Craig Mundie is a geek, and I mean that in the best possible way. Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, the 17-year veteran of Redmond, WA, still talks like an engineer, throwing out terms like “heterogeneous machine architectures,” “GUIs” (graphical user interfaces), and “clouds and clients” like there’s no tomorrow. It’s kind of refreshing, given that he is in charge of setting the long-term agenda for one of the most powerful companies on the planet.

Mundie is in the midst of a weeklong tour of some top universities around the country. He called me yesterday from Cambridge, MA, where he had just finished a presentation to Harvard University students, faculty, and guests. He visits the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (my alma mater) today, and comes to Kane Hall at the University of Washington tomorrow afternoon. It’s similar to the college tours Bill Gates used to do.

From what I can tell, the goal is to stir up interest in computer science, give audiences a glimpse of future computing systems as Microsoft sees them, and stimulate discussions about how these technologies can help solve some pressing global problems. (You can read more about Mundie’s tour and demos in this Seattle Times story.)

Besides hearing Mundie’s thoughts on computer science education and the future of computing, I wanted to drill down and ask him about the challenge of taking on Microsoft’s strategy development (after Gates stepped down last year) in the most difficult economic times in recent memory. I also wanted to ask him about the deeper culture of Microsoft, the renewed role of research in the company’s future, and the importance of nurturing relationships around the world—and his secret ally in that quest.

Here are some edited highlights from our conversation:

Xconomy: What are you trying to get across to university audiences on this tour?

Craig Mundie: In these presentations, I’m trying to get them to think not only about how computing evolves, but with that evolution, what kinds of problems will become approachable, and what are the new methods? Several things are evolving in parallel [and leading to more heterogeneous and complex machines]. That begets the requirement of how to do programming around parallel computing. With very high-scale computing facilities, the cloud and the client come together to form one system that people will program. They will use those things together with new display and sensing technologies.

Just as the GUI revolutionized computing, we could see a similar revolution with more natural interactions with machines, rather than just “type and point and click.” That will expand the number of people who can interact with computers. With the diversity, rooms can become computers [for instance]. You won’t think of them so much as a computer.

X: What are some of the global problems you think advanced computing will help solve?

CM: Beyond the computer science realm, I’ve talked about energy and the environment. I show one piece of research work we’re doing to compose computational models, a simplified climate model, at Princeton and Microsoft Research. It shows linkages between deforestation in the Amazon and atmospheric temperatures around the rest of the world. If you were a policy person, these kinds of things would give you tools to support your decision making.

In energy, we’re doing computer modeling and direct visualizations. I showed a model, loaned to us from TerraPower [the nuclear power firm spun off from Nathan Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures …Next Page »

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For Mik Kersten, it all started when he saw Maria Klawe speak at the University of British Columbia. It was the mid-1990s, and Klawe, a distinguished mathematician and computer scientist—now the president of Harvey Mudd College and recently appointed to Microsoft’s board of directors—was giving a lecture to students and faculty. “She talked about her hippie days traveling in India, and it convinced me to switch to computer science,” Kersten says.

Kersten was an undergrad at UBC studying anthropology. Today, he is the co-founder and CEO of Tasktop Technologies, a Vancouver, BC-based startup that is working to reinvent user interfaces for software developers and other knowledge workers so they can be much more productive. It is one of those quiet Northwest success stories you probably haven’t heard much about yet, but you will—Tasktop is profitable, and has recently signed a number of important deals with the likes of IBM and Microsoft.

The company’s basic idea is to organize work around tasks, instead of files, folders, or Web pages. Kersten’s “task-focused interface” builds tools and information around the specific task you are trying to accomplish—writing code to import digital media into a library, say, or analyzing trends in a database. Tasktop’s software automatically gathers screenshots, notes, e-mails, and other information related to the task at hand and puts it on your desktop in a single handy spot for reference. If you come back to the task an hour later, or a week later, your desktop is returned to where you left off.

It’s a far cry from the way most people work on tasks today, using tools that are glorified Windows Explorer or Mac Finder applications, or Outlook or Google search tools that make you scroll through tons of results, Kersten says. As a software engineer himself, he had felt quite a bit of personal pain. “I was getting bad RSI [repetitive strain injury] in my forearms,” he says. “I was spending more time looking for the information I needed to write code than actual coding.”

Kersten’s early career path took him to Palo Alto Research Center (formerly Xerox PARC) in Silicon Valley, where he worked on user interfaces until 2003. There, he was exposed to a technology called “degree of interest trees.” This is a type of interface that lets you navigate large, branching structures of information. The amount of detail displayed is based on your level of interest in each item, so you don’t get swamped with lots of information about low-priority matters. As Kersten explains, this “makes it easier for programmers to work with very complex systems”—like having to refer to millions of lines of code, or search through 100,000 files. “Programmers get completely overloaded with information,” he says. “It’s extremely difficult to find what they’re looking for.”

