Agenda for Monday, July 17, 2006
| Time | Room | Description | |
| 8:00–9:00 | Continental Breakfast | ||
| 9:00–10:45 | Opening Plenary Session | ||
| 9:00–9:20 | Kodiak | Faculty Summit Introduction and Welcome Harold Javid, Faculty Summit Chair, Microsoft Research | |
| External Research & Programs Overview Sailesh Chutani, Director of External Research & Programs, Microsoft Research
Presentation: External Research & Programs Overview |
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| 9:20–10:45 | Kodiak |
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| 10:45–11:00 | Break | ||
| 11:00-12:00 | Break-out Sessions | ||
| Cascade | Breaking Through the Curriculum Silos: The Future of HCI Bill Buxton, Microsoft Research; Michael Sagan, Trek Bicycle Corporation; John SanGiovanni, Microsoft Research (Chair); Brad Weed, Microsoft So much of our lives require interaction with software that controls how we create, consume, and share media and information. When this interaction design is done well, it’s magic. When it’s done poorly, it can be a source of unending frustration. Software interaction design requires blended knowledge, experience, and skills in technology, human behavior, and visual design. How can academia and industry respond to the ever increasing demand for software, services, and devices that are at once useful, usable, and desirable? This panel discussion aims to break down the silos through open, provocative debate and dialog among industry and academic experts.
Presentation: Breaking Through the Curriculum Silos: The Future of HCI (Michael Sagan) |
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| Rainier | A Technical Introduction to Microsoft Robotics Studio Henrik Nielsen, Microsoft Research; Stewart Tansley, Microsoft Research (Chair); Tandy Trower, Microsoft Research This session will present a background and architectural overview of the Microsoft Robotics Studio, an end-to-end development environment that makes robotics development easier. Robotics Studio, is now available for download and evaluation from the Web, as a community technical preview (CTP). Attend this session for an under-the-hood look at this powerful robotics platform, and learn how it can apply to academic research and curriculum development.
Presentation: Microsoft Robotics Studio (Tandy Trower) |
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| St. Helens | Frameworks for Research in Code Generation and Execution Wen-mei Hwu, University of Illinois; John Lefor, Microsoft Research (Chair); Mark Lewin, Microsoft Research; Nam Tran, Microsoft Increasingly, interesting issues in program generation and execution touch on several areas of the software stack: Programming languages, compilation, code generation and optimization, static and dynamic analysis, virtual machines and managed execution, and underlying operating systems. This talk will survey technology assets such as Phoenix and SSCLI, which Microsoft shares with academia. Successful research projects based on these technologies will be highlighted.
Presentation: Frameworks for Research in Code Generation and Execution (Mark Lewin) |
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| Baker | Research & Innovation: The Missing Link – What Happens When Women Are Missing from the Lab and Classroom Al Aho, Columbia University; Janice Cuny, University of Oregon; Jane Prey, Microsoft Research (Chair); Lucy Sanders, National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) The lack of women in the computing field is cause for major concern. What is the impact of this void to innovation and the research community, what activities are currently underway, and what can an individual do? This panel brings together a group of computing researchers who are very concerned about the under-representation of women in computing and hope to open a dialogue with fellow researchers in the audience to help identify more ideas and activities in attracting, retaining, and developing talented women. | ||
| Hood | Design Opportunities in an Emerging Market: The Search for a Process for Accessing the User‘s Context Mythreyee Ganapathy, Microsoft Research (Chair); Ravi Poovaiah, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay; Ajanta Sen, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay In the backdrop of an emerging market scenario in India and the increasing need in the last three-five years to design devices and applications that are technology driven, it is our submission that an understanding of the user’s context has become critical as never before. The reasons are obvious. The focus of the networking technologies has started shifting away from traditional users (with large income bases) in big cities, to underserved communities, whether rural or urban. It is imperative that we understand the mindsets of these user groups their needs for specific products thrown up by their own environments that are hugely culturally mediated and what makes them click with certain products that already exist in the market. We will attempt to outline a normative process that uses a combination of factors, such as ethnographic and socio-cultural, economic, market conditions, and technology levels, to help us construct a reasonable composite of what constitutes the user’s needs and context. And then we will map these on to design principles. We will approach our presentation with a backdrop of the design philosophy adopted by the Industrial Design Centre (IDC) at IIT Bombay, India and exemplify our thoughts with projects carried out at the center by its faculty and students.
