Another visit with Microsoft Research: Advances in computerized assistance, search, and display
House Calls for Healthcare Professionals: video program
Microsoft Research is one of the largest and fastest-growing software research organizations in the world. Its distinguished researchers and scientists are responsible for innovations that bring technology to life. Some of these projects have the potential to change healthcare as we know it and improve health around the world.
This video edition of House Calls gives you an inside view of Microsoft's latest areas of research and how they may impact healthcare. Bill Crounse, M.D., and his guests take a look at four innovations being developed inside Microsoft Research: the Personal Assistant Scheduling System, DiffIE, Search Vox, and the Omni-Directional Projector.
Personal Assistant Scheduling System Guest: Eric Horvitz, M.D., Ph.D., Area Manager, Microsoft Research
Scheduling can often take more time and effort than the eventual meeting. While many solutions have been developed to assist with this task, nothing has completely solved the problem. The Personal Assistant Scheduling System (PASS) is as close to a personal assistant as you can get. The system has access to the user's calendar and location, current state of availability, and predictions about future presence and availability. Using systems developed earlier by Microsoft Research, PASS observes a user across multiple devices and sensors and makes inferences about his or her location and presence and when he or she will be available for different kinds of communications. PASS also provides a signal about how busy the user is, computing the "cost of interrupting."
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What's New on this Page: DiffIE Guest: Susan Dumais, Ph.D., Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research
Web content is constantly changing, but with current technology, it can be difficult to determine what is new. Browsers and search engines don't emphasize new material and users have to sift through already-viewed content to find what has changed. To solve this problem, Microsoft Research developed DiffIE, a browser plug-in that makes Web content changes more obvious to users. DiffIE caches the pages a person visits and highlights how those pages have changed when the person subsequently returns to them. This new tool greatly improves research capabilities by allowing users to immediately find the latest content.
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Search Vox Guest: Tim Paek, Ph.D., Researcher, Microsoft Research
Most users have struggled with speech recognition technologies and found them to be sorely lacking. In response to this issue, Microsoft Research developed Search Vox, a search interface for mobile devices that allows users to enter queries using speech recognition. Search Vox is designed to get around speech recognition failures by providing text and touch recovery methods that don't require much extra effort. Search Vox can also use partial queries, giving the user much more flexibility.
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Omni-Directional Projector Guests: Hrvoje Benko, Ph.D., Researcher, Microsoft Research, and Jonathan Fay, Architect, Microsoft Research
Microsoft Research's Omni-Directional Projector combines a standard projector with a wide-angle lens capable of projecting immersive 360-degree data onto a hemispherical dome. This technology provides an experience similar to much more expensive planetarium projectors or virtual-reality CAVE projectors. An exciting additional feature is the ability for users to interact with the presentation through freehand gestures in mid-air, without the need for gloves or a tracking object. These interactions are facilitated by an infrared camera that shares the wide-angle lens with the projector and is capable of detecting a user's hands and gestures.
