it.
#Feb 8th, 2005 @ 11:14 AM
ZippyV
ZippyV
Fired Up

In what stage is that HIV project now?

Charles, there is an interesting project going on to find a solution for cancer and YOU (and everybody else) can help too! More info.

#Feb 8th, 2005 @ 4:48 PM
heckerma
heckerma
Thanks!

Yes, we're working with teams in Perth Australia and at the UW, the Hutch, and Harvard.

We're in the process of writing a paper.  When it's ready, we'll announce it on http://research.microsoft.com/bioinfo/.
#Feb 8th, 2005 @ 4:53 PM
heckerma
heckerma

Test-tube evaluations are underway with teams in Perth Australia and the UW.

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