After a six-month stint at Bellevue, WA-based Intentional Software (billionaire Charles Simonyi’s company), Kersten decided to quit industry to do fundamental research on how to improve …Next Page »

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The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA, or “the stimulus”) totaled approximately $787 billion. Of this, approximately $21.5 billion (2.7 percent) was for the support of R&D—$18 billion for the conduct of research and $3.5 billion for facilities and equipment.

Why R&D as part of the stimulus? Because it employs people (that’s what we do with federal research grant funding), but more importantly, because it lays the foundation for America’s world leadership. Consider my own field, computer science: just about every sector of the information technology industry can trace its roots to innovations arising from federally-sponsored research. The challenges that our nation faces today—in information technology, energy, health care, transportation, and other fields – will only be surmounted with a vigorous program of R&D.

ARRA R&D funding was distributed across the full spectrum of federal science agencies. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) received the lion’s share: $10.4 billion. The National Science Foundation (NSF) was next, at $2.9 billion, followed by the Department of Energy (DoE), at $2.4 billion, and others. Awards are only just beginning to be made—quality is ensured through a highly competitive peer-reviewed proposal process that inserts some unavoidable delay in the loop.

So, how’s it going? NIH is the only agency with an easily accessible database of ARRA R&D awards. As The Seattle Times recently reported, the University of Washington currently is tied with the University of Michigan for the largest dollar value of first-year ARRA R&D awards from NIH: $99 million. (Most research awards extend over multiple years, but the NIH database reports only the first year of funding.)

It’s worth reflecting on how remarkable this is. Here are the numbers for a dozen top-ranked institutions nationally:

First-Year NIH ARRA Research Funding for
12 Universities With Top Research Medical Schools
As of 10/5/2009

Annually for several decades, the University of Washington has ranked among the top few institutions in the nation in federal research obligations—research at UW brings $1 billion to the state annually, employing thousands and enriching the education of thousands more. This NIH ARRA research award performance is consistent. However, despite this extraordinary performance, lack of institutional diversity hurts Washington State overall. Our state has 385 NIH ARRA research awards: 241 to UW, 48 to the Hutch, 21 to Seattle Childrens, and a total of 75 to all other organizations. California, by contrast, has received 1,708 awards; Massachusetts 1,226; New York 1,136; Pennsylvania 807; Texas 668; North Carolina 556; Illinois 502; Maryland 476; Ohio 449; Michigan 395.

What’s the bottom line? America’s competitiveness, and Washington State’s competitiveness, will be dramatically enhanced by R&D funds awarded as part of the stimulus. Our ability to tackle society’s grand challenges depends on it.

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Microsoft’s latest reorganization, which involves labs in both the Seattle and Boston areas, has a new face. It’s Lili Cheng, a 14-year Microsoftie with experience in both research (social computing) and products (Windows Vista user experience). Cheng now officially leads three separate groups that are being rolled into one: her Creative Systems Group within Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA; Rich Media Lab led by Kostas Mallios, also in Redmond; and Startup Labs in Cambridge, MA, led by Reed Sturtevant.

Yesterday, chief software architect Ray Ozzie announced the creation of the new entity, called FUSE (Future Social Experience) Labs, which will focus on social computing as applied to Microsoft products in entertainment and business. Sturtevant, the founding managing director of Startup Labs, is leaving the company, while Mallios will continue to report to Ozzie and is taking on business development duties involved with technology incubation.

But back to the lab’s new head, who spoke with me from Cambridge yesterday. Cheng, after inheriting about 70 staff members from Startup Labs and Rich Media Lab, now manages about 80 people in FUSE Labs, and says she will be splitting her time between the Seattle and Boston areas. She said the employees of Startup Labs (there are 30-some staff members) will be staying in Cambridge.

As Cheng explains, the goal of FUSE Labs is to “bridge the gap” between research and products—an oft-heard refrain at Microsoft (and most big companies)—by working on projects that are two to five years away from commercialization, and interacting closely with product teams.

The specific focus of the lab is social computing—applying social media (things like Twitter, Facebook, and other social-network technologies) to problems in business collaboration and entertainment. The high-level strategy here is to “embed social activity into business scenarios” for Microsoft, Cheng says. She didn’t say anything more specific about Microsoft’s plans for social media, or about how the employees in Startup Labs and Rich Media Lab will be integrated into the social theme. But she adds, “Interacting with other people is so personal and emotional to every single person out there. It’s important for every company out there.”

Cheng’s team has previously built applications like Kodu, which lets kids create games and stories using an Xbox controller and share them on a community games channel; and Salsa, a prototype that connects your e-mail inbox with social networks. (The latter sounds a lot like what the Seattle startup Gist, led by ex-Microsoftie T.A. McCann, has built and is actively testing.)

Asked what her greatest challenge is in the new job, Cheng said it’s addressing how to “take best advantage of this amazing opportunity.” Having been in the social computing space for many years, she says, now it’s time to “just go for it.”

