Entries tagged with ms research - Channel 9

Margaret Burnett: Gender and Software

Charles — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 18:49:00 GMT

Meet Dr. Margaret Burnett, a Professor of Computer Science at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Oregon State University. She is exploring hypotheses correlating and differentiating (or unifying) both the design and usage patterns of software by gender. Dr. Burnett has spent the last three months as a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research. Great fodder for the latest edition of WM_IN, we thought, and we were lucky enough to catch up with Dr. Burnett during her last week at MSR to talk about her focus of study, which is the fascinating topic of gender differences and human-computer interaction that exist in the ways people solve problems when they use software.

Dr. Burnett's current research focuses on end-user programming, end-user software engineering, information foraging theory as applied to programming, and gender issues in those contexts. She is also the principal architect of the Forms/3 and the FAR visual programming languages, plus the WYSIWYT testing methodology for end-user programmers. Watch, learn and enjoy!

Expert to Expert: Helen Wang and Alex Moshchuk - Inside Gazelle

Charles — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 17:48:00 GMT

Microsoft Research was in the news not too long ago regarding the innovative, outside-the-box research being done by MSR scientists on display at the annual MSR TechFest event. One of the stars of the show was a new web browser project named Gazelle.

Gazelle is a Microsoft Research prototype web browser constructed as a multi-principal OS (emphasis on research and prototype). From the Gazelle Microsoft Research Technical Report: Gazelle’s Browser Kernel is an operating system that exclusively manages resource protection and sharing across web site principals. This construction exposes intricate design issues that no previous work has identified, such as legacy protection of cross-origin script source, and cross-principal, cross-process display and events protection.

Interesting, Captain. This really piqued our curiosity so Erik Meijer and I decided to find out the inside scoop on Gazelle. Why choose an OS architecture to model a web browser? How does it work, exactly? What does multi-principal mean in the context of execution of web pages? Aren't we talking about isolated processes? What happens when a principal is compromised? Is the browser kernel completely isolated from code executing in a principal context(is it possible to "blue screen" Gazelle)? What are the intrinsic challenges with implementing this design? How performant is a multi-principal, kernel-based web browser (what if you have 40 principal contexts running simultaneously, for example)?

This is a great conversation with Gazelle project lead Helen Wang and Alex Moshchuk, a PhD student intern developer working on the Gazelle project. We cover a lot of ground and Erik and I are unusually curious given the fascinating model Gazelle represents for a truly secure web browser.

Enjoy! This is a birthday present from Channel 9 to you!

Expert to Expert: Inside Concurrent Basic (CB)

Charles — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 23:09:00 GMT

"Concurrent Basic extends Visual Basic with stylish asynchronous concurrency constructs derived from the join calculus. Our design advances earlier MSRC work on Polyphonic C#, Comega and the Joins Library. Unlike its C# based predecessors, CB adopts a simple event-like syntax familiar to VB programmers, allows one to declare generic concurrency abstractions and provides more natural support for inheritance. CB also offers open extensibility based on custom attributes."

Code Sample:

Module Buffer

Public Asynchronous Put(ByVal s As String)

Public Synchronous Take() As String

Private Function CaseTakeAndPut(ByVal s As String) As String When Take, Put

Return s

End Function

End Module

OK. Sounds great. There are new keywords, Asynchronous and Synchronous. Conceptually, these are easy enough to understand. How do they work, exactly? What's the thinking behind the current design? Why was VB.NET chosen as the language to extend? Wouldn't any CLI language suffice? Who thought this up, anyway? What's the thinking behind the thinking?

Enter C9 celebrity host Erik Meijer, who leads yet another great conversation with fellow software experts Claudio Russo (MSR Researcher and co-creator of Concurrent Basic) and Lucian Wischik (software developer and current VB.NET Czar).

Obviously, we've been focusing a lot of attention of Concurrency and Parallelism over the past few years. We talk about the library versus language approach quite a bit. In this case, concurrency constructs have been baked into the language to form a different variant of VB, CB (Concurrent Basic). CB is a research project and therefore a research language. It has no ship vehicle and is not available for trial at this point. Microsoft makes no committment to shipping VB with these concurrency constructs built in. CB is a research language. CB is being shown in action at this year's MSR TechFest. Be sure to check out Laura's coverage of TechFest 2009.

