In the 15th century, British noblemen decided that they needed brighter colors for their coats of arms to help their armies more easily distinguish them on muddy battlefields. They naturally approached suppliers in their own nation. But when British tradesmen refused to accept this innovative approach to their traditional ways, the noblemen turned to Germany, where tradesmen were more than willing. This in turn helped spawn the German chemical industry, then the German petrochemical industry, then the German pharmaceutical industry. The British were left on the competitive sidelines.

Five centuries later, Otis Elevator, which had dominated its business until the 1970s, found itself in a war with GE, Westinghouse, Hitachi, and Fujitsu. The challenge was how to respond. After all, weren’t elevators just motors and bent metal? Then a member of Otis’s internal IT department made a breakthrough: Otis developed software that could automatically configure elevators and gave it to architects so that they could conform to local building codes, thus gaining market share for Otis. By putting computer chips in elevators, Otis could also send repair crews before systems broke down. Since the real money in elevators is maintenance, those who win the installation battle end up with a cash flow that will continue for as long as the building is standing.

Though separated by a half millennium, these examples show how innovation has always driven new technology, which drives new companies, which create economic growth and jobs. But innovation does not just happen. It requires far more than just inventors: it needs the entire organization. The messianic belief held by many organizations that they can lead in innovation by increasing research and development spending is simply not true. Apple, for example, trails its industry in R&D spending, yet it leads in innovation. And large companies that brag about their research departments by day often end up having to make large acquisitions because their own R&D departments continue to fail them.

America cannot maintain its dominance in some sectors and regain it in others without innovation, the importance of which has been hailed by everyone from the President to the local manager. But innovation does not occur automatically. To produce workers, managers, investors, and others who recognize and reward innovation requires making innovation a state of mind. Innovation should be taught, beginning in kindergarten. Properly run business schools combine … Next Page »

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I recently had dinner here in the Boston area with Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer. With just one other guest present, it was an unusually personal and far-ranging discussion. Most of the talk was of a general nature—more background than anything else. Still, a few things stuck with me as noteworthy. I thought I would share them here.

Mundie, as you might have guessed from his title, serves as Microsoft’s long-term technology strategist and visionary. His domain includes basically anything and everything that Microsoft is eyeing in the 3-10-year time horizon, and even beyond. This includes the sprawling Microsoft Research (MSR) organization (six major labs around the world), the Health Solutions Group that oversees the company’s growing health IT efforts for healthcare enterprises, providers, and consumers, the Startup Business Group that incubates new technologies with the aim of creating new MS products, and a host of smaller operations and groups focused on various aspects of future technology identification and development. In this role, Mundie serves on a couple of government technology committees, including President Obama’s council of advisors on science and technology, and acts as a top Microsoft liaison to major governments such as China, India, and Russia. Even the famous Microsoft Home of the Future, an ever-updated exhibit on the main corporate campus, is part of his realm.

Taken as a whole, this is quite a realm, from advanced technology to fundamental research that’s about as pure as you can get in industry these days. Viewed another way, you could say Mundie was the yin to chief software architect Ray Ozzie’s yang—that is, until Ozzie announced his impending departure from the company last month. That’s because Ozzie’s job was to focus on Microsoft strategy and technology in the present to near term—meaning less than three years out. Together, as Mundie also said, they split most of Bill Gates’ duties (I think Mundie got the fun part, but that’s just me).

My dinner with Mundie took place in early October, less than two weeks before Ozzie’s announcement (so yes, I was admittedly slow to write up my notes). Now, with Ozzie soon to be heading out the door, I decided to go back to my notes and supplement them with some commentary and a follow up question or two to draw out the things I found most interesting:

—Microsoft is getting more secretive about its futuristic pursuits: This was really interesting to me—I think of it as the Steve Jobs effect, since the Apple kingpin is notorious for keeping things under wraps with dire penalties for those who leak. The way this came up was we were talking about TechFest, the technology fair for Microsoft employees where everyone in the product groups can see what is going on at the research labs (and to a degree, vice-versa) and other parts of the company doing advanced technology. Some outsiders, including a few press like me, were previously invited to this. But when I remarked to Mundie how I hadn’t seen much about TechFest lately, and certainly not been invited in recent years, he said that was deliberate (I didn’t take it personally).

“Everybody we compete with has plenty of notice of what we’re going to do next,” he told me. “Microsoft has little surprise value with the consumer.” Therefore, he says, “I’ve been a little bit more parsimonious about revealing the inventions I believe will be important.” He also said his goal was … Next Page »

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With all the froth around big tech company earnings, device announcements, and mobile app stores, it’s refreshing to see some long-term research in computing being funded. Google announced today it has awarded $1.35 million ($900,000 up front) to the University of Washington for work on mobile data collection for public health and environmental monitoring, and $100,000 to UC San Diego, for research on energy efficiency.