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Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect, announced today the company is forming a new laboratory called Future Social Experience Labs, or FUSE Labs, which will focus on aspects of “social computing” beyond just communication and collaboration. The move is part of a wider restructuring of Microsoft’s labs: FUSE Labs is a merger between the Creative Systems Group at Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA; Rich Media Labs; and Startup Labs in Cambridge, MA. As part of the announcement, Ozzie said Reed Sturtevant, the founding managing director of Startup Labs for the past two years, is leaving the company to pursue other interests.

FUSE Labs will be led by Lili Cheng, a 14-year Microsoft veteran who most recently headed the Creative Systems Group and previously managed the user experience teams for Windows Vista. Before joining Microsoft, Cheng worked at Apple Computer in the human interface-advanced technology group, where she worked on QuickTime VR and QuickTime Conferencing products. Cheng is now general manager of FUSE Labs (in Redmond) and will report directly to Ozzie. “I’ve known Lili for many years, and have long been impressed by her vision and ability to create; to engage yet to also inspire; to lead; to make tough choices; to deliver,” Ozzie said in a memo to Microsoft staff.

Ozzie said he has “refined the missions” of Microsoft’s labs, in part because of “changing business conditions.” From his memo, it sounds like the goal of the new lab is to apply research in social computing (things like user interfaces, social networks, and human behavior) to help develop new products in the areas of entertainment, productivity, and teamwork—as well as to explore how Microsoft can extend the ways people use computer operating systems.

“The three groups being combined have concrete skills and code in areas where ‘social’ meets sharing; where ‘social’ meets real-time; where ‘social’ meets media; where ‘social’ meets search; where ‘social’ meets the cloud plus three screens and a world of devices,” he said. (See more on Ozzie’s three-screen vision here.)

It also sounds like the reorganization is meant to focus the impact of social computing research more immediately on the company’s product pipeline. “FUSE Labs will bring more coherence and capability to those advanced development projects where they’re already actively collaborating with product groups to help them succeed with ‘leapfrog’ efforts,” Ozzie said in his memo. “Working closely with [Microsoft Research] and across our divisions, the lab will prioritize efforts where its capabilities can be applied to areas where the company’s extant missions, structures, tempo or risk might otherwise cause us to miss a material threat or opportunity.”

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The Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation at MIT today announced the recipients of its Fall 2009 research grants. The funds, $600,000 in all, will go to eight teams working on early-stage projects the areas of composite materials, diagnostics, disease therapies, drug discovery, diabetes treatment, high power electronics, energy efficient displays, and sensors. Recipients include Vladimir Bulovic (flexible micro-electromechanical system arrays), Michael Cima (a drug delivery device to treat brain edema), Karen Gleason (long-lived LEDs on flexible substrates), Rohit Karnik and Jeffrey Karp (a device for separating cells), Michael Strano (a carbon nanotube based, implantable glucose sensor), Timothy Swager (an inexpensive chemical process to produce graphene), Kripa Varanasi (a device for rapid dissipation of heat from high-power electronics), and Graham Walker (new antibiotic targets).

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Yesterday’s annual open house at Intel Labs Seattle, near the UW campus, did not disappoint. I got a whirlwind tour from incoming lab director Dieter Fox (who also talked with me about Intel and the future of robotics). In attendance were some prominent members of the Intel brass like chief technology officer Justin Rattner, and vice president of Intel Labs Andrew Chien. Vice presidents mixed with professors, researchers, students, and members of the tech startup community. (Among the luminaries I spotted were Matt O’Donnell, dean of UW’s college of engineering, Janis Machala from UW TechTransfer and Paladin Partners, and Matt McIlwain from Madrona Venture Group.)

There has been a lot of progress at Intel Labs since last year’s open house. Here’s a quick tour of the most interesting projects I saw, arranged by the type of technology:

—One of the main themes of the lab is everyday sensing and perception. That encompasses everything from smart sensors in the home that figure out what you’re doing in the kitchen to wearable cameras that help inform you about the world around you. Jeff Hightower, a researcher at the lab who did his Ph.D. at UW, showed me a demo of a project called “Personal 3D audio cursor” which involves a wearable camera, compass, gyroscope, and computer that senses where you are, who you’re with, and what you’re doing. The device then speaks to you over earbud headphones to identify the people around you using face recognition—and the sound appears to come from the direction of the person it is identifying.

It’s just an example of what can be done to enhance your information about the world around you. The real innovation, Hightower says, lies in the “online learning aspect” of the face recognition algorithm. You feed the computer three example photos of a person under different lighting conditions, and the software learns to recognize their face. Hightower says they are starting with photo albums to train the computer, and want to try things like people’s LinkedIn contacts as training examples. (Which makes me think of Learn That Name, the iPhone app for helping people recognize their LinkedIn contacts in the real world.) Hightower says this type of face recognition software will “absolutely be ready for prime time” in five years.