Presentation: IDC at IIT Bombay (Ravi Poovaiah) |
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| Sonora | Tablet PC as an Enabling Technology Guy Barker, Microsoft; Patrick Bristow, Microsoft Research (Chair); Mike Buckley, University of Buffalo; Todd Landstad, Microsoft The Tablet PC has found a home in many different areas, such as transcribing and searching notes, sharing handwritten notes without the need to transcribe, sending e-mail messages and running applications when a keyboard is unavailable, using the voice recorder, and annotating documents using ink. This panel will discuss the socially relevant potential of the Tablet PC as a powerful tool in assistive technologies and communications. By using speech synthesis and the voice recorder functionality, we will demonstrate creative developer- and student-built applications for the Tablet PC to aid those who require voice assistance. We will also discuss and demonstrate other aspects of the Tablet PC that could potentially benefit users of assistive technology.
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| 12:00–12:15 | Box Lunch Pickup | ||
| 12:15–1:15 | Lunch and Brown Bag Sessions | ||
| Cascade | MIT iCampus: Innovating Education, Sharing Technology Phil Long, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Paul Oka, Microsoft Research (Chair) For the past six years, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Microsoft Research have collaborated on a series of educational technology research and development projects anchored around the pedagogy of active learning and technologies that leverage Web services. The success of pilot implementations of these projects in the MIT curriculum led to a concerted effort to share selected projects with other institutions around the world. Prominent among these are iLabs, a software architecture for sharing access to physical experiments through the Web; xMAS, cross media annotation system for authoring multimedia documents based on DVD source material; iMOAT, an assessment tool providing a scalable work flow for administering large-scale tests, geared toward essay exams; and xTutor, an online tutorial system for teaching computer science and recently extended to ease adding new content. During this brown bag, we’ll demonstrate some of the tools and feature their adoption and use by other institutions around the world. Significant collaborations with universities in Australia (University of Queensland, RMIT, University of Melbourne, La Trobe University), China (Zhejiang University, Dalian University, Xi�an Jiaotong University), and elsewhere reflect some of the opportunities for collaboration as well as hint at the conditions required for adoption of new technologies.
Presentation: iCampus: Innovating Education, Sharing Technology (Paul Oka) |
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| Rainier | The Institute for Personal Robots in Education Tucker Balch, Georgia Institute of Technology; Stewart Tansley, Microsoft Research (Chair) Where are the computer science students of tomorrow? There is a shocking decline in attraction and retention of CS students in the US. Our thesis is that exciting applications such as robotics can enhance the computer science curriculum, raising attraction and retention figures, and bringing other benefits. However, contemporary robotics in the CS classroom has remained relatively costly, fragile, and complicated, not fully realizing its full potential for widespread usage, and suggested benefits are largely anecdotal. The Institute for Instructional Robotics is designed to address these challenges, launching in summer 2006 with a three-year program, supported by $1M funds from Microsoft and $1M matching funds from Georgia Tech and Bryn Mawr College. We will develop a new platform for teaching CS, initially specifically targeted at CS1/CS2. This will be combined with leading-edge CS curriculum materials from Georgia Tech’s new Threads model. The effectiveness of the platform and associated teaching materials will be rigorously assessed through live trials at selected schools. The results will be widely published, and the design refined over the life of the institute. With a strong team and a rigorous scientific approach, we believe we have a real chance of providing a proven solution that can be widely deployed in the US and beyond.
Presentation: The Institute for Personal Robots in Education (IPRE) (Stewart Tansley) |
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| St. Helens | Windows Academic Program: Supporting OS Teaching and Research Mark Lewin, Microsoft Research (Chair); Dave Probert, Microsoft; Arkady Retik, Microsoft This brown bag presents a new academic program that provides instructional material and resources to support teaching and research in operating system concepts by using Microsoft Windows XP. The talk will briefly review the program components: Windows OS Internals Curriculum Resource Kit (CRK), Windows Research Kernel (WRK), and programming lab environment (ProjectOZ). In particular, the talk will focus on the Windows Research Kernel, which contains the bulk of the source code for the Windows NT kernel (compatible with Windows Server 2003 for x86/x64 and Windows XP x64) and a novel environment for low-level OS projects (code named ProjectOZ), which takes advantage of the native Windows NT layer of Windows to simplify OS experimentation for teaching and research.