The awards are part of $5.7 million in the first Google Focused Awards Grants being given to a dozen projects led by 31 professors at 10 universities in the U.S. and U.K. The areas of research also include machine learning and privacy. The grants are for two to three years, and give the recipients “access to Google tools, technologies and expertise,” according to a blog post by Alfred Spector, Google’s vice president of research and special initiatives.

The UW grant is to computer science professor (and former Intel Research Seattle director) Gaetano Borriello, in collaboration with Deborah Estrin at UCLA. (Wade and I have previously reported on the work of these two professors in wireless sensor networks.) The new grant is for researching the use of mobile phones as data collection devices for public health and environmental monitoring applications.

“Here at Google Seattle, we deeply appreciate our strong relationship with the University of Washington,” said Brian Bershad, Google Seattle’s engineering director (and former UW computer science professor), in a statement. “With this focused research award, we see an example of how that collaboration and recognition extends broadly across Google.”

Meanwhile, the UCSD grant to computer scientists Tajana Simunic Rosing, Steven Swanson, and Amin Vahdat, is for studying energy efficiency in computing. Energy efficiency has been among the topics of interest at the UC San Diego campus of Calit2, the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology. Calit2 director Larry Smarr views global warming as a serious environmental threat, and has highlighted efforts at UCSD and elsewhere to make data centers and other IT operations more energy-efficient.

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Yesterday afternoon I stopped by Intel Labs Seattle, the research lab run by the chip-making giant near the University of Washington campus, for the lab’s annual open house. It’s an extravaganza that always draws a big crowd from the local tech community. Besides the huge variety of lab demos, one of the most interesting things going on was a changing of the guard.

Dieter Fox, an associate professor of computer science and engineering at the UW, succeeded David Wetherall as director of the lab two weeks ago, when Wetherall’s three-year term officially finished (see photo below). Fox is the fourth director of the Seattle lab, formerly called Intel Research Seattle; all have been UW computer science professors. While Wetherall’s expertise is in wireless networks, mobile devices, and Internet protocols, Fox’s strengths are in robotics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. (He is the co-author of the 2005 advanced textbook, Probabilistic Robotics, with Sebastian Thrun of Stanford University and Wolfram Burgard from the University of Freiburg.)

So, will Intel Labs Seattle now be doing all robotics, all the time? Will the first general-purpose household helper robot come out of Intel (NASDAQ: INTC)? One can always hope—but Fox seems to have a broader and more practical outlook on the lab’s role in shaping the future of computing.

“Our role with respect to Intel is performing what they call disrupting research that is off-roadmap, but essentially our task is also to surprise Intel,” Fox says. “If we show what can be done with future computing systems, then we are serving our purpose. And beyond surprising Intel, we also want to surprise consumers by what can be done. It’s becoming more and more important that these computational systems are going to be observing the environment, using sensors. Today’s smartphones all have GPS, accelerometers, and all that. The key question is, how can we extract relevant information to make it more interesting for users?”

Seeing as robots are computing systems that sense and manipulate their environment, they will certainly figure prominently in the lab’s work—perhaps more than ever before. “For Intel, it’s clear the future of robotics is going to become extremely relevant. We need to see what are the key questions from a computational perspective, what kind of processing is needed for these systems,” Fox says. “Our key agenda is to inform Intel on what the future of computing looks like, especially computing connected to everyday scenarios.”

The idea is that if and when the market for intelligent household robots takes off, it’ll be Intel that provides their brains (in the form of microprocessor chips). But even beyond that, Fox says, “Intel could provide the processing that’s adapted to the specific needs of those systems, and along the way maybe also provide the computational toolset I need. So it’s not only the hardware, but it’s also a better understanding of how you extract information from these sensors. That’s also a theme for Intel—they want to go beyond just building the hardware, and show the whole user experience you can get if you have good computational power.”

Lastly, I got some closing thoughts on the lab’s evolution from its outgoing director. “The trajectory of the lab is, we’ve always done perception and sensing, starting with location, and we’re moving now to richer systems” like computer vision and robotic manipulation of objects, says Wetherall, who is going back to full-time teaching and research at UW this month (though he’ll stay involved with Intel Labs). “It’s quite a natural progression for the lab,” he notes. “That’s what leads to intelligent systems.”

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Much has been made of the fact that Microsoft is moving about half of its Live Labs applied research staff to other divisions, such as product groups and Microsoft Research. The news, announced within Microsoft a week ago, has been met with criticism from outside observers, who lament the reduction of one of the company’s most innovative groups (some would say its most innovative group). But there is another side to this story.