—Just across the room, UW Ph.D. Student Shaun Kane was giving a popular demo on “Bonfire,” a new kind of computing interface for extending your workspace from your laptop to your tabletop (see photo left). Using a camera pointed at the area around his laptop and virtual buttons projected onto the tabletop, Kane showed he could press the virtual buttons to do things like scroll through applications on his laptop. The camera tracked his hand movements and also captured an image of a business card placed on the table, which could be stored for reference. The software can potentially do things like make your laptop aware of all papers and objects on your desk; then the computer might do helpful things like turn off music when you take your headphones off and put them on the desk. This was the first time the project has been shown to the public; Kane will be presenting it at a research conference next week (UIST 2009 in Victoria, BC). The big-picture goal, he said, is to “make interacting with laptops richer, more involved, and smarter.”

—One of the big crowd pleasers was a mobile robot that could plug itself into a wall socket to charge up (see photo below). Software engineer Louis LeGrand, a UW alum, showed me how it works. The robot starts with an internal map of the lab space, so it knows where the electrical outlets are. It uses a range finder to get close to the wall, in the vicinity of the outlet. Then it uses an electric field sensor (not vision) to find the right electrical signature for the outlet—so essentially it senses the electricity in the wall. After about a minute of slow-moving adjustments, it plugs itself in. “We expect in the not-too-distant future, there will be a huge new market for robots—and Intel processors,” LeGrand says.

Next door, Dieter Fox showed me some interesting work on robotic manipulation of an object (like an apple or a bottle of water) using a robot hand and computer vision. Using a camera system, the computer figures out a physical model of what the robot is picking up. This way, Fox says, a robot can learn about the world around it the way a person would, by handling objects and looking at them. It’s a longstanding challenge in robotics, and quite a burgeoning area of research.

—Another theme of the lab is wireless power—everything from being able to charge your mobile device without plugging it in, to antennas and radio frequency identification (RFID) chips powered by the sun. Researcher Emily Cooper, who did her Ph.D. at MIT, gave me an update on the magnetic resonance project for charging devices like a laptop or a phone through the air (we saw it last year). The device now sends both radio signals and power in the same transmission, which could help you find power for your particular mobile device over a range of about one meter.

Lastly, outgoing lab director David Wetherall showed me “WISP” (Wireless Identification and Sensing Platform, see photo left), a type of enhanced RFID tag that contains sensors and a microcontroller and gets its power from an ultrahigh-frequency RFID reader. The device can also use solar cells to harvest more power. The lab is working with academic collaborators who use the WISP for everything from gaming applications to undersea neutrino detection.

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If you want to glimpse the future of gaming and entertainment software, check out the presentations at the world’s largest and most prestigious graphics conference.

This week, at the annual SIGGRAPH meeting (in New Orleans this year), researchers from Microsoft and elsewhere are presenting cutting-edge techniques in computer animation, image and video processing, interactive interfaces, and digital special effects. Microsoft Research has had a strong presence at this conference for the past decade.

What’s particularly cool about SIGGRAPH is its combination of academic rigor and almost immediate commercial applications for games and movies. It’s the nature of the ultra-competitive entertainment industry: everyone wants to use this stuff as soon as it’s ready for prime time (and sometimes even when it isn’t).

Here are a few of the Microsoft projects that stood out to me:

—Sometimes it’s all about the hair. But in the digital world of games and special effects, hair on characters can be a big pain. Artists and programmers have to manually create hairstyles for each character or base them on photos of real hair, and these are costly and time-consuming processes. Now Baining Guo of Microsoft Research Asia has teamed up with researchers at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, as well as Tsinghua University and Zhejiang University in China, to create a new method for synthesizing digital hair (see image above). The software designs each hairdo at two levels—keeping track of 2-D and 3-D geometry—and uses a “hair clustering algorithm” to take an input hairdo and create a new, original ‘do’ that can be put on a new character or avatar. This has clear applications for crowd simulations, game development, and online virtual worlds.

—Now you can search for clouds in the cloud. If you do an image search on Google or Bing, the results are tied to text surrounding the images, not the content of the pictures itself. You could potentially get much better results if the software could find specific features in the image you’re looking for. Now Jian Sun of Microsoft Research Asia and his collaborators at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Beihang University have solved this problem for a certain class of images (see left): a collection of more than half a million photos of the sky. Their software, called SkyFinder, can take a search query like “landscape at sunset with the sun on the bottom left,” and returns all pictures fitting that description. The tool could be useful in photo editing and film production, to swap in different sky backgrounds for a particular shot or scene.

—There’s a new model for computer architecture. Microsoft graphics guru Kurt Akeley, together with Stanford University researchers including Pat Hanrahan (known for his work with Pixar, and co-founder of Seattle’s Tableau Software), have developed a new programming model and toolkit for future graphics processing units (GPUs). GPUs are specialized chips, found in most personal computers, mobile phones, and game consoles, that are designed to manipulate and render 3D graphics efficiently. In the past few years, though, GPUs have become powerful enough to do more general kinds of computations, and influence the way computing is done in general. (One example is Portland, OR-based Elemental Technologies, which takes advantage of GPUs to do advanced video encoding and processing for businesses.) Akeley and his collaborators are aiming for the day when GPUs redefine computer architecture; their toolkit could have applications not only in entertainment (for rendering sophisticated new graphics) but for the broader future of software development.

