Entries tagged with techfest - Channel 9

TechFest - Lie Lu and Frank Seide - Music Steering Project

Dan — 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 — 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 — 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 — 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 — 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

Microsoft Research TechFest - XNA, a depth-sensing camera, an LCD projector, and some genius

Rory — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 18:50:05 GMT

There was one booth at TechFest that was constantly jammed with people. Everybody wanted to interview Andy Wilson.

I'm not quite sure what to call his work. I can think of all sorts of adjectives with which to describe it, but an actual name escapes me.

I will say that I had never seen anything like it.

Without a name, then, I'll just say that it's the world's coolest example of real-time terrain generation with XNA through the use of a depth-sensing video camera and real world objects.

It's also probably the world's only example of real-time terrain generation with XNA through the use of a depth-sensing video camera and real world objects.

And even that mouthful isn't enough to describe everything you'll see in this relatively short video.

Something to keep in mind while watching is that this was Andy's first XNA project.

It made me question whether or not I actually know anything at all about coding...

Microsoft Research TechFest - Using P2P to speed up multiplayer gaming (and other things)

Rory — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 02:16:58 GMT

Had some technical difficulties with posting this video yesterday, but we seem to be back online and working.

That's a good thing - this another video in the TechFest series, but it isn't especially business oriented.

Imagine if part of your job was to learn how to play Quake III.

Yeah.

Now imagine that part of your job was to improve Quake III's networking to the point that you could potentially have a game with hundreds of players rather than just sixteen or so.

That's what these guys are doing.

The technology, of course, isn't confined to Quake III. That's just the testing ground. It was an easy choice because the source for Quake III is freely available.

In the end, despite the emphasis on game playing, the subject here is really optimization of P2P networking, and an amazing job was done here.

I'll be back on Monday to post another video in this series, and you really, really won't want to miss it. I'm not going to get into any details here, but it's something pretty special. It'll improve your Monday, anyway :)

Microsoft Research TechFest - Technology on the Wall

Rory — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 00:51:19 GMT

TechFest is quite the event. The room it's taking place in isn't especially big, but it seems enormous because any geek with an ounce of good geeky sense knows to stop at every single last booth.

Nothing bores. Nothing displeases.

It's all amazing.

In this video, you'll get to take a look at some of the ideas MSR has come up with for technology in the home. They want to integrate tech into daily living in such a way that tech is just a medium. The point is to share, view, talk, and enjoy.

All the things you should do at home.

Off camera, I asked if I could buy some of the stuff, and I got a firm no. I think they were happy, though. I mean, who wouldn't be?

If I had designed this stuff I'd be quite proud of myself.

These MSR people really are a different breed. I feel fortunate to have gotten to walk around so casually and talk to so many of them.

Microsoft Research TechFest - Intro, DynaVis, and FastDash

Rory — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 20:13:14 GMT

If you could see me now, I'm a giddy, happy, silly little niner.

I just learned about something at Microsoft that happens every year called "TechFest". It's a convention for Microsoft Research, meant to provide a glimpse of what goes on in what I now think of as the Area 51 of Microsoft.

I spent a couple hours just walking around yesterday, going nuts for everything I saw. Typically, when I go to a convention, I like most of what I see, but it's only the rare item that really brings out my excitement.

TechFest is completely different. There isn't a single thing sitting in there that isn't simply fantastic. Beautiful. Amazing. Fun. Useful.

In this, the first video in what will be a series covering this event, we get a nice introduction to TechFest, some info about Microsoft Research (MSR), and two projects: DynaVis and FastDash.

When you watch this video, hopefully you get an idea of why I'm so excited right now. Once I have the whole series online, you'll be able to see the amazing work being done in MSR - and this only represents a few projects. There are many others.

I'd like to film them all someday :)