Live Labs was founded in January 2006 by Microsoft technical fellow Gary Flake, in a partnership between MSN and Microsoft Research. Its main goal was to accelerate innovation in Internet technologies like search, data mining, and distributed computing. Live Labs has been best known for developing visual interface technologies like Seadragon, a zooming application for all sorts of visual information, and Photosynth, which lets you create striking 3-D virtual environments from a series of photos.

According to the Live Labs blog, the current restructuring sends various team members to MSN, Windows Mobile, Microsoft Advertising, and Live Search. “Contrary to recent whispers and tweets, we are not shutting down, disbanding, dismantling, or anything of the sort,” the blog said. “In the coming weeks and months we’ll bring you updated developer tools, new ways to use Seadragon, and much more.”

Microsoft hasn’t said specifically what will happen to Photosynth and other favorite technologies from Live Labs. But the broader question on many people’s minds is whether the innovativeness of Live Labs will be crushed by plugging staff members into shorter-term product development instead of applied research.

Ed Lazowska, a University of Washington computer science professor and Microsoft watcher, has a very different take. “I think this re-org is great in terms of the company’s competitiveness and innovation potential,” he says in an e-mail. “The people from Live Labs who were doing research are now … Next Page »

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On Monday, Microsoft announced it had appointed Maria Klawe, the president of Harvey Mudd College, to the company’s board of directors. Klawe’s appointment makes Microsoft’s board 10 members strong again, after longtime director Jon Shirley (a former Microsoft president and chief operating officer) stepped down last November. I had the opportunity to speak with Klawe yesterday about her new role, and what she brings to the Redmond software company.

Klawe (pronounced “Claw-vay”) has been president of Harvey Mudd, an elite college in Claremont, CA, focused on science and engineering, since 2006. Before that, she was dean of engineering at Princeton University. She had previously spent 15 years at the University of British Columbia in various leadership roles, including head of the department of computer science and dean of science. For good measure, she also spent eight years at IBM Research. (And for any math geeks out there, her Erdős number is 1.)

A highly respected mathematician and computer scientist, Klawe has done seminal research in areas like multimedia, functional analysis, human-computer interaction, and gender issues in information technology. University of Washington computer scientist Ed Lazowska, who has known Klawe for 30-plus years, touts her smarts and leadership. “She’s impatient and persistent in the best senses—she wants things to be done right, and she wants them to be done right now,” he writes in an e-mail. “She’s very strong on gender equity, which will be good medicine for Microsoft—although she’s by no means a one-issue person. Her only idiosyncrasy is that she paints watercolors during meetings.”

Klawe has a disarming modesty about her, though she says she was “difficult” and “arrogant” growing up (hard to believe now). Having followed her research over the years and talked with her a couple of times, I think it’s fair to say Microsoft is gaining a wealth of perspective on computing, basic research, and consumer-tech trends among young people—mainly through Klawe’s deep connections to student life at her school. She also has plenty of connections to Microsoft and the Seattle area, and some compelling thoughts on local innovation.

Here are edited excerpts from our conversation:

Xconomy: So tell us about your new role as a board member of Microsoft, and what it means to you.

Maria Klawe: I just started as a director. They voted me in on Monday, so I’m not assigned to any specific committees yet; it’s the middle of the year. So I have the generic responsibilities of a director. I attended my first board meeting on March 9. I’m absolutely thrilled about it.

X: How did the board appointment come about? Who were your connections, and had you been thinking about this for a while?

MK: Two things happened independently. I was thinking about the next role to play externally that would be a good learning opportunity for me, and good for the college. I discussed it with my board chair, and said, ‘I want to be on the board of a technology company.’ I made a list of three companies: Microsoft, Amazon, and Intel, in no particular order. Google already had two university presidents on its board. So that was on my to-do list for the next few years. I hadn’t actually told anybody else that was what I wanted to do.

The next thing that happened: I know people at Microsoft Research, foremost among them Rick Rashid [senior vice president and head of research]. I got an e-mail from Rick in October asking if we could talk by phone. Given our schedules, it wasn’t until halfway through November that we talked. He said, ‘Microsoft is thinking about putting an academic on its board, and your name has come up.’ Rick thought for sure I wouldn’t be interested; he seemed sorry to be the one to have to ask me. I said, ‘Actually, it’s on my to-do list, to go on a corporate board.’ He said, ‘Really? If you are interested, you should meet with Brad Smith [senior vice president and general counsel for Microsoft] and Bill Gates.’ It just so happened I was going to be in Seattle the next week. Lo and behold, on November 19, I had a meeting with Bill Gates and Brad Smith.

X: I’m guessing the meeting went pretty well. (No word on whether any watercolor paintings came of it.)