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Burlington, MA-based Vela Systems, which develops software for construction firms, has completed a $10.5 million equity funding, according to an amended SEC filing made today. The investors were not disclosed. In July 2007, Vela raised $6 million, which is included in the $10.5 million total. The company provides software to allow construction companies to access, modify, and manage paperwork using mobile devices. Vela was spun out of mobile software research and development from the MIT Center for Real Estate and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. [A previous version of this story mistakenly implied that Vela had raised $10.5 million in new funding. We regret the error---Eds.]

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Think about the technological tools you use most often. For many of us, cell phones and computers rank high up on that list. But these devices are designed with the hearing and sighted in mind, and are constantly evolving, so there are numerous hurdles to clear to make a phone or a computer usable to the blind or deaf.

The University of Washington’s Richard Ladner, along with students in the electrical engineering and computer science departments, is using engineering and computational tools to work on several of these hurdles—and the commercial applications could have far-ranging impact.

“When you think about a person with a disability, such as a blind person, most people think that’s a medical problem,” he said in a recent interview. “Just restoring the human function may be a solvable problem, but probably not for a long time. But maybe there’s another way to get the same thing done, to allow a person to read a book or talk to their family. So thinking non-medically, as an engineer, there are other ways to solve these problems.”

Ladner, who was born to two deaf parents, also believes that technologies developed for the blind and deaf may eventually lead to broader technological advancements—not such a far-fetched idea, as it’s happened before. Mobile GPS was originally developed as an aid for the blind, Ladner said, as was optical character recognition, a technology developed in the 1960s to turn an image of text (such as a photo of a book page) into digital text, which would then be read out loud using speech synthesizers. Now, the same technology is ubiquitous in turning pictures of text into digital text;Google uses it to digitize books.

Ladner used to work on computational theory before shifting to accessible technology in 2002. He and colleague Eve Riskin, professor of electrical engineering, are now trying to take their long-running project on accessibility for the deaf, MobileASL, to the market. This project uses video compression technology to enable signing over video cell phones on low-bandwidth wireless networks (such as those in the U.S.). Currently, deaf people can’t reliably use video cell phones to communicate using sign language, because the videos are too choppy to be intelligible. Ladner and his colleagues are working with UW TechTransfer on commercializing MobileASL.

“We’re trying to get it out and get it in actual use,” he said. “It’s in high demand. I get hundreds of e-mails about it.”

Although designed with the deaf in mind, MobileASL could be used by anyone who wants better quality video phone calls, Ladner said. Bringing it to market is slightly complicated by the fact that …Next Page »

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Four professors from the University of Washington’s department of computer science and engineering recently presented their cutting-edge research to a private audience of tech executives and investors active in the game industry in downtown Seattle. The Interactive Media Technology Showcase was hosted on Wednesday by UW TechTransfer and enterpriseSeattle, and coincided with the Casual Connect gaming conference nearby. The moderator was gaming veteran Alex St. John, the founder of WildTangent and now entrepreneur-in-residence at UW TechTransfer.

As I understand it, the goal was to forge deeper ties between researchers and the gaming industry—presumably to explore the commercial applications of the professors’ work in areas like 3-D graphics, video processing, scene and motion generation, and human-computer interfaces. According to UW TechTransfer, the discussions led to at least one take-home message: that “control, simulation, and image manipulation technologies are at the point of radically changing the game development model.” Specifically, computers can now generate realistic-looking scenes, characters, and movements—potentially making it cheaper, faster, and easier to produce game-quality action and visuals, and “creating new possibilities for human control of game play.”

Just a brief recap of the talks here (you can also see videos here):

—Yoky Matsuoka, a neuro-robotics expert, gave an overview of her work on robotic hands and limbs, and control of virtual environments. She talked about how “neurobotic input devices” could let you grasp and manipulate virtual 3-D objects. Matsuoka’s work on measuring how challenging or stimulating it is to learn a repetitive action (like a hand motion) could potentially have impact on game design, in terms of being able to measure people’s enjoyment of a particular game or their ability to adopt new devices like the Nintendo Wii.

—Zoran Popovic, a specialist in computer simulations and animation, talked about artificial intelligence techniques for making next-gen Massively Multiplayer Online …Next Page »

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When you’ve been at Microsoft for 17 years, you’ve seen a few things. This morning, Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, shared some of his hard-earned wisdom in a keynote talk at company headquarters in Redmond, WA—helping to kick off Microsoft Research’s 10th annual faculty summit.

Mundie outlined his broad thoughts on the future of computing and Microsoft’s role in it—and went into pretty good depth in spots. Nothing too earth-shattering, but it was cool to hear the technologist discuss the roadmap of where his company may be headed with more of a research and innovation hat on, and not much marketing slickness. The backdrop of his talk was that computing devices are becoming more and more pervasive (at least in wealthy countries), so what are the emerging opportunities? “Computing everywhere will be something we take for granted,” Mundie said. “But it was not common knowledge as little as 15 years ago.”

