Entries tagged with ms research - Channel 9

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

Dan — 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

briankel — 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!

LOW RES FILE

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 — 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

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 21:24:44 GMT

A few months ago, I 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 here.

Kentaro Toyama on MSR India [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.

in reply to Kentaro Toyama on MSR India

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.

Rich Williams: On Computational Ecology and Working at MSR

Charles — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 16:24:24 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, we meet Rich Williams, a Researcher (Computational Ecology) and programmer writing complex modeling algorithms that professional ecologists can use to understand the behavior and dynamics of the systems they study.

Models (or predictive simulations) help real-world scientists get a grasp on complex dynamical systems like ecological systems. Consider all the variables involved in an emergent system with complex interactions between biological and physical/chemical systems... Without computation, understanding ecological systems is not possible. Tune in. Enjoy.

Andrew Herbert: On Managing Scientists and Researching the Future at MSR Cambridge

Charles — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 18:47:25 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).

In this interview, I sit down with Andrew Herbert, Distinguished Engineer and Managing Director of MSR Cambridge. Andrew, an OS guy at heart, manages over one hundred researchers, who, by definition, are unmanageable - that is, you can't tell a researcher what to do; you can only guide them in the right direction and ensure that they do not get too distracted from their science.

Tune in and learn about Andrew's past, the history of MSR Cambridge, important research areas in computation for the next 10 years, and what life is like at MSR for scientists.

Byron Cook: Terminator - Proving Good Things Will Eventually Happen

Charles — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 15:31:52 GMT

Here's another installment from MSR Cambridge (much more to come). This time, I was lucky enough to get some time with Byron Cook, a researcher in MSR's Programming Principles and Tools group focusing on static analysis of system code to hunt for algorithms and code fragments that will most likely induce a system state lovingly referred to by all as a Hang. You know, when nothing seems to work anymore, you can't use your mouse or keyboard, windows are frozen in time and you resort to a hard reboot. Well, what is a hang, exactly? How is a hang directly related to events? Did you know that a typical hang is event-related (never ending event response) caused by kernel mode code (drivers mostly) that never, well, terminates?

Byron and team have written a very interesting tool that analyzes code, tests it against proofs of correctness (mathematical proofs, indeed) and alerts developers at design time that some code they've written is heading down a very slippery slope that will end in a hang. Terminator is proof based. OK. How does Terminator work, you ask? Proofs? It's all about prooving termination.

Please tune in and find out. This is a really cool introduction to the notion of mathematically prooving that good things will eventually happen in code.

PS. I just found out that, like myself, Byron is an Evergreen State College alumnus. Small world!

Rick Rashid: Leading Microsoft into the Future with Research

Charles — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 16:20:09 GMT

Microsoft Research Cambridge turned 10 years old this week. Happy birthday MSRC! I was lucky enough to have been there (in fact I am still there, or is that here, as I type) and conducted 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)

In this interview, I sit down with the fearless leader of Microsoft Research (he started MSR, actually), Rick Rashid, Senior Vice President and computer scientist (he's a famous OS guy (you'll meet another one in a subsequent interview)). We talk about the role MSR plays in Microsoft's strategic vision, what's expected of MSR scientists, what attracts academics to industry, the state of operating system research and more. Enjoy.

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.