MK: As a university president, you want to talk about your college. For the first 45 minutes, Bill just asked me about Harvey Mudd. Towards the end of the hour, he said, … Next Page »

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Why can’t big companies invent? How should inventors handle their intellectual property? And what are countries around the world doing on these fronts? I recently stopped by Intellectual Ventures in Bellevue, WA, to get the scoop from Patrick Ennis, IV’s global head of technology. Ennis was a venture capitalist with Arch Venture Partners in Seattle for 10 years before taking his current post in early 2008. (Between jobs, he took some time off and, among other things, chopped wood full-time for a week.)

Back in October, Xconomy reported that Ennis is heading up Intellectual Ventures’ expansion in China, Japan, Korea, India, and Singapore. The invention company, which is led by founders Nathan Myhrvold and Edward Jung, currently has some $5 billion under management, 450-plus employees, and 160 university partnerships around the world. I wanted to get a deeper sense of Ennis’s philosophies on invention and intellectual property on a global scale.

Ennis organized his thoughts loosely around a talk he gave last month at the Ready To Commercialize 2008 conference, run by the Office of Technology Commercialization at the University of Texas (which happened to be IV’s 100th university partner). In Austin, he spoke on game-changing approaches to commercializing inventions. The conversation we had over lunch in Bellevue was free-flowing and touched on everything from anatomy and antibiotics to Sumerian culture and the Renaissance.

I was particularly intrigued by Ennis’s take on the current state of global competition and its historical context. “It’s a complicated world,” he said. “Leonardo da Vinci could do what he did because the world was not as complicated. Leonardo could not be a Renaissance person today—there’s too much to know.”

A few more highlights from Ennis, in his own words:

—On doing business at Intellectual Ventures: “We want to create a market for invention. We want to reward inventors, perfect the process of invention, and make invention respectable…We don’t ask for exclusive deal sourcing agreements, we like to earn our business a deal at a time, the old-fashioned way. All organizations, if they succeed, have to fight the hubris thing. You see that with all big companies. IBM had it, Microsoft had it, and Google, quicker than any other startup, got it. It’s amazing how the hubris seeped into Google real quick. And the backlash is coming—you see it in the EU and, to a certain extent, in the States.”

“We’re a collection of individuals, and business is always done personally, one on one, whether you work for a 10-person company, or 450, or 4,000,” Ennis says. “That’s when companies lose their way, … Next Page »

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Updated Nov. 5 with comments from senior vice president Rick Rashid (see below): You did good, Bill Gates. When you decided to build a new computer-science research lab in Beijing in 1998, you probably saw it as a relatively low-risk venture with a high upside. It would be challenging and take a lot of work on the ground, sure, but Microsoft would benefit from tapping top researchers in China and giving back to the local computer-science community, thereby earning good will in a country with huge market potential. From most appearances, the bet has paid off.

Microsoft Research Asia, which turns 10 years old today, is the largest of the company’s research labs outside of Redmond. (The others are located in Silicon Valley; Cambridge, England; Bangalore, India; and the newest one in Cambridge, MA.) It has about 350 full-time researchers and engineers, has employed 2,500 student interns, and has published some 3,000 papers in technical journals and conferences. More than 250 technologies from the lab have apparently been transferred into Microsoft products, including Office, Windows, Xbox, and MSN. Microsoft Research founder Nathan Myhrvold and senior vice president of research Rick Rashid played key roles in establishing the Chinese lab. (You can read more about its rise, and its impact on Microsoft, China, and information technology, in this book by a couple of Xconomy authors.)

This week is about celebrating with the community in Beijing—and getting work done at the same time. The Microsoft festivities include a faculty summit involving hundreds of visiting professors and administrators from the Asia-Pacific region, a technical advisory board meeting, and several lab-hosted banquet dinners. Gates himself won’t be there, but he visited in August during the Olympics. Among the Redmond returnees is Harry Shum, Microsoft’s vice president for search product development, who was the previous head of the Beijing lab. Ya-Qin Zhang, the lab director before him, is now a vice president in charge of Microsoft’s R&D and sales in China. (Microsoft now employs some 5,000 people in China.) I’m guessing the only member of the lab’s founding team who won’t be there is Kai-Fu Lee, who now heads up Google Greater China, after a high-profile split with Microsoft in 2005.

Rashid sent an e-mail to the lab and to the company’s top brass, including Gates and Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer: “I could not be more proud of what has been accomplished. Today was a great milestone for MSR Asia and for Microsoft Research.”

Reached by e-mail yesterday, the Beijing lab’s current managing director, Hsiao-Wuen Hon, said he was “completely occupied” with the week’s events. Hon is a former Apple employee who started working for Microsoft in Redmond on speech and user interfaces in 1995. Born and raised in China, he helped launch the Beijing lab and did a fair bit of recruiting in the early days. Hon moved to Beijing in 2004 to join the lab as assistant managing director, and also headed the lab’s Search Technology Center.