“Today, computers work at your command,” Mundie continued. His vision, he said, is that they will transition to “working on your behalf.”

Here are my top five takeaways from his talk:

1. It’s all about the natural user interface.

Today’s devices are able to understand voice, handwriting, and touch commands better than ever before, but nobody has really put it all together yet. “All the things we talk about as natural user interfaces have been largely used one at a time as enhancements to [graphical user interfaces],” Mundie said. Gesture recognition, expressive responses, immersive 3-D virtual environments, and understanding of context—these advances in computing algorithms will lead to software that is “better at anticipating what you might want.” (Mundie said that Nathan Myhrvold, who hired him, pointed out that early movie cameras were used to film plays before people experimented with them to create new kinds of film experiences. In the same way, better user interfaces will lead to new ideas about how to use software, Mundie implied.)

2. It’s time for the digital assistant—but fear not, real assistants.

Mundie showed a demo of Microsoft researcher Eric Horvitz talking to a “robotic receptionist” (on a screen) to schedule a meeting. The software used machine vision to track Horvitz’s movements, gaze, and orientation to the screen, speech recognition to understand what he was saying, and speech synthesis to communicate back to him—all in real time. Mundie admitted each element was still rough, but …Next Page »

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From the seas to the stars, Microsoft Research is trying to increase its impact. The Redmond, WA-based computer science research organization is releasing new software tools aimed at helping scientists manage and visualize huge amounts of information, and make discoveries in fields as diverse as astronomy and oceanography. The announcement of the free tools, called Project Trident, is being made today at the 10th annual Microsoft Research Faculty Summit in Redmond.

Everyone knows information overload is a huge issue. Just try being a scientist these days. With increasing amounts of data available from the Internet, satellites, telescopes, cameras, gene sequencers, and networked sensors, researchers—and organizations in general—are looking for ways to cut through the deluge and focus faster on doing the analysis and getting results, rather than sorting through data.

It’s also a problem faced by big companies, financial analysts, and medical institutions. So, ultimately, Project Trident is not aimed at spearing purely scientific research problems—it’s software that also could yield big results for business down the road. “If we look back at the challenges faced in business, scientists were facing them years if not decades before,” says Roger Barga, a Microsoft researcher and principal architect on Project Trident. “We’re getting an early look at what our business customers will expect in their products in 3-5 years. It’s pushing another Microsoft [Windows] platform into new areas.”

Project Trident started around 2006, when Barga began collaborating with legendary Microsoft researcher Jim Gray (who was lost at sea in January 2007) on tools to help oceanographers make sense of volumes of data on things like temperature, salinity, and the physics of seafloor hydrothermal vents. “There’s a clear understanding of the science and how to put instruments in the ocean, but there’s a gap in how to convert data streaming in from the ocean to useful analysis,” Barga says. “Jim had this vision of …Next Page »

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Five researchers from the University of Washington and Washington State University, Vancouver, working together with Washington companies, received a total of $376,454 in state funding through Washington Technology Center, according to an announcement today.  The university researchers are working with property data solutions company Data Data in Vancouver; biomaterials firm Healionics in Redmond; pressure instrumentation manufacturer Paine Electronics in East Wenatchee; nanostructure material builder Modumetal in Seattle; and medical simulator developer Simulab, also in Seattle.

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Dan Weld spends a lot of time thinking about the Web and how to get the best information out of it. Weld is a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington and a serial entrepreneur, having co-founded Netbot, AdRelevance, and Nimble Technology. He is also a venture partner with Seattle-based Madrona Venture Group. Some of his research projects include customizable software interfaces and ways to improve information finding on Wikipedia. He is an expert in Web search, information extraction, and adaptive user interfaces, so he seemed like the perfect person to ask: what is the big deal with Microsoft’s Bing, anyway?

In a recent interview, Weld talked about the improvements Bing has made over Google and other current search engines (only slight), the future of Web search, and a hint at a project he is working on that he thinks could change the way we find information online.

The following is an edited version of our conversation.

Xconomy: Let’s start with your general impressions of Bing.

Dan Weld: I think it’s a nice, if small, advance. Some of the things they’ve done in this relaunch are primarily architectural and will support their plans for the future. In terms of what is actually available right now, the biggest change is integrating vertical search in a uniform way.

X: What does that mean?

DW: When you think of search, everyone thinks about Google, and maybe Yahoo, but there are many other kinds of search, like people searches (you can think about Facebook as a people search), travel search (Kayak and Expedia), health information sites. You can think about Wikipedia as providing a search for encyclopedic information. Shopping searches—Amazon is great in part because it makes it easy to find so much information about the products, and reviews of products. All of these are examples of vertical search experiences. Instead of having wide coverage, you have a better experience within a narrow range.

Bing has tried to marry those things into an integrated wide search experience. All of the engines have been doing this. If you do a search on Google for a movie, you might see information about show times and trailers at the top, for example. Bing has gone further in some directions than people have gone before, in this aspect. If you look at their tabbed pane, it lets you look at different kinds of information right there.

X: But doesn’t Google do that too?

DW: All the engines are trying to do it, but the way Microsoft has done it with Bing is somewhat better than what Google has done. With the shopping tab, you get a faceted interface, meaning you can narrow your search using categorical information, restricting yourself to a particular brand or price range. Those facets are specific to the object you’re searching.

X: So if this is just a small change, what kinds of big changes can we expect to see in the future?

DW: Lots of people are happy with search today, but that’s because they set their sights too low. I think search is going to change enormously in the future, and I think it’s going to do so by …Next Page »

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It’s not every day you get to watch a U.S. senator swallow a swirling ball of liquid nitrogen-cooled foam (yuzu-flavored, no less). Talk about a palate cleanser.

That was just one stop along a rather surreal press tour and ribbon-cutting ceremony this morning at the Intellectual Ventures Laboratory in Bellevue, WA, as Sen. Maria Cantwell got a personal tour of the lab from company co-founder and chief executive Nathan Myhrvold. “The point of the lab is to do prototyping and do research around our inventions,” Myhrvold said. “We never know exactly what we’ll need, so we have to have a lot of capabilities.”

(Among these is a unique way of doing ribbon-cutting, as you’ll see on the next page. All photos courtesy of McKenzie Funk.)

The wide range of capabilities at Intellectual Ventures was on display in a series of lab demos. The tour included glimpses of an expansive cooking-science station (site of the palate cleanser) and setups for doing epidemiological computer modeling of malaria outbreaks; diagnosing malaria by laser light (instead of a blood sample); designing electricity-free vaccine containers that can withstand 105 °F exposure in Africa for six months; and photographing mosquito wingbeats at ultra-high speed (27,000 frames per second). Then came the coup de grace—bug-zapping lasers that work as a “photonic fence” against mosquitoes and agricultural pests (the live-demo lasers were non-lethal and just for show, shooting 50 bugs per second). OK, maybe not the most practical technology yet, but it’s certainly a striking demo.

The lab hasn’t changed much since I saw it last summer; it still has about 30 full-time employees. But overall, Intellectual Ventures has grown to more than 500 staff members, up from 400-some employees earlier this year. The company has also leased space across the street from the lab for a new supercomputing center, presumably to help its researchers perform large computer simulations for epidemiology studies and other complex problems.

Sen. Cantwell, a Democrat who’s midway through her second term for Washington state, asked Myhrvold what Intellectual Ventures is doing for this state’s economy. “We’re going to try to keep …Next Page »

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Thermo Fisher Scientific (NYSE:TMO), a Waltham, MA-based provider of scientific research products and services, says that it has struck a deal to buy Biolab, of Auckland, New Zealand, for about $120 million. The acquisition of Biolab—a supplier of analytical instruments, lab equipment, and research materials—expands Thermo’s market presence in New Zealand, Australia, and the South Pacific, according to Thermo. Biolab is the scientific and healthcare unit of multi-industry firm Alesco (ASX:ALS), headquartered in Sidney, Australia, and Thermo plans to integrate Biolab into its laboratory products and services division.

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On Monday, Bellevue, WA-based Intellectual Ventures signed an agreement with the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay to license some of the university’s inventions and to work on technology commercialization strategies with its researchers, as reported by CIOL, Express India, TechFlash, and other outlets. It’s not really big news by itself—Intellectual Ventures has formed similar partnerships with other institutes in India, as well as in China, Japan, Korea, and soon, Singapore—but it fits into the broader strategy the firm is pursuing around the world to foster invention.

Last fall, Intellectual Ventures opened offices in five Asian countries in an effort to gain access to a much wider pool of inventors and talent. Led by global head of technology Patrick Ennis, a physicist and former managing director at Arch Venture Partners—and other members of Intellectual Ventures’ senior leadership team, including co-founder and president Edward Jung—the company is building relationships with prominent academic scientists in Asia, and setting up partnerships whereby it can license certain inventions in exchange for helping with patents and commercialization. The strategy reminds me a lot of Microsoft Research, which has set up labs in China and India in the past 10 years and built partnerships with local university researchers and administrators. (This blueprint is not surprising, given that Intellectual Ventures’ co-founder and CEO Nathan Myhrvold was the founder of Microsoft Research.)

The reception Intellectual Ventures is getting also reminds me of Microsoft Research. While most university officials see the partnerships as benefiting their researchers and increasing the flow of innovation, critics have rolled out the standard “patent troll” fears that the company is coming in to buy up all the best intellectual property—which will only be assuaged by years of relationship building and repeatedly demonstrating that these sorts of deals can benefit both sides.

Nevertheless, Intellectual Ventures’ Indian operation seems to be off to a strong start. It is now staffed by about 15 people, led by Ashok Misra, the former head of IIT-Bombay and a highly respected polymer materials scientist.

I caught up with the staff of Intellectual Ventures to hear about the workings of the Indian university partnership. Nicholas Gibson, one of the firm’s directors of business development in Japan, said via e-mail, “The agreement with IIT-Bombay is important as it gives [us] more direct access to top flight university-based Indian inventors. The deal also gives IIT-B access to commercialization possibilities …Next Page »

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New ideas for alternative energy and cleantech were in the air on Tuesday at the University of Washington, which hosted a regional meeting of the National Academy of Engineering and a public symposium on energy topics. We’ve taken a keen interest in this subject lately at Xconomy as we prepare for our own Northwest cleantech event next week, and wanted to hear from a couple of our very own Xconomists—Ed Lazowska of UW computer science and engineering (who co-organized the meeting), and Charles M. Vest, president of the National Academy of Engineering and the former president of MIT.

In his opening remarks, Vest noted that the National Academy of Engineering will soon release a report called “America’s Energy Future.” “We hope it will become a bible for policymakers to understand what the technological and economic facts are about most of the major technologies that may play a role in the next 10 to 20 years in the distribution, generation, and transportation of electrical energy,” Vest said. “It will not be a policy document, but it will be a basis of facts which we hope those in Congress and the administration will utilize.”

Here are a few highlights from three of the ensuing energy talks:

—Rob Pratt, a staff scientist and program manager at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, spoke about “smart grid” technologies and how minute-by-minute communications and monitoring of energy use could lead to huge overall savings in cost and carbon emissions.

In California, for example, an estimated 1 percent decrease in electricity demand would lead to a 10 percent decrease in energy bills, because electricity generation is most expensive during times of peak demand (e.g., hot summer days). That could translate into some $50 billion in savings for the U.S., if people had enough information about power usage to adjust their consumption levels.

Pratt presented the results of a trial of 112 homes on the Olympic Peninsula, in which letting customers explicitly control their energy usage and savings (and guaranteeing they would not pay more than normal) led to a 15 percent decrease in peak load demand over the course of a year. “You need a simple, intuitive interface,” Pratt said. “Do you need standards for [smart grid] communication? Ours were simple—you need to understand cost, quantity, and time.”

As for his outlook, Pratt said, “I predict this country will embark on an energy efficiency program that will make anything else we’ve done look like child’s play.” He noted that the cleanest power plants are the ones that produce energy for intermediate demand levels—not the peak, not the lowest. And he sees a big opportunity in electric vehicles, provided people manage the timing of charging them up. Giving consumers and utilities minute-by-minute data to track usage levels will be crucial. “The smart grid can help sort this out,” he said. “If we buy the smart grid, this is free. This is like software.”

—Tim Rahmes, biofuels program manager at Boeing (he’s based in Everett, WA), spoke about his team’s recent efforts to test biofuels for aviation. Boeing’s customers in the airline and defense industries are concerned with carbon emissions, fuel availability, and fuel costs, he said. The most important thing about Boeing’s biofuel effort is that it must be sustainable, and not compete with …Next Page »

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Microsoft’s ninth annual TechFest is going on this week in Redmond, WA. This is the big demo event where researchers from all of Microsoft’s research labs around the world (based in Redmond, Silicon Valley, New England, UK, India, and China) get to show off their results to product groups, vice presidents, professors, and other guests.

I spent the morning there, and (among many other things) heard some high-level strategy thoughts from Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, and Rick Rashid, senior vice president and worldwide head of Microsoft Research.

Just a few highlights:

—Mundie spoke about the importance of research to Microsoft’s long-term future, especially in the current climate: “I think research is one of the things we have to do to survive in the long term,” he said. “Even big and great companies can have 30- to 40-year lifespans. My responsibility is to balance the interest of shareholders, employees, and the public, who we service through these technologies. The company would struggle to survive and prosper if we didn’t have the research investment. Companies who are struggling say, ‘We can get by with acquisitions,’ and so forth. I think that contributes to their demise. So in building research labs outside the U.S. [for example], we start first with the idea of long-term prospering.”

Mundie added, “It’s a time when it’s even more important than normal. If you look back at the economic downturns, including the beginning of the Great Depression, the companies that fared the best continued to invest in research and product development. We remain very focused in both research and development across the company.”

Asked to comment on specific areas of technology that might spur economic growth, Mundie pointed to user interfaces and human-computer interaction, particularly in developing countries where people are just starting to come online.

—Rashid said, “One of the values of basic research is you don’t know what will come of it…You invest in basic research precisely because you don’t know what the future is going to hold—you’re going to have a war, famine, economic dislocation, or technology changes, or there’s a new competitor. If you knew what you were going to do, it wouldn’t be basic research.” He emphasized the importance of looking years down the road—it will usually be at least two or three years before a project beginning in Microsoft Research will be useful to product teams.

As for specific technologies that could make a difference to Microsoft, Rashid pointed to location-aware services for social networking, virtual environments, and projects that harness the power of imaging and video using mobile devices, among others.

Stay tuned for more from Microsoft’s research and innovation showcase…

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