Minds, Machines, and Intelligence: A Conversation with Eric Horvitz

Charles — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 19:41:00 GMT

Microsoft is well known for Windows, Office, .NET, Xbox, Zune and a long list of other products and technologies.

Less discussed however, is a group at Microsoft that isn’t necessarily focused on ship dates, packaging, or competing products. Instead they think about how computers and technology can make life easier, with an eye towards developing new technologies that can improve all our lives and often in cooperation with product team, but also working with people in academia, governments and industry. The name of this group is Microsoft Research.

Eric Horvitz, today’s guest, joined Microsoft Research with two colleagues in 1993 to form the Decision Theory and Adaptive Systems group. Since then he has been at the center of a variety of projects focused on machine intelligence and adaptation, and the related tasks of information discovery, collection, and delivery

CHESS: An Automated Concurrency Testing Tool

Charles — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 21:46:00 GMT

CHESS is an automated tool from Microsoft Research for finding errors in multithreaded software by systematic exploration of thread schedules. It finds errors, such as data-races, deadlocks, hangs, and data-corruption induced access violations, that are extremely hard to find with current testing tools. Once CHESS locates an error, it provides a fully repeatable execution of the program leading to the error, thus greatly aiding the debugging process. In addition, CHESS provides a valuable and novel notion of test coverage suitable for multithreaded programs. CHESS can use existing concurrent test cases and is therefore easy to deploy. Both developers and testers should find CHESS useful. The CHESS architecture is described in this technical report.

Here, we meet some of the researchers behind CHESS, Madan Musuvathi and Shaz Qadeer. Joining in the conversation are two software test engineers extraordinare, Chris Dern and Rahul Patil. Chris and Rahul use CHESS as part of their daily routine of finding bugs in the various technologies that power Microsoft's Parallel Computing Platform. Tune in and learn about this great technology from the folks who know it best.

Expert to Expert: Natural Language and Computational Linguistics

Charles — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 18:34:00 GMT

Ever wonder what it takes to compute language (language in this case refers to what we humans speak and or/write)? From Wikipedia: Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the statistical and/or rule-based modeling of natural language from a computational perspective. This modeling is not limited to any particular field of linguistics. Traditionally, computational linguistics was usually performed by computer scientists who had specialized in the application of computers to the processing of a natural language. Computational linguists often work as members of interdisciplinary teams, including linguists (specifically trained in linguistics), language experts (persons with some level of ability in the languages relevant to a given project), and computer scientists. In general computational linguistics draws upon the involvement of linguists, computer scientists, experts in artificial intelligence, cognitive psychologists, mathematicians, and logicians, amongst others.

Here, we meet some of the scientists in Microsoft Research who work on computational linguistics. The great Erik Meijer conducts the interview. Special guests are: Researchers Chris Quirk, Michael Gamon and Lucy Vanderwende. This is a great Expert to Expert since the Experts in this case are from different domains of expertise (Erik is a programming language specialist. The scientists Erik converses with are specialists in natural language computation, linguisitics and mathematics). This is a fascinating conversation that spans topics from natural language processing to computing understanding (Yes. AI comes up...).

Enjoy!

Countdown to PDC2008: Rick Rashid, a Researcher’s Researcher

Charles — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 21:18:00 GMT

17 years in the same job? Yep, Senior Vice President of Microsoft Research, Rick Rashid has been doing the same thing since the first day he joined the firm, and he’s still loving it. Listen to Rick talk about all of the cool innovation coming out of MSR, and he foreshadows his PDC keynote warning audience members to be thoughtful about where they sit during his speech. Hmmm. Whatever in the world could that possibly mean? Who cares! Mike’s got apple pie in this, his final PDC Hard Hat Challenge. Bonne chance!