Microsoft’s foreign research labs have always been about finding the best talent around the world, and the Beijing lab has been a pretty striking example of this strategy. “There’s no doubt China produces a lot of engineers, but 10 years ago, no one knew what their quality was, particularly when we talk about people who can do world-class research,” said Hon in a recent interview with a Microsoft press officer. “We proved we could find that top talent and give them an environment in which to succeed.”

The Beijing lab’s main technical areas have evolved somewhat over the years. The researchers now focus on user interfaces, multimedia, data-centric computing (with a recent emphasis on cloud computing), search and ads, and fundamentals like theory, systems, and networking. It will be interesting to see how the lab contributes to the company’s recent initiatives in Web-based software, services, and advertising, and in mobile software. Looking ahead, how does Hon want people to view the Beijing lab—and Microsoft as a whole? “I want them to continue to think of Microsoft as an innovator,” Hon said in the interview. “We have very fierce competition from high-tech companies and people generating new technologies. We cannot sit still.”

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Want wireless power? Better network privacy? Automated elder care? You’ve come to the right place.

That place is the 2008 Intel Research Seattle open house, which I had the opportunity to attend yesterday afternoon. I had gotten a sneak preview the day before from lab director David Wetherall, and just before hitting the demos, I also sat down with Intel’s vice president and director of research, Andrew Chien, for an overview. For the open house, Wetherall noted that Abel Weinrib, Intel’s vice president and director of the corporate technology group, was in attendance, along with representatives from Intel’s business units, and many Seattle-area researchers and industry types.

Then it was time for the fun stuff. Wandering around the sixth floor of Intel’s building near the University of Washington campus, I got a technology-packed tour from the lab’s associate director and principal engineer, Anthony LaMarca. I’ll give just a few of the highlights here. (All photos courtesy of Cheryl Miller at Intel.)

—First, I took in the latest progress in home-monitoring systems for elder care. These include sensors like radio-frequency identification tags on kitchen utensils, which then communicate with a computer to infer when a person is eating, drinking, taking proper medications, and so forth. I covered this area several years ago, and wondered just how far the tech implementation has come. “It’s gone from a vision to something much closer to reality,” said Wetherall. “We’re doing real trials, and sorting out the business value proposition too. We find many parties stand to gain if you do it the right way…Families like it, organizations like it, insurance companies like it. It helps with auditing, as well as providing appropriate care.”

The lab is working with the Veterans Administration on home tests. Home monitoring is related to a broader theme within Intel Research—what it calls “richly communicative” everyday sensing and perception. “Our insight was it was practically impossible to get the deployment right,” says Chien. “And to translate it to a business model was not going to fly.” Chien says the researchers set a “90-90″ goal: it should work for 90 percent of activities, for 90 percent of your day. “It’s a coverage goal, and it is really central to achieving large-scale commercialization of the technology,” Chien adds. “This is a second generation of sensing and perception…It’s one of our largest efforts.”

—James Landay, a professor of computer science and engineering at the UW and the previous director of Intel Research Seattle, showed me another example: a monitoring device to help you keep track of your exercise and activity levels, and even what kind of transportation you’re using on a daily basis (walking, biking, driving). An accelerometer and other sensors in the device connect to a processor, which uses your cell phone as a display. Landay says his team is in the process of porting the technology over to the iPhone (which has an onboard accelerometer), and possibly to phones that will run Google’s Android system, because the latter might be a more open platform.

—Intel research scientist Ben Greenstein showed me the “trustworthy wireless” project, which is about improving privacy for users of wireless devices. On a monitor was a map of Seattle showing all the locations his laptop had been broadcasting signals that anyone could use to figure out his identity and where he lives (with software available on the Internet). Another monitor showed exactly what information is sent out when his laptop tries to find a wireless network, or when he opens an e-mail while connected to a network. Greenstein pointed out one nefarious use I hadn’t thought of: a corporate spy might be able to figure out connections between companies and anticipate certain deals just by hanging out in their vicinity. “They might work out if something’s going down,” he says. To defend against this, Greenstein’s software goes in and limits the information being sent out by a device, by working at different levels of the wireless device and network.

—Who knew that Intel works this much on robots? Principal engineer Josh Smith, who did his Ph.D. at MIT with Neil Gershenfeld, showed me a few “personal robotics” projects, including a robotic arm and hand with springy actuators to make it softer, safer, and more adaptive to manipulating objects in its environment (see top photo). Electric-field sensors and a video camera allow it to recognize objects and tell when it is gripping a cup or an apple, say. “Manipulation is the big, hard problem for robotics now,” Smith says. If home helper robots ever take off, I’m thinking Intel wants to be the one to supply their brains.