Presentation: Windows Academic Program: Supporting OS Teaching and Research (Dave Probert) White paper: Windows Academic Program (opens in new tab) |
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| Baker | Birds of a Feather: Deans, Chairs, Organization Representatives Tom Healy, Microsoft Research (Moderator) Tom Healy will moderate this birds-of-a-feather session for deans, chairs, and organization representatives, which will continue the discussion started in the opening plenary session. In particular, this session will ask what are the shared responsibilities of government, industry, and the academy in creating an “innovation infrastructure?” What specific actions and policies can the academy, government, and industry collectively support to drive national competitiveness, technology innovation, and scientific discoveries?
Presentation: Birds of a Feather: Deans, Chairs, Organization Representatives (Tom Healy) |
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| Sonora | Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellows: Research Projects Harold Javid, Microsoft Research (Moderator); Wei Wang, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Automatic computer visual recognition. Seamless human computer interactions tools. Rethinking computer system design, Physics based character animation, Natural language processing. Today’s investigation of such subjects could fuel the innovations of tomorrow. Microsoft Research is helping to support such creativity with the announcement of the second contingent of five winners of the Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellowship Program. Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellows receive two annual installments of $100,000 with which to pursue innovative research. This Brown Bag session will introduce the five recipients of the 2006 Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellowships to the faculty summit audience. Each of the five fellows will give a short overview of their research work.
Regina Barzilay, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Eddie Kohler, University of California, Los Angeles Aaron Hertzmann, University of Toronto Scott Klemmer, Stanford University Fei-Fei Li, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Presentations: |
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| 1:15–2:30 | Break-out Sessions | ||
| Cascade | Technical and Design Trends in Mobile Devices Scott Klemmer, Stanford University; Horace Luke, Microsoft; John SanGiovanni, Microsoft Research (Chair) Every week, a tidal wave of new mobile devices enter the marketplace. What current technical and design trends will influence the features and form factors of tomorrow’s mobile devices?
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| Rainier | Computing in the Life Sciences Stephen Emmott, Microsoft Research; Dan Fay, Microsoft; Simon Mercer, Microsoft Research (Chair) Just as computers are transforming the life sciences, the life sciences are a source of ideas that will transform computing in the next century. Microsoft has been engaged with academia for several years, providing support for a range of projects which have the potential to advance the state of the art of scientific research, and we are now coordinating our initiatives to make a global impact.
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| St. Helens | What‘s New in Windows Vista and Office 2007 for Academia Mor Hezi, Microsoft; Bert Keely, Microsoft; Todd Needham, Microsoft Research (Chair); Murray Sargent, Microsoft Bert Keely will begin this session by discussing and demonstrating improvements to Windows Vista for Tablet PCs, including the new Windows Touch Technology support for touch screens, the Handwriting Recognition Personalization Tool for tailoring recognition results to your own personal handwriting style, flicks gesture controls, and the new Touch Pointer, a special tool for accessing right-click menus and targeting small pieces of the interface with your finger. Next, Mor Hezi will cover Excel 2007 improvements of particular interest to academia, including visualization and analysis, support for massive data sets, Web publishing, sharing and the new XML file format, and enhancements to pivot tables. Finally, Murray Sargent will demonstrate how Unicode’s rich mathematical character set combined with OpenType font technology, TeX’s mathematical typography principles, and enhanced auto-correction can be used to produce high-quality, streamlined technical text processing.
Presentation: Math Editing and Display in Office 2007 (Murray Sargent) |
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| Baker | HIP Human Interactions in Programming Rob DeLine, Microsoft Research; John Spencer, Microsoft Research (Chair) Since the earliest days of computing, software development tools have been based on a dangerous stereotype: development is done by a nerd alone in a box. Contrary to this prejudice, software development is in fact a very social activity. Members of a development team collaborate, cooperate, and learn from one another, and even the nerdiest programmer spends as much time communicating with teammates, colleagues, and the community as he or she does programming. The HIP group is creating new tools based on the obvious observation that software development is done by people working together.
