{"id":307148,"date":"2009-04-22T14:21:31","date_gmt":"2009-04-22T21:21:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/?p=307148"},"modified":"2016-10-17T16:51:49","modified_gmt":"2016-10-17T23:51:49","slug":"beijing-labs-new-initiative-eheritage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/blog\/beijing-labs-new-initiative-eheritage\/","title":{"rendered":"Beijing Lab\u2019s New Initiative: eHeritage"},"content":{"rendered":"
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research<\/em><\/p>\n Leonardo da Vinci and Filippo Brunelleschi resound through history as two of the guiding lights of the Italian Renaissance. Leonardo, of course, gifted us with the Mona Lisa<\/em> and The Last Supper<\/em>, but he also excelled at mathematics, engineering, anatomy, botany, and a clutch of additional artistic endeavors. Brunelleschi, meanwhile is heralded for his dome atop the Duomo in Florence, but in addition to that engineering feat, he also devised the linear perspective, a revolutionary principle in 15th-century painting.<\/p>\n Men of art, men of science\u2014such wide-ranging expertise is rare 600 years later, but if Lolan Song has her way, such disparate disciplines soon might be converging anew to help preserve some of the world\u2019s greatest treasures.<\/p>\n Song, senior director of the Microsoft External Research<\/a> Division for Microsoft Research Asia<\/a>, well-known as University Relations in the Asia-Pacific region, has joined Baining Guo<\/a>, assistant managing director of Microsoft Research Asia, in spearheading an effort called eHeritage, which aims to use computing technology to assist and partner with the academic community in the Asia Pacific region to digitize portions of the Asian cultural heritage endangered by deterioration or destruction. And in doing so, she is attempting to recombine the threads of science and art that have come unraveled over the centuries.<\/p>\n \u201cScience and art are in the same family,\u201d Song says, \u201cbut over time, that labor division has become more and more specialized, and the arts and science became separate fields. We think that, through new computing technology, we can remarry those two large fields together so that those two can be combined again.\u201d<\/p>\n Guo provides technical advice to the project, receiving support from Ying-Qing Xu, lead researcher in the Internet Graphics Group<\/a>; Xin Tong<\/a>, lead researcher and research manager in the same group; Yasuyuki Matsushita, lead researcher in the Visual Computing Group<\/a>; and Moshe Ben-Ezra, also a lead researcher for the Visual Computing Group. Such teamwork has enabled Microsoft Research Asia to establish itself at the forefront of technological innovation in areas such as computer graphics, computer vision, multimedia, and networking.<\/p>\n The eHeritage project is dedicated to advancing multidisciplinary research worldwide by engaging and partnering with the academic community, focusing on:<\/p>\n Microsoft Research Asia celebrated its 10th anniversary in November, and the lab has demonstrated the quality of its research in top conferences and journals the world over. Having ascended to world-class status, it was only natural that those at the lab began to seek opportunities to make technological contributions to the society at large.<\/p>\n\n