—Lastly, the most visually striking (and technically speculative) demo was one on “wireless power.” This is the idea that you could potentially charge your phone or laptop without plugging it into a wall socket. Wouldn’t that be something? I didn’t believe it when I first heard about the research at MIT last summer, which was published in the journal Science. (Doing power transfer via electromagnetic radiation has efficiency and safety issues.) But the new idea, which is based on magnetic fields, has held up so far. Alanson Sample, a graduate student in electrical engineering at the UW, showed a demo of a light bulb being turned on by 60 watts of power transferred from one magnetic coil to another, about two feet away (see photo, left). It works by setting up a resonance between the powering coil and the remote coil connected to the light bulb, which gives you an energy efficiency of about 75 percent. Alanson said he’s working on setting up magnetic loops to fit on a laptop. A visitor from laptop-maker Lenovo seemed very interested.

All in all, Intel seems convinced it is getting its money’s worth from its UW research collaborators. “We are the eyes and ears in the community,” says Intel’s LaMarca, who adds that if there’s an interesting idea in the innovation community, the lab makes sure Intel hears about it. On the UW side, the partnership seems to be going well, too. “We’re very excited about the lab being here, and having our faculty members run it,” says Hank Levy, chairman of the department of computer science and engineering at UW. “The lab changes focus every couple of years, but it also keeps some continuity.”

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My last memory of Andrew Chien might be wrestling with him on the living room floor circa 1981. Growing up in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, his family and mine were friends. Chien grew up to be a professor of computer science at his hometown University of Illinois, then a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of California, San Diego, and now a vice president and director of research at Intel. Our meeting yesterday, at the 2008 Intel Research Seattle open house, was much more civilized than our last encounter (when I was about 10 and he was a teenager).

Besides his expertise in distributed computing and corporate research, Chien is interesting to Xconomy because of his connections to various innovation communities, on the West Coast and elsewhere. He has lived in San Diego for the past 10 years or so, but his Intel office is in Hillsboro, OR, and he also spends a fair bit of time at corporate headquarters in Santa Clara, CA. “Intel is very distributed,” he says. “I have global responsibilities, including in China and India.” When we talked, he was getting ready for a business trip to Taiwan.

From his global perspective, Chien has some keen insights into East Coast and West Coast innovation. “The Boston community was built on the backs of Route 128 defense contractors, which gave birth to the Digitals of the world, and then biotechs came out of universities,” he says. San Diego has some similarities to that model, Chien points out. “I’m amazed by Qualcomm and the wirelesss diaspora that came out of it. Qualcomm came out of the defense industry—Route 15 companies, which were heavily defense contractors—and there’s materials and radio expertise which is quite different from what you see in Silicon Valley.”

“The other interesting thing in San Diego,” he continues, “is there’s been really interesting crossover between information theory and communications, with life sciences. All that [information theory] methodology is spilling into the bio space…Bioinformatics really started at the level of blueprints. Then it moved rapidly to gene regulation, control loops, and systems. Those systems don’t operate in the traditional way that systems operate in electrical or mechanical engineering, because they’re statistical. Bringing those [mathematical] techniques to bear on biological systems to understand how they work, that synergy is powerful…The number of information theorists per capita in San Diego is high.”

I asked Chien what Intel Research is doing in the field, and he mentioned nucleic acid sequencing (e.g., DNA and RNA). “It’s all in the broad vein of the ‘X-dollar genome,’ which is getting cheaper and cheaper. Most techniques today, like 23andMe and Affymetrix, are based on optical sensing,” he says. “For Intel, optical is interesting, but it’s not the sweet spot for our interest…The grand dream is, can you move to a basis of electrical sensing.” If so, he says, you could do a huge amount of scaling up that’s possible because of the infrastructure built up around silicon chips. “The very broad vision of where this goes is not for medical or scientific research, but for sequencing as broad-based sensing—for instance, environmental sensing [e.g., food or water testing for safety] at low cost. It’s a long-range research effort.”

On that note, I asked Chien about his broader vision for Intel Research. “We call it ‘Essential Computing,’” he says. “About two and a half years ago, when I started at Intel, we took a hard look at where computing is going. The big change is that computing is moving from work-oriented tasks to social and communication-oriented applications, including health and well-being.” Essential computing, as Chien explains, will “simplify and enrich our lives.”

The effort rests on two main pillars or technological thrusts, he says. The first is “new functionality” that will allow computing devices to sense and be aware of everything from your emotional state to who your friends are. To some extent, that’s happening already. The second pillar is motivated by what Chien calls “the dirty secret of the IT industry—our technology is hard to use. It often lets us down. We need to make technology something you’d depend on” for sensitive communications with people important to you, he says. In the end, it’s about making computing devices simpler and easier to use. “It’s like your wristwatch,” Chien says. “It’s got to become that integrated and that reliable.”