Presentation: Human Interactions in Programming (Rob DeLine) |
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| Sonora | Future Thoughts on Tablet Technology Richard Anderson, University of Washington; Otto Berkes, Microsoft; Jane Prey, Microsoft Research (Chair) In this session, Richard Anderson will discuss using Tablet PCs to support active learning in the classroom. Classroom Presenter is a Tablet PC-based Classroom Interaction system. He will describe how the system has been employed in computer science courses, such as Data Structures, Algorithms, and Software engineering. The emphasis of the talk will be on the pedagogy that is being developed around using student devices in the classroom and on how different instructional goals can be achieved with the help of technology.
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| 2:30–2:45 | Break | ||
| 2:45–4:00 | Break-out Sessions | ||
| Cascade | Got Multiple Devices and Displays? Mary Czerwinski, Microsoft Research (Moderator); François Guimbreti�re, University of Maryland; Beth Mynatt, Georgia Institute of Technology; George Robertson, Microsoft Research; Andy Wilson, Microsoft Research How do you get a bunch of devices in a room, add people and large displays, and really make it work? Much research recently has been carried out around large displays, but mainly as a single user device. What happens when you also consider desktops, laptops, tablets, tabletops, PDAs, and cell phones, and examine how people collaborate to use these and their existing tools to create a device ecology? What do we really know about how multiple knowledge workers or consumers will work effectively integrating all of these technologies? (Hint: It may be less than you think!) And, what new tasks and activities do multiple device ecologies support well? These and many related topics will be discussed by the panelists for what will surely be a lively debate. Mary Czerwinski, Principal Researcher and Manager of the Visualization and Interaction Research Group in Microsoft Research, will moderate.
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| Rainier | Bioinformatics: Helping Scientists Do Better Science Phil Bourne, University of California at San Diego; Bongshin Lee, Microsoft Research; Simon Mercer, Microsoft Research (Chair); Mark Wilkinson, University of British Columbia Bioinformatics is a broad domain for which the Windows platform has a lot to offer. In this session, we’ll show several areas of bioinformatics that have the potential to use the power of Windows to make a significant impact on the state of the art.
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| St. Helens | Singularity Galen Hunt, Microsoft Research; Jim Larus, Microsoft Research; Mark Lewin, Microsoft Research (Chair) The Microsoft Research Singularity project started with the question: “What would software look like if it was designed from scratch for dependability?” Singularity builds on advances in programming languages and tools to develop a new system architecture and operating system, named Singularity. Singularity varies significantly from present systems. It is written almost entirely in safe languages, it uses software instead of hardware protection to isolate processes, and it replaces the open process architecture, used since 1960s Multics, with a new sealed process architecture. Singularity demonstrates the practicality of new technologies and architectural decisions, which should lead to the construction of more robust and dependable systems.
Presentation: Singularity Overview (Galen Hunt) |
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| Baker | Spec# Rustan Leino, Microsoft Research; John Spencer, Microsoft Research (Chair) Spec# is a programming system that aims to provide programmers with a higher degree of rigor than in common languages today. The Spec# language extends the object-oriented .NET language C#, adding features like non-null types, pre- and postconditions, and object invariants. In addition to static type checking and compiler-emitted runtime checks for specifications, Spec# has a static program verifier. The program verifier translates Spec# programs into verification conditions, which are then analyzed by an automatic theorem prover. In this talk, I will give a demo and overview of Spec#. I will then discuss some aspects of its design in more detail.
Presentation: Spec# (Rustan Leino) |
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| Hood | Mesh Networking: New Applications and Technologies Suman Banerjee, University of Wisconsin; Dina Katabi, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; S. Keshav, University of Waterloo, Canada; Jitu Padhye, Microsoft Research; Stewart Tansley, Microsoft Research (Moderator) A mesh network is a peer-to-peer multi-hop wireless network in which participant nodes cooperate with one another to route packets. Wireless mesh networking is an important component of the broadband everywhere vision providing blanket high-speed internet access in places without pre-existing infrastructure. It enables quick-and-easy extension of a local area network to a wide area. Over the last three years there has been a substantial amount of research in mesh networking with significant new technical developments. However, many believe that the work is far from being done. The state-of-art is insufficient for deploying large wireless mesh networks. Important issues such as radio range, network capacity, scalability, manageability, and security remain open problems. Panelist will discuss how far along we are in realizing our vision. They will share some of their latest research results and answer audience questions on mesh networking.
