TechFest Overview – Video Montage
Cutting-Edge Technology on Display
Microsoft Research’s annual innovation fair, TechFest, draws thousands of Microsoft employees to view futuristic projects that grow out of the company’s global investment in basic research. Take a quick journey through some innovations and cool technologies showcased during past events.
Videos
Principal Researcher Zhengyou Zhang talks about improving audioconferencing through the use of audio spatialization at this year’s Microsoft Research TechFest.
This demo explores how to add pointing input capabilities to very small screen devices. On first sight, touch-screens seem to allow for particular compactness, because they integrate input and screen into the same physical space. The opposite is true, however, because the users fingers occlude contents and prevent precision. Microsoft Research Redmond has created a 2.4 inch prototype that allows a back-of-device interface. This clip explains how and why it works.
Commute UX: The Next Level of In-Car Infotainment
Ivan Tashev, Y.C. Ju, and Mike Seltzer from Microsoft Research Redmond present novel technologies that enable natural-language input, expose a multimodel user interface including speech, a GUI, touch and buttons; and use the state-of-the-art sound-capture and processing technologies for improved speech recognition and sound quality.
Core Tools for Augmented Reality
Michael Cohen, Principal Researcher from Microsoft Research Redmond explains his TechFest 2009 treasure hunt demonstration using Core Tools for Augmented Reality.
Digital Past to Digital Presence
From archiving your memorabilia to new ways to communicate with your family, Principal Researcher Richard Harper from Microsoft Research Cambridge, demonstrates a suite of new household technologies.
Image-Centric Advertising Platform
In existing online-advertisement platforms, the relevance between advertisers and users is decided largely by advanced keyword matching. With this, advertisers bid on images instead of keywords. For example, a toy seller could bid on the image of a related movie poster, while a restaurant could bid on the image of a cooking magazine cover. Users would receive ads based on the content of images they recently browsed or used.
Low-Power Processors in the Data Center
Microsoft Research Director of Software Architecture Jim Larus demonstrates a prototype datacenter for studying the tradeoffs of low-power processors in the datacenter.
Natural Language Moves In-Car Infotainment Forward
Microsoft Research exposes new natural language technologies that raise the bar for functionality, usability and reliability of in-car infotainment systems.
TechFest 2009: Core Tools For Augmented Reality
This demo will explain the development of a new kind of image feature that can be used within a variety of applications, ranging from image stitching to augmented reality. The features are already finding their way into Microsoft products and are being considered for many new applications. The demo shows a fun example application: A treasure hunt! By using the posters and other graphics on display during TechFest, the users then borrow a device that augments the workd wih virtual clues to find the hidden treasure.
The increasing availability of GPS-enabled devices is changing the way people interact with the web and brings a large number of GPS trajectories representing peoples’ location histories. GeoLife 2.0 is a location based social-networking service on Virtual Earth that enables people to build connections with each other using their location histories. By mining the similarity between location histories, this system can help a user automatically discover potential friends in a community with similar interests. This system also enables travel experts who can help plot the ideal sight-seeing locations for you to visit in any part of the world.
Today, it’s easy to share a webpage or a blog post, because items on the web have unique IDs: URLs. We don’t have this on the desktop. Social Desktop adds URLs to the files and folders on your desktop, letting you share anything on your computer with anyone who can click a URL. Persons receiving links can either access via e-mail or comment, tag and search across all shared items via the Social Desktop webpage
Lei MA from Microsoft Research Asia, shows how to input characters into devices such as Xboxes and TV’s using a low-cost Webcam using air gestures instead of standard keyboard & mouse input. The gestures captured by the camera will be fed into a robust handwriting recognizer.