Entries tagged with collaborative applied research - Channel 9

Trident Workbench

Sam Stokes — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 22:22:00 GMT

Hey, take a look at the Trident Workbench from Microsoft Research. It is a great idea, and with time it looks like it will evolve into a great tool for scienitists and researchers.

It can be found at: Trident Workbench

EMIC - Software Verification

Lori — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 16:57:00 GMT

Today – more than ever – complex software architectures, configurations and the implications of parallel software running on multi-core hardware call for a new methodology to make sure that software is of high-quality and does what it is was designed for. By using a formal approach and going beyond regular software testing the verification team at the European Microsoft Innovation Center (EMIC), Aachen, Germany are enhancing software verification methods and tools and applying them to analyze 50,000 lines of code in a real life scenario of a market-ready product. This approach is what makes the project unique.

Thomas Santen and Stephan Tobies from EMIC explain what formal software verification is about and how it can help to build reliable systems. The technology they explain is being developed jointly at EMIC and Microsoft’s Research in Software Engineering group (RiSE) in Redmond. Their tool VCC verifies concurrent, low-level C code that is annotated by contracts specifying its intended behavior.

Thomas and Stephan work in the hypervisor verification project Verisoft, which is a collaboration of EMIC, RiSE, along with Wolfgang Paul, professor for computer architecture at the Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany. The aim of this project is to verify the hypervisor kernel of Microsoft Hyper-V, Microsoft’s virtualization product. The hypervisor kernel is a small multi-processor operating system micro kernel with memory and thread management but without device drivers. The implementation of this kernel consists of roughly 60 thousand lines of highly optimized C and x64 assembler code.

For further information, please contact Thomas Santen (Thomas.Santen-at-microsoft.com) or Stephan Tobies (Stephan.Tobies-at-microsoft.com).

EMIC Celebrates 5th Anniversary

Lori — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 17:08:00 GMT

The European Microsoft Innovation Center (EMIC) recently celebrated its 5th anniversary with a reception at its offices in Aachen, Germany. At the party, guests had the opportunity to talk to researchers, check out demos of some of their current projects and enjoy food and drinks. EMIC is a Microsoft Research & Development facility that focuses on collaborative applied research in Europe.

For more information on EMIC research, projects and partners, visit:

http://www.microsoft.com/EMIC

EMIC - Delegation Framework

Lori — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:52:00 GMT

Anna Nano is a Software Design Engineer in the Security team at the European Microsoft Innovation Center (EMIC) in Aachen, Germany, where she works on a delegation framework project.

In today’s world, we rely more and more on digitally available information that is stored, processed or provided by services on the Internet. Examples include Health Vault, where users can store their medical data, or a sightseeing service providing users with city tours based on their current location, etc. Due to this greater reliance on services, composing web services is becoming an important part of application development. It is more and more common to combine services from different providers into one application. However, services dealing with personal information of users have security and privacy requirements that make their composition difficult. Users care about privacy and want to control who can access their personal information. For example, they want to let their friends view their online pictures or let a sightseeing service access their current location. To do this they need a way to delegate access to their personal information. Currently, it is difficult for users to deal with the variety of existing solutions for access control. There are simply too many disparate user experiences. Think about creating a XACML policy, managing an access control list, or handling credentials to a friend. This variety will never totally disappear.

To solve this problem, Anna and her colleagues have proposed an abstraction model for existing access control mechanisms and a unified way for the user to delegate rights. A unified API is essential for the emerging market of service composition. Their proposed unified API makes services dealing with user’s personal information available for composition without polluting the details of the composition with access control details.

This solution provides tools for abstract delegation that is independent of the underlying mechanisms as well as a unified user experience for delegation, revocation and the overall management of access to personal data. These tools allow specifying at the composition level that a delegator grants access on a resource to a delegatee that is then mapped to the management of a concrete access control mechanism depending on the composed service.

The European Microsoft Innovation Center (EMIC), founded in 2003 in Aachen, Germany, is a Microsoft Research & Development facility. The German lab is unique to Microsoft in its focus on collaborative applied research in Europe. EMIC works in the context of development programs sponsored by the European Commission and the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). EMIC’s research is focused on enterprise, mobility, home, security, software verification and embedded systems. www.microsoft.com/EMIC

EMIC - Specialized Workflow Foundation Activity

Lori — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:09:00 GMT

In this video, Sébastien Peray and Marcel Tilly from the European Microsoft Innovation Center’s (EMIC) Enterprise team talk about the project that they are working on - a new, specialized Workflow Foundation activity as an easy to use approach for dynamic service selection.