Curtis Wong, Roy Gould: The story of the WorldWide Telescope

Dan Fernandez — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 16:54:00 GMT

John Udell recently published a great podcast with Curtis Wong, manager of Next Media Research for Microsoft, and Roy Gould, a science educator with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics on the inception of the WorldWide Telescope project.

Interview transcript and podcast

Pex - Automated Exploratory Testing for .NET

Brian Keller — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 17:56:00 GMT

Pex is a tool being developed by Microsoft Research which has the potential to dramatically improve the quality of software testing while requiring minimal, if any, effort on the part of the developer. Pex can automatically generate a set of inputs for a paramaterized unit test which can effectively excercise most, if not all, possible code paths.

I visited Nikolai Tillmann and Peli de Halleux on the Pex team for a closer look at this cool technology.

Expert to Expert: Contract Oriented Programming and Spec#

Charles — Tue, 27 May 2008 18:27:52 GMT

The Spec# programming system is a new attempt at a more cost effective way to develop and maintain high-quality software. Spec# is pronounced "Spec sharp" and can be written (and searched for) as the "specsharp" or "Spec# programming system". The Spec# system consists of:

The Spec# programming language. Spec# is an extension of the object-oriented language C#. It extends the type system to include non-null types and checked exceptions. It provides method contracts in the form of pre- and postconditions as well as object invariants.

The Spec# compiler. Integrated into the Microsoft Visual Studio development environment for the .NET platform, the compiler statically enforces non-null types, emits run-time checks for method contracts and invariants, and records the contracts as metadata for consumption by downstream tools.

The Spec# static program verifier. This component (codenamed Boogie) generates logical verification conditions from a Spec# program. Internally, it uses an automatic theorem prover that analyzes the verification conditions to prove the correctness of the program or find errors in it.

A unique feature of the Spec# programming system is its guarantee of maintaining invariants in object-oriented programs in the presence of callbacks, threads, and inter-object relationships.

The Spec# programming system is being developed as a research project at Microsoft Research in Redmond, primarily by the Programming Languages and Methods group.

Here, Expert to Expert guest expert and programming language guru Erik Meijer chats with MSR researchers and spec# designers Wolfram Schulte, Rustan Leino and Peter Mueller. We dig into the details of Spec# and contract oriented programming in general. Plenty of code on the screen and lots of deep conversation. Just how we like it for Going Deep and Expert to Expert.

Enjoy!

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MP4

ZUNE

Dan Reed: On the ManyCore Future and Parallelism in the Sky

Charles — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 19:42:12 GMT

Dan Reed is Microsoft's Director of Scalable/Multi-Core Systems Research and head of the recently formed Universal Parallel Computing Research Centers (UPCRC): one at the University of California at Berkeley (UC-Berkeley) and a second at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Since we've been here) but part of the same wide-angle general purpose solution to the complex (and arguably fractal) general problem that spans microblips in DRAM to massive data centers.

Certainly the computation Cloud of the future must not only be scalable and highly performant, but also adaptive and homeostatic in how it reacts to frequent perturbation.

What are some of the challenges on the server side with respect to concurrent processing and massive scalability? Clustered server computing environments have traditionally been very good at parallel computation (compared to the general purpose client) so what's Dan and Microsoft working on to ensure our Cloud scales to ManyCore? Is machine learning being incorporated into clustered computing software adaptation and evolution?

Dan has a very interesting biography:

"Previously, I was the founding director of the Renaissiance Computing Institute (RENCI) at the University of North Carolina, the Chancellor's Eminent Professor, and Senior Advisor for Strategy and Innovation. Before that, I was head of the Department of Computer Science, Edward William and Jane Marr Gutgsell Professor, and Director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois.
I am also a member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) and chair of the Computing Research Association (CRA)"

Dan was the head of CS at Illinois during the birth of the web browser Mosaic which changed the way people interact with the Internet forever... We talk about where the web is today (including browsers) versus what Mosaic enabled when it arrived.

Enjoy. This is another great discussion with a supercomputing stalwart whose main focus these days is on ensuring we are prepared for the highly parallel future of general purpose computation in the sky.

Low res file here.