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On a clear day, David Wetherall can see Mount Rainier from his desk. On a clearer day, he can see the future of Intel. OK, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration. But Wetherall, the director of Intel Research Seattle, has certainly been charged with leading an exploratory research effort for the chip-making giant—blue-sky, “off-roadmap” stuff that won’t be in Intel’s products anytime soon, but is nonetheless vital to the company because it could help create the broader future of computing.

Intel Research Seattle, located three blocks from the University of Washington campus, is one of three Intel labs tied closely to universities around the country—the others are at UC Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. The Seattle lab, which opened in 2001, has 20 full-time researchers, with about an equal number of students, interns, and visiting researchers at any given time.

I sat down with Wetherall yesterday as he was doing last-minute preparations for today’s annual lab open house. Wetherall has been director of the Seattle lab since mid-2006. He is also an associate professor of computer science and engineering at UW, and his own research has focused on wireless networks and distributed systems. It’s an unusual model, in that Intel hires its research lab directors for three-year terms, after which they typically go back to academia full-time. (Wetherall is the third director of the Seattle lab.) “The lab has a charter, to bring in new people from the university,” says Wetherall. This helps “invigorate things” and keeps the lab’s research on the “cutting edge.”

As Wetherall explains, it’s a pretty open and forward-looking effort. “We have a lot of joint research, projects where university people work here, and we also fund research at the university. It’s a big way we get things done. There is a joint, open collaborative agreement between Intel and UW. People don’t have to sign an NDA,” says Wetherall. “We’re not focused on an immediate product, we’re focused around opening markets…We’re chartered with doing disruptive research that’s not on the product map. Intel is interested in new computing technologies. We’re trying to invent them, and stay ahead of the game. We’re a small scout organization looking for game-changing technologies.”

The Seattle lab’s research theme is “focused on future computer systems woven into the fabric of everyday life,” says Wetherall. It’s the next step in the evolution of computers as they migrate from desktops to mobile devices to embedded devices. “We try to figure out what technologies and usage models work, how to power them, how to provide privacy, how to do sensing,” he adds. Researchers at the lab have expertise in hardware, robotics, machine learning, wireless networks, and human-computer interfaces, among other disciplines. “We believe in prototyping, from hardware through software systems, and we have a user-centered viewpoint,” says Wetherall. “We are finding out what users want.”

It sounds a lot like the “connected computing” (or ubiquitous computing) trend that the founders of Voyager Capital were telling me about last week, from an investor’s perspective—the confluence of software, wireless, and digital media. I asked Wetherall what connections the Intel lab has with the local innovation community in these areas. … Next Page »

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Yesterday, we ran the first half of a sit-down interview with Nathan Myhrvold, cofounder and CEO of Intellectual Ventures, the Bellevue, WA-based invention laboratory and investment firm. Myhrvold, the former CTO of Microsoft (and an Xconomist), placed his current company’s goals in the context of venture capital and private equity, arguing that there is a real need to create what he calls an “invention capital” industry.

In what follows, Myhrvold talks about the lessons he learned in forming Microsoft Research, the differences between research and invention, some ambitious and far-out projects from Intellectual Ventures (e.g., invisibility, geo-engineering), and the motivation behind his firm’s upcoming expansion into five Asian countries.

Xconomy: Before we get into specific projects and inventions, what all did you learn from Microsoft Research that’s applicable to Intellectual Ventures?

Nathan Myhrvold: I have a theory that R&D is a great investment, a fundamentally good business. Using the human mind to go from nothing to something is a hell of a trick. And there’s nothing fair about it. A guy like Einstein can come up with all these things, but so can people who aren’t actually all that smart! There are people dumber than Einstein who’ve made amazing contributions.

So I believe you can make money with research, or invention. But you need a certain scale factor. Let’s say I have this idea called life insurance. If I just insured your life, it wouldn’t be worth it to either one of us. Insurance is fundamentally a risky bet, and to make it reasonable, what you’re buying and selling is variance. You need to have a large end limit to shrink the variance down. With Microsoft Research, I came to the conclusion that research could have been enormously profitable for Bell Labs, IBM, and others. It was profitable, but it could have been even more profitable. Xerox PARC could have made Xerox one of the most valuable companies on Earth. But most people screwed it up.

And after screwing it up, the lesson was mislearned that it’s impossible to be successful in this way. Most of Silicon Valley turned away from the notion of trying to do anything new. The implicit attitude was, hey, that’s why Stanford exists, somehow they’ll come up with new ideas. We’ll wait until that occurs. And then when companies got bigger, the size of Oracle or Sun or Apple, they said, “Well, keep doing that. Screw it, we’re not actually going to do anything really exciting.” And I thought, no that’s the wrong thing to do. If you have the scale at which you can afford to wait 5 to 10 years for a result, that was the key thing. If I say, invent something or do valuable research tomorrow, that’s an impossible task. But if I say, support 100 really smart people working really hard for 5 years, something great will come of it.