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| Sonora | Pen Research Jay Pittman, Microsoft; Jane Prey, Microsoft Research (Chair); Andy van Dam, Brown University In this session, Andy van Dam and Patrick Haluptzok give their talk, “The Pen Can Be Mightier Than the Keyboard.” Brown Researchers Perspectives on the Possibilities of Pen Input. This talk will cover the research directions of the Brown Computer Graphics Group into pen-based computing and the exciting possibilities opened by the creation of the new Microsoft Center for Research on Pen-Centric Computing at Brown. Next, Jay Pittman discusses how the Microsoft Handwriting Research team develops handwriting recognizers that work for everyday people by using their own natural writing style. Available recognizers include English (two varieties), Japanese, Chinese (two varieties), Korean, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, and Portuguese. All current products handle either the Latin or the East Asian orthographies. At this time, we are researching the recognition of scripts outside those orthographies, specifically Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, and Brahmic scripts. This presentation will provide an overview of our recognizer architecture, and then review some of the difficulties associated with the new script families.
Presentation: Pen Research (Jay Pittman) |
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| 4:00–4:15 | Break | ||
| 4:15–5:15 | Kodiak | Flashing, Peeping, and Charging: Computing for Many Futures Genevieve Bell, Director of User Experience, Digital Home Group, Intel Corporation There is no single technology trajectory that determines the path of technology development. Instead there are many points of innovation, invention, and creation. Taking a global perspective, informed by a strong understanding of the importance of local cultures, it is possible to see a series of different pathways to the future of computing. In this talk, I will explore some of the different landmarks and roadmaps on those different pathways and challenge conventional wisdoms and comforts around technology. | |
| 5:15–6:00 | Travel to Kirkland | ||
| 6:30–9:00 | Dinner Cruise from Lake Washington to Puget Sound | ||
Agenda for Tuesday, July 18, 2006
| Time | Room | Description | |
| 8:00–9:00 | Continental Breakfast | ||
| 9:00–10:00 | Kodiak | Microsoft Research: An Overview of Projects Daniel T. Ling, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Research Steve Richardson, Microsoft Research Matt Uyttendaele, Microsoft Research Yi-Min Wang, Microsoft Research Alec Wolman, Microsoft Research | |
| 10:00–1:00 | McKinley | DemoFest provides an opportunity for leading academic researcher to see a sampling of exciting results from Microsoft Research. This unique three-hour event also gives faculty a chance to talk one on one with the Microsoft researchers and to see a few of the sponsored research projects from the External Research & Programs group. | |
| 11:45–12:00 | Box Lunch Pickup | ||
| 12:00–1:00 | Lunch and Brown Bag Sessions | ||
| Rainier | University and Industry Collaborations Bryan Barnett, Microsoft Research (Chair); Ken Leppert, Microsoft Research Microsoft engages with the academic research community in a number of ways. This session will focus on the legal and other issues raised by these partnerships and suggest guidelines for ensuring that they are successful. There will be an open discussion about university-industry engagements in general, and the presenters will answer questions about engaging with Microsoft in particular.