People are often faced with the problem of how to find the right service for a specific problem, for example finding the closest printer with the smallest printer queue or even just finding the cheapest book. Everybody would like to use the best, cheapest, or closest service depending on his or her own context. Optimizing service usage and service selection and finding the cheapest service are well-known tasks in the enterprise as they help to reduce costs.

Sébastien and Marcel talk about how to find the right service at the right time during runtime and introduce a lightweight, new concept. They present how easily and quickly every developer can make his or her static workflow more dynamic and flexible. This new, specialized Workflow Foundation activity called AbstractServiceActivity can easily be added to each workflow. The developer can add and remove services to this activity and can define criteria for service selection, like price, reliability, etc. All this is possible during runtime without changing the workflow itself. This pragmatic solution helps to solve dynamic service selection problems in most of the cases without adding too much complexity.

EMIC - Framework to Build Prototype Solutions for "Crisis of Choice"

Lori — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 15:55:00 GMT

We are drowning in a sea of information overload. Television channels, email, books and music assault our senses with far too much content. The volume of content on the internet and generated by applications is literally exploding. Not only traditional media but millions of individual users are putting their own content on the web. The massive popularity of YouTube is just one example of this phenomenon. In this flood, how do you distinguish content that matters to you from the rest? How do you for example discover multimedia information and entertainment in a way that suits you personally? Isn’t there an easier way?

The European Microsoft Innovation Center (EMIC) Home team created a framework that allows you to quickly prototype solutions that help you solve this “crisis of choice.”

In this video, Ron Mevissen, Lead Developer of EMIC Home team, gives an introduction to the topic and the project. He also shows the Media Center recommender prototype that helps you find interesting TV programs. After that, Stefan Hirtbach, Software Engineer in the EMIC Home teams shows a recommender for Outlook that helps you decide the importance of email - which one should I read now, which one can wait. Rich Hanbidge, Software Engineer in the EMIC Home team shows a recommender for Xbox Live that helps you find interesting items such as downloadable videos, games, etc. offered by Xbox Live. Rene Hülswitt, Software Engineer in the EMIC Home team shows the Virtual Earth recommender that helps find interesting POI (points of interests) like restaurants, tourist attractions etc. near you.

The European Microsoft Innovation Center (EMIC), founded in 2003 in Aachen, Germany, is a Microsoft Research & Development facility. The German lab is unique to Microsoft in its focus on collaborative applied research in Europe. EMIC works in the context of development programs sponsored by the European Commission and the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). EMIC’s research is focused on enterprise, mobility, home, security, software verification and embedded systems. www.microsoft.com/EMIC

European Microsoft Innovation Center in Aachen, Germany

Lori — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 10:31:00 GMT

Back in June I went to Aachen, Germany to visit the European Microsoft Innovation Center (EMIC). There I spoke with several of the scientists and engineers working at EMIC. In this video, I interview John Lefor, Director of EMIC, to find out more about what it is they do there.

EMIC

EMIC is one of the Microsoft facilities dedicated to research and development in Europe. The German lab is unique to Microsoft in its focus on collaborative applied research in Europe. Under the auspices of research and development programs sponsored by the European Commission and the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), EMIC develops technologies that are made available for the next generation of software systems, products, and standards. EMIC contributes knowledge to the European technology community and gains information from European areas of expertise, reinforcing relationships with the European industrial and academic community. EMIC’s researchers work together with more than 100 respected European academic and business partners throughout Europe, including British Telecom, SAP, Siemens, Philips, Hewlett-Packard, the Fraunhofer Society and INRIA among others. EMIC was founded in 2003 and is host to more than 40 scientists and engineers from more than ten different countries.

At the European Microsoft Innovation Center, research is focused in the following areas:

· Enterprise: service level agreements (SLA) and distributed complex event processing (CEP), dynamic service composition and knowledge process support

· Mobility: network awareness and cognitive radio, service-oriented sensor applications, and peer-to-peer

· Home: recommender framework, home service middleware

· Security: security and privacy for service composition, dynamic authorization, and context-aware information rights management

· Software verification: industrially viable methodology and scalable tools

· Embedded systems: embedded runtimes, methods & tools, and distributed embedded systems and services

For more information on EMIC research, projects and partners, visit:

http://www.microsoft.com/EMIC