Expert to Expert: Erik Meijer and Bertrand Meyer - Objects, Contracts, Concurrency, Sleeping Barbers

Charles — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 18:32:29 GMT

Bertrand Meyer is a programming language guru, computer scientist and arguably the uncle of object oriented programming :). Bertrand created the Eiffel programming language. Eiffel is an object-oriented language that is based on a fixed set of powerful principles like Design by Contract and Command-Query Separation. It's a very powerful language that has impacted the evolution of the more popular general purpose OO languages such as Java and C#.

With the arrival of multi-core and soon-to-arrive many-core chipsets concurrency and parallelism are top-of-mind for general purpose language designers these days. Bertrand has introduced the SCOOP model on top of Eiffel. SCOOP is a comprehensive effort to make concurrent and distributed programming simple and safe, taking advantages of Eiffel's object technology and Design by Contract.

General purpose programming language designer and passionate functional programmig advocate Erik Meijer leads the discussion in this addition of Expert to Expert. You all know great tools for software developers.

Very special guest star and famous mathematical logician Yuri Gurevich joins us for the first half of the conversation (He happened to be in Bertrand's office when we arrived - very lucky for us indeed! :)).

This is a long conversation that I hope you eenjoy as much as I do. Find yourself some quality time to listen and learn from this chat amongst some the world's finest programming thinkers.

Enjoy!

Low res file here.

TechFest - Lie Lu and Frank Seide - Music Steering Project

Dan Fernandez — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 19:25:03 GMT

The Music Steering Project is a software project that analyzes audio content to dynamically build a playlists of similar music (similar to Pandora). This enables you to easily discover new artists and songs, a problem I've personally had with a Zune subscription. It also enables you to set the mood of music you want to listen to and have the software automatically build you a playlist based on your mood.

TechFest - Feng Zhao - Tiny Web Services

Dan Fernandez — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 17:53:58 GMT

In honor of Earth day today, we're putting this video back up on the home page as it's a great eco-friendly concept and it's programmable!

What if you could build a microchip that was power efficient enough to run a small Web server and host Web services that enabled it to monitor or change it's state, all using 2AA batteries that could run for years? Feng's team is building exactly that, a series of prototype sensors that can be used to do things like monitor electricity efficiency and usage over time to help reduce costs and be more green and you can programatically control them in Visual Studio like you would any Web service.

Techfest - Chuck Thacker and John Davis - Revitalizing Chip Architecture Research

Dan Fernandez — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 17:31:47 GMT

The goal of this Techfest project is to help revitalize chipset architecture research by enabling academia to build new chip architectures without the expense of fabricating custom chips.

TechFest - Merrie Morris - Collaborative Search, Co-Search, and Search Bar

Dan Fernandez — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 17:23:31 GMT

In this video, you'll see demos of some unique ways to alter the search experience including

- Collaborative Search - searching and annotating with multiple people
- Co-Search - multiple people using the same computer with multiple mice and mobile phones for input devices
- Search Bar - Enables a single person to keep track of their search results

TechFest - Frank McSherry - Privacy Integrated Queries

Dan Fernandez — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 16:50:42 GMT

Privacy Integrated Queries is a system that enables you to use any LINQ-enabled provider to query and analyze sensitive data (medical data, search logs, financial data) without revealing sensitive information. Watch the video to see a demo of it in action using MSN Search logs

TechNet Radio: How Microsoft IT uses Visual Studio Team System 2005 to Measure Software Code Stabil

erickingfrog — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 17:13:55 GMT

A strategic initiative within Microsoft IT is to improve the overall productivity, quality, and predictability of internal software development projects. Microsoft IT partnered with Microsoft Research to create a Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2005 extension that counts lines of code and predicts system defects. In the software development environment, insight into the volume of code being produced, and the changes applied to that code, provide measurements of productivity and quality. Join this TechNet Radio to see how the Line of Code (LOC) counter provides a flexible and extensible framework for automating the LOC counting process.