Presentation: University-Industry Collaborations (Bryan Barnett, Ken Leppert) |
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| St. Helens | Gaming for Computer Science Instruction John Nordlinger, Microsoft Research (Chair); Andrew Phelps, Rochester Institute of Technology John Nordlinger will be discussing the gaming in computer science initiative and assets available and forthcoming for academics interested in enhancing computer science. Andrew Phelps will then present one of those assets created by RIT called MUPPETs (Multi-User Programming Pedagogy for Enhancing Traditional Study), which supports C#, Java, DirectX, and OpenGL in a pervasive visual virtual environment. Presentation: Gaming for Computer Science Instruction (Andrew Phelps) White paper: Computer Gaming to Enhance CS Curriculum (opens in new tab) Webcast: Gaming for Computer Science Instruction (opens in new tab) | ||
| Baker | High-Performance Computing with Windows Dan Fay, Microsoft (Chair); Marvin Theimer, Microsoft; Ryan Waite, Microsoft Microsoft recently launched its first product aimed specifically at the high-performance computing market, namely the Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Solution. This product is designed to enable running compute-intensive scientific and technical programs on Windows-based compute clusters, with an emphasis on supporting personal and small workgroup compute clusters. I will give a tour of the product’s capabilities and will also discuss what kinds of things we are thinking of adding to the next version of the product. High-Performance Computing with Windows (Ryan Waite) Webcast: High-Performance Computing with Windows (opens in new tab) | ||
| 1:00–2:15 | Break-out Sessions | ||
| Cascade | Understanding Emerging Markets and Opportunities Phillip Joe, Microsoft; Daniel Makoski, Microsoft; Melissa Pailthorp, Microsoft; John SanGiovanni, Microsoft Research (Chair); Hugh Teegan, Microsoft In recent years, emerging markets have become a major focus of technology engagement in research, commerce, and community outreach. This session will feature program managers from three separate teams around Microsoft who have active projects focused on emerging markets and will provide some insights on the social and technical opportunities and considerations.
Presentations: Inclusive Design: Principles for Innovating in Emerging Markets (Phillip Joe) |
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| Rainier | Microsoft eScience Simon Mercer, Microsoft Research (Chair); Alex Szalay, The Johns Hopkins University; Katalin Szl�vecz, The Johns Hopkins University eScience can be defined as the use of computing to enable scientific understanding on a scale that would not otherwise be possible. These projects demonstrate the breadth of impact computing is having on scientific research.
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| St. Helens | Recent Progress on Sensor Networks and Embedded Computing Stewart Tansley, Microsoft Research (Chair); Feng Zhao, Microsoft Research We have been investigating the problems of programming and managing networked embedded systems such as wireless sensors and mobile devices at Microsoft Research. In this talk, I will report on our progresses on a number of projects, including the SONGS programming model based on the specification and composition of light-weight services; the MSRSense Toolkit, which is a set of tools for collecting, processing, visualizing, and archiving sensor data and bridging the motes and .NET/PC platforms; and SenseWeb, which provides an infrastructure and a geo-centric Web interface for publishing and browsing live sensor data streams, as well as our work on a low-power reconfigurable hardware platform to support multi-radio real-time applications. For more information about the Networked Embedded Computing group, visit the Networked Embedded Computing Web site (opens in new tab).
Recent Progress on Sensor Networks and Embedded Computing (Feng Zhao) |
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| Baker | Computing Research in Latin America Marcelo Arenas, Universidad Catolica de Chile; David Garza-Salazar, Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico; Jaime Puente, Microsoft Research (Chair); Clarisse Sieckenius de Souza, Pontif�cia Universidade Cat�lica do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil This session will provide an overview of the research agenda in computer science in Latin America and the overall regional organization and existing cooperation programs. Several interesting projects will be discussed as examples of the success research stories in this emerging region. The number of science and engineering articles credited to Latin American organizational authors and published in the most recognized influential scientific and technical journals almost tripled between 1988 and 2001. This growth rate was greater than that of emerging and developing countries in other regions. The increase in the number of Latin American articles was concentrated in four countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico. During this session specific research projects from Brazil, Mexico, and Chile will be mentioned in addition to an overall perspective of the computer science research agenda in the region.
Presentations: Computing Research in Latin America (Jaime Puente) |
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| Hood | Information Makers and Consuming Information Max Chickering, Microsoft Live Labs; Elizabeth Lane Lawley, Rochester Institute Technology; Evelyne Viegas, Microsoft Research (Chair) Lawley’s talk on “The Social Side of Search” emphasizes a new internet culture. Most characterizations of search activities frame it as a solitary activity – like reading or writing. A single user types queries into the search box on their personal computer. In fact, however, search is inherently informed by the actions of other users. The ranking of search results is based not only on the content of the page, but also on the extent to which that page has been linked to by other users. And a growing number of search-related application explicitly prioritize collaborative information seeking behavior – examples include social bookmarking services like del.icio.us, and social photo sharing applications like Flickr. I will discuss the growing importance of social features in search-related applications, as well as the tension between sharing and privacy that can result from these features. Chickering’s talk on “Learning Bayesian Networks for Managing Inventory of Banner Advertisements” addresses the challenges of bringing back to the user relevant ads. Many online publishers sell space on their Web pages for placement of banner advertisements. In addition, these publishers often give impression guarantees the publisher agrees to show each advertisement a minimum number of times. Impression guarantees significantly complicate the advertisement-delivery system because the system must manage inventory. This talk describes how to manage inventory of banner advertisements. The system allows advertisers to target both groups of pages (e.g., sports pages) and demographic information about the people browsing the content (e.g., males from Seattle). The system uses Web-traffic data to maintain a Bayesian-network model of the joint distribution over targetable attributes.
Presentations: The Social Side of Search (Elizabeth Lane Lawley) |
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| Sonora | Hands-on: Exploring a Multi-Cultural Classroom and Supporting Large Tiled Displays Patrick Bristow, Microsoft Research (Chair); Brian Donnellan, National University of Ireland at Galway; Patrick Mantey, University of California at Santa Cruz; Gino Sorcinelli, University of Massachusetts at Amherst Professors Donnellan and Sorcinelli will model how they use ConferenceXP and Tablet PCs in their trans-Atlantic, virtual classroom. Session participants will take an active role in this process by using Tablet PCs to receive a broadcast of the session’s content in OneNote. The combination of Tablet PCs with OneNote enables participants to annotate PowerPoint slides with their comments by using the Tablet PC inking capability. Professor Mantey will then present his work on an advanced multimedia lecture hall exploiting large tiled displays and student laptops, the software supporting their combined use, and the initial validation of this environment in enhancing learning and student-instructor interaction.
Presentation: Multi-Cultural Collaboration and Virtual Product Development Teams (Brian Donnellan, Gino Sorcinelli) |
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| 1:00–3:00 | Kodiak | Design Expo The Design Expo is a Microsoft Research forum where the top graduate design institutions showcase their prototype interaction design ideas. Microsoft Research sponsors a semester long class at seven interdisciplinary leading design schools and invites the top class projects to present their ideas as part of the Faculty Summit. This year, we are inviting seven institutions with established programs in interdisciplinary design and will be providing a forum around the theme, “The Gigabit Connection: Opportunities and Issues in a High-Bandwidth Ubiquitous Computing World” to showcase exceptional design thinking about the future of computing and interaction. Student teams will present innovative business ideas, concept prototypes, visual and industrial designs, and supporting research in their media based presentations around the theme of high-bandwidth ubiquitous computing. This year’s schools include participants from New York University Interactive Telecommunications Program, Rhode Island School of Design, Stanford University, Carnegie Mellon University, Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial (Brazil), Technische Universiteit Delft (Netherlands), and National Institute of Design (India). | |
| 2:15–2:30 | Break | ||
| 2:30–3:45 | Break-out Sessions | ||
| Cascade | Digital Inclusion Research: A Global Survey Tom Healy, Microsoft Research (Chair); Miguel Nussbaum, Universidad Catolica de Chile; Henry Nyongesa, University of Botswana; Roni Rosenfeld, Carnegie Mellon University; John SanGiovanni, Microsoft Research In early 2006, Microsoft Research organized the Digital Inclusion RFP program. The focus of this program was to explore applications for mobile devices, wireless networking, and other emerging technologies for applications in rural or underserved communities. Eighteen projects were selected from ten different countries across a wide array of solutions and research problems. This session will feature presentations from three of the funded research teams, from the U.S., Chile, and Botswana. After the session, join us to engage in an open audience-driven discussion about these projects.
Presentations: Digital Inclusion Research: A Global Survey (Tom Healy) |
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| Rainier | Modeling in the Life Sciences Tanya Berger-Wolf, University of Illinois at Chicago; Simon Mercer, Microsoft Research (Chair); Andrew Phillips, Microsoft Research; Sean Sedwards, University of Trento The integration of computing with scientific research is catalyzing the creation of new forms of science. The analysis and modeling of complex biological systems has been identified by the 2020 Science Group as a key challenge in the understanding of biology, and the codification of biological concepts is a critical step in the development of formal languages to enable direct computation with biological concepts.
Presentations: Analysis of Dynamic Social Networks (Tanya Berger-Wolf) |
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| St. Helens | Creating Games with the XNