Sensor Network Research

What do limping cows and elderly home care have in common? It turns out, they're both the target of research projects involving sensor networks at the European Microsoft Innovation Center (EMIC) in Aachen, Germany. In this video, Matthias Neugebauer (Program Manager at the EMIC), tells us all about it.

MyMedia- Dynamic Personalization of Multimedia

MyMedia is a recommender system research project to help people making sense of the vast amount of multimedia content. It's co-ordinated by Alexander Voss, Research Program Manager at the European Microsoft Innovation Center in Aachen, Germany. Visit the project's website to get more information: www.mymediaproject.org.

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Software Verification

Today - more than ever - complex software architectures, configurations and the implications of parallel software running on multi-core hardware call for a new methodology to make sure that software is of high-quality and does what it is was designed for. By using a formal approach and going beyond regular software testing the verification team at the European Microsoft Innovation Center (EMIC), Aachen, Germany are enhancing software verification methods and tools and applying them to analyze 50,000 lines of code in a real life scenario of a market-ready product. This approach is what makes the project unique.

Thomas Santen and Stephan Tobies from EMIC explain what formal software verification is about and how it can help to build reliable systems. The technology they explain is being developed jointly at EMIC and Microsoft’s Research in Software Engineering group (RiSE) in Redmond. Their tool VCC verifies concurrent, low-level C code that is annotated by contracts specifying its intended behavior.

Thomas and Stephan work in the hypervisor verification project Verisoft, which is a collaboration of EMIC, RiSE, along with Wolfgang Paul, professor for computer architecture at the Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany. The aim of this project is to verify the hypervisor kernel of Microsoft Hyper-V, Microsoft’s virtualization product. The hypervisor kernel is a small multi-processor operating system micro kernel with memory and thread management but without device drivers. The implementation of this kernel consists of roughly 60 thousand lines of highly optimized C and x64 assembler code.

For further information, please contact Thomas Santen (Thomas.Santen-at-microsoft.com) or Stephan Tobies (Stephan.Tobies-at-microsoft.com).

EMIC Celebrates its 5th Anniversary

The European Microsoft Innovation Center (EMIC) recently celebrated its 5th anniversary with a reception at its offices in Aachen, Germany. At the party, guests had the opportunity to talk to researchers, check out demos of some of their current projects and enjoy food and drinks. EMIC is a Microsoft Research and Development facility that focuses on collaborative applied research in Europe.

European Microsoft Innovation Center

EMIC is one of the Microsoft facilities dedicated to research and development in Europe. The German lab is unique to Microsoft in its focus on collaborative applied research in Europe. Under the auspices of research and development programs sponsored by the European Commission and the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), EMIC develops technologies that are made available for the next generation of software systems, products, and standards. EMIC contributes knowledge to the European technology community and gains information from European areas of expertise, reinforcing relationships with the European industrial and academic community. EMIC’s researchers work together with more than 100 respected European academic and business partners throughout Europe, including British Telecom, SAP, Siemens, Philips, Hewlett-Packard, the Fraunhofer Society and INRIA among others. EMIC was founded in 2003 and is host to more than 40 scientists and engineers from more than ten different countries.

AbstractServiceActivity for Workflow Foundation

Sébastien Peray and Marcel Tilly from EMIC’s Enterprise team show a new, specialized Workflow Foundation activity as an easy to use approach for dynamic service selection.
People often face the problem of finding the right service for a specific problem, for instance finding the closest printer with the smallest printer queue or just finding the cheapest book. Everybody would like to use the best, cheapest, or closest service depending on his or her context. Optimizing service usage and service selection, finding the cheapest service is also a well-known enterprise problem as it directly relates to reducing costs.

Sébastien and Marcel talk about how to find the right service at the right time during runtime and introducing a lightweight, new concept. They present a way that every developer can use to easily and quickly make his or her static workflow more dynamic and flexible!A new, specialized Workflow Foundation activity – called AbstractServiceActivity – can easily be added to each workflow. The developer can add and remove services to this activity and can define criteria for service selection, like price, reliability etc.. All this is possible during runtime without changing the workflow itself. This pragmatic solution helps to solve dynamic service selection problems in most of the cases without adding significant complexity. Try it!

Enhanced Recommender Technologies

We are drowning in a sea of information overload. Television channels, email, books and music assault our senses with far too much content. The volume of content on the internet and generated by applications is literally exploding. Not only traditional media but millions of individual users are putting their own content on the web. The massive popularity of YouTube is just one example of this phenomenon. So, in this flood, how do you distinguish content that matters to you from the rest? How do you, for example, discover multimedia information and entertainment in a way that suits you personally? Isn’t there an easier way? The EMIC Home Team has created a framework that allows you to quickly prototype solutions that help you solve this “crisis of choice”.

Ron Mevissen, Lead Developer of the EMIC Home Team introduces and demonstrates the Media Center Recommender prototype that helps you find interesting TV programs. Rene Hülswitt, Software Engineer in the EMIC Home Team shows off the Virtual Earth Recommender that helps find points of interests like restaurants, tourist attractions etc. near you. Rich Hanbidge, Software Engineer in the EMIC Home Team gives a demo of a recommender for Xbox Live that helps you find interesting items offered by XBOX live such as downloadable videos or games. Stefan Hirtbach, Software Engineer in the EMIC Home Team demonstrates a recommender for Outlook that helps you decide the importance of emails, which ones should be read now, which ones can wait.

Delegate Access to Your Services

In today’s world, we rely more and more on digitally available information that is stored, processed or provided by services on the internet. Examples are Health Vault, where users can store their medical data, a sightseeing service providing users with city tours based on their current location, etc . Thus, composing web services is becoming an important part of application development. It is more and more common to combine services from different providers into one application. But, services dealing with personal information of users have security and privacy requirements that make their composition difficult. Users care about privacy and want to control who can access their personal information. I.e. they want to let their friends view their online pictures or let a sightseeing service access their current location. For this, they need a way to delegate access to their personal information. Users cannot deal with the variety of existing solutions for access control. There are simply too many disparate user experiences. Think about creating a XACML policy, managing an access control list, or handing credentials to a friend. This variety will never totally disappear.

We propose an abstraction model for existing access control mechanisms and a unified way for the user to delegate rights. We see this unified API as essential for the emerging market of service composition. The proposed unified API makes services dealing with user's personal information available to composition without polluting the details of the composition with access control details.

Our solution provides tools for abstract delegation that is independent of the underlying mechanisms as well as a unified user experience for delegation, revocation and the overall management of access to personal data. These tools allow specifying at the composition level that a Delegator grants access on a Resource to a Delegatee that is than mapped to the management of a concrete access control mechanism depending on the composed service.