Eric Ostrowski - Your Show Host and TechNet Radio Producer

Chris Avis – IT Pro Evangelist

Anantharam Chadalavada - Anantharam Chadalavada is a senior program manager at Microsoft IT, driving implementation of Team Software Process and Scrum Coaching and development of internal tools to aid Microsoft IT program delivery engineering excellence. Anantharam also contributes to evangelizing software quality practices and software measurement frameworks across Microsoft IT. Prior to joining Microsoft, he worked for seven years in software consulting based in Illinois and before that in the technology industry in India for about eight years. He holds a bachelor's of technology degree in electronic engineering.

Inside MultiTouch: Team, Demo, Lab Tour

Charles — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 00:31:33 GMT

MSR Cambridge is a hotbed of innovation. TabletPC, Machine Learning, Vision, F#, Generics, Software Transactional Memory to name only a few off the top of my head (yeah, I probably missed some bigger ones. It's OK. You get the point...).

You've heard of the latest brainchild: MultiTouch (you've seen the YouTube video, I'd imagine...). But, you haven't met all the characters involved with this intriguing invention (no, it's not really related to Microsoft Surface and other highly sophisticated multi-touch technologies) and you've certainly not heard about what they're currently working on or seen where they experiment and build this stuff.

Well, now you will. Meet the scientists behind MultiTouch; Shahram Izadi, Alex Butler, and Steve Hodges. Tune in and learn about the Who, What, How and Why behind MSR's innovative MultiTouch. It's pretty amazing and, surprisingly, not incredibly complicated technology. Find out all about it right here on Channel 9. :)

Enjoy!

Bill Buxton: Designing User Experience

Charles — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 09:57:42 GMT

Bill Buxton is a researcher in MSR. I got the chance to sit down with him recently to learn about user experience from the design guru himself.

His bio:

"Bill Buxton is a designer and a researcher concerned with human aspects of technology. His work reflects a particular interest in the use of technology to support creative activities such as design, film making and music. Buxton's research specialties include technologies, techniques and theories of input to computers, technology mediated human-human collaboration, and ubiquitous computing. "

Enjoy.

Byron Cook: Inside Terminator

Charles — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 21:24:00 GMT

A few months ago, I interviewed Byron Cook, a researcher at MSR Cambridge, about his work on Terminator, which is a proof-based analysis tool used for proving that good things will eventually happen in unmanaged code paths. That is, it's a very good thing for code to stop executing eventually otherwise system hangs occur (drivers are the number one cause of system hangs and other undesirable system-wide problems).

Terminator is designed to help developers find bugs in their code that cause non-terminating execution. Many of you provided feedback after the last interview that Byron should have gone a bit deeper into the technology, including whiteboarding proofs. Well, he was recently in Redmond and agreed to be the next participant in Going Deep.

Here we dig into the details of Terminator on the whiteboard and even see a demo of Terminator running over some DDK (Driver Development Kit) sample C code.

Fasten your seat belts. We do jump head first into the rabbit hole.

Enjoy!

PS: The Download file (pointed to from the Download button below) was encoded at 512Kbs. If you want a higher bit rate file you can click here.

Kentaro Toyama on MSR India

JonUdell — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 19:40:50 GMT

This morning I spoke with Kentaro Toyama, the assistant managing director of Microsoft Research India, about the mission of Microsoft's Bangalore-based research center. Our podcast touches on all six of MSR India's research areas. These are mostly the same kinds of advanced computer science problems that the other labs around the world focus on. Although it wasn't a requirement that each of these efforts be particularly appropriate to India, it turns out that one way or another they are.

India's wealth of mathematical talent, for example, is a tremendous asset for a research program in cryptography, security, and algorithms. Likewise its linguistic diversity -- there are 22 officially recognized languages, and several hundred dialects -- makes it a natural home for research on multilingual systems. And a country that's adding 7 million mobile phone subscribers every month is a great place to investigate mobility, networks, and systems.

There's also work in areas outside the realm of classic computer science. Kentaro Toyama leads an area called technology for emerging markets which tackles problems like how to create text-free user interfaces for people who cannot read. Obviously you need to rely heavily on graphics and on audio feedback, but there are fascinating subtleties involved. Simple icons don't work well, because they're not expressive enough. But fully realistic images don't work well either, because they're overly literal. It turns out that a cartoon-like approach is what works best, and within that discipline there are further subtleties -- for example, you want to animate the pictorial verbs, but not the nouns.

I was also fascinated to hear about related work in digital geographics, and in particular, about an effort to render map data in the style of hand-drawn historical maps. Why do this? Well for one thing, those old maps are beautiful. But as Kentaro Toyama points out, there's a non-aesthetic reason too. Maps produced by human cartographers communicate more effectively than machine-generated maps normally can. That's because cartographers use their intelligence and judgement to select and emphasize certain features at the expense of others. It'd be great to be able to model some of that intelligence and judgment and reproduce it software.

I've been to India twice. When I was 5, my family lived in New Delhi for a year. Then in 1993, for BYTE, I visited to learn about the software industry there. Maybe finding out more about MSR India will turn out to be a reason to go again.

Mitch Goldberg: Where Research and Products Meet - Who Drives Who?

Charles — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 17:14:42 GMT

Microsoft Research Cambridge turned 10 years old last week. Happy birthday MSRC! I was lucky enough to have been there and was able to conduct several interviews with some of the many unusually intelligent and passionate folks who think about the future of computing and the role computation plays in every aspect of our lives (from new interactive devices that promise to make the business of home life more interesting and less stressful, tools and methodologies that will help Microsoft quickly respond to industry changes (can you say many core?) to understanding, via accurate modeling, incredibly complex biological and ecological systems).

Here, I catch up with Mitch Goldberg, Director, who has the really interesting and enviable job of connecting Research with product teams and helping to ensure that the great technologies coming out of MSR make their way into real products. This technology/algorithm sharing is known as tech transfer.

The relationship between MSR and Microsoft's product groups is stronger than ever. Mitch explains how the relationship "works", the interesting dynamics between the hard-schedule-based product teams on the one hand and the non-product-release-driven scientists on the other. What recent Microsoft products contain MSR Cambridge research technologies? Tune in.

Simon Peyton-Jones: Towards a Programming Language Nirvana

Charles — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 17:55:14 GMT

While in Cambridge, England recently for the MSR Cambridge 10 year anniversary and MSR Cambridge PhD Summer School (stay tuned for coverage on this on Channel 8...) I caught up with Simon Peyton-Jones, Erik Meijer and, very briefly (too briefly), Butler Lampson to talk about what's going on inside Simon's head right now with respect to general purpose programming language evolution.

Trust me, it's most interesting and programmers should be excited about the thoughts in Simon's head these days. Join us for a really brief conversation (I think this is my shortest interview in the 3+ years I've been taking part in conversations here on Channel 9) with some of programming language design's best and brightest. Here, Simon clues us in to the nirvana of programming languages: Safe and Useful (effectful). Better just to listen in to Simon's excellent and succinct explanation of the holy grail of general purpose programming languages.

Enjoy!

PS I will be interviewing Butler Lampson sometime in the future (when he's in Redmond). He's a rather prominent computer scientist with a rich history in making systems that many of us rely on for a number of things...

Natasa Milic-Frayling: Research Partnerships and Knowledge Exchange

Charles — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 15:54:59 GMT

Microsoft Research Cambridge turned 10 years old last week. Happy birthday MSRC! I was lucky enough to have been there and was able to conduct several interviews with some of the many unusually intelligent and passionate folks who think about the future of computing and the role computation plays in every aspect of our lives (from new interactive devices that promise to make the business of home life more interesting and less stressful, tools and methodologies that will help Microsoft quickly respond to industry changes (can you say many core?) to understanding, via accurate modeling, incredibly complex biological and ecological systems).

Have you ever thought about the how to preserve digital media? It's not an easy problem. It's one issue that Natasa Milic-Frayling, Senior Researcher and mathematician and team work on in partnership with companies, libraries, universities, goverments. Natasa runs Microsoft's Research Partnership Program, which is a collaborative enterprise of cross-industry knowledge exchange to solve industry-scale problems.