X: That’s what you had at Microsoft, because of its size.

NM: At Microsoft, we had the resources to do that. So I talked Bill [Gates] into starting Microsoft Research. It’s been hugely successful; they would say it’s one of the best investments they ever made, enormous customer value and shareholder value…To sum up, Microsoft Research is based on a similar idea [as Intellectual Ventures], with one twist. There, all I had to do was convince one man, and we could go ahead. After I retired from Microsoft, I wanted to keep going. I no longer had the one man to convince to do the whole thing. If you think about how to replicate the model, even if I’d gotten Bill to give me more money to do something else, that wouldn’t be the replicable model. So that’s where I came back and said OK, how could you do this on an even broader scale?

It turns out the way the world does this on a broad scale isn’t by saying this will be done by a government agency or by Bell Labs, a research lab funded by a monopoly business. In fact, the modern way to do it is to create one of these marketplaces where large investors are willing to put a small fraction of their income towards really risky things. And so … Next Page »

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On Monday evening, I had the pleasure of sailing the Seattle waterways with Microsoft and several hundred of its university-faculty friends. We were all aboard an Argosy cruise ship for a three-hour tour that took us from the city dock in Kirkland, WA, across Lake Washington; past the University of Washington; through the Ballard Locks; and all the way down to Elliott Bay and downtown Seattle, where we docked near the aquarium. The weather was perfect and afforded us spectacular views of Mount Rainier, the Olympic Mountains, and open water.

It was all part of the annual Faculty Summit hosted by Microsoft Research, in which the company invites leading researchers from academia and government to Redmond for two days of talks with staff from all of Microsoft’s global research labs. This week’s summit included sessions on scholarly communication, artificial intelligence, and applications of Microsoft’s Virtual Earth—and plenty of tech demos. (The Seattle P-I did a nice piece on a new spherical-display technology.)

But enough about work… I was there to catch up with familiar faces, meet some new ones, and find out what people are talking about at the intersection of computer science and Microsoft. Over a buffet dinner of halibut, steak, pasta, and fruit, I got more than my fill. Just a few highlights here:

—I should probably start with what people weren’t talking about (at least with me). That would include Microsoft’s competition with Google, the bid to acquire Yahoo, and the abrupt departure of Microsoft senior executive Kevin Johnson. When you’re trying to do innovative research—really the long-term future of any tech company—these corporate dramas are probably just a distraction.

—Microsoft’s Beijing research lab is gearing up for the Olympics, which are the talk of the whole town, according to Hsiao-Wuen Hon, the managing director of the lab. The city will effectively shut down for the opening ceremonies on August 8. The airport will be closed. Street traffic will be highly restricted. All attendees will go through a two-hour security checkpoint. Thousands of Chinese army troops will be stationed next to the “Bird’s Nest” Olympic stadium in Beijing. There is a rumor that the top of the stadium is armed with anti-aircraft guns to shoot down any airborne terrorist threats. I asked Hon whether he gets to attend the ceremony. “Unfortunately yes,” he joked.

—Word has it that Bill Gates will attend the games, along with Warren Buffett and many heads of state, including President George W. Bush. Gates’s preferred sport to watch? Ping-pong (OK, table tennis). The table-tennis viewing will be hosted by Microsoft’s top people in China, as well as government officials. Suffice to say that every minute of his public appearances will be carefully managed and choreographed—not by Microsoft as much as by his gracious hosts.

—Shri Narayanan, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California, had some interesting insights into the similarities between academia and industry. Narayanan, who spent five years at AT&T Labs-Research, noted that a lot of the challenges are the same when leading a corporate group and a university research group: fighting for funding, intensive recruiting, marketing, and managing workload. An academic research group, he quipped, was “like a startup with no stock options.” The tradeoff, of course, is a bit more independence and flexibility of schedule.

—A couple of Microsoft research projects caught my ear. One is by principal researcher Feng Zhao, who is designing sensor networks for energy-efficient data centers—more on this another time, but Zhao moderated a panel yesterday called “Browsing the physical world in real-time,” which relates a bit to Wade’s story this week about the “Internet of things.” And the other is smart Web-conferencing software by Zhengyou Zhang, another principal researcher in Redmond—this uses computer-vision algorithms to track the gaze and gestures of meeting participants, so as to give more clues about who is speaking or listening to whom. (Having worked out of a remote office for the past three years, I can appreciate the value of that.)

Lastly, as we were waiting to clear the Ballard Locks to enter Puget Sound, we passed through a waterway famous for its migrating salmon. Apparently the action of the lock creates turbulence in the water that brings baby salmon to the surface, where they are easy pickings for predatory seagulls. So the locks have high-pressure water jets to spray the surface and keep the birds away. I’m not sure what this says about corporate competition, but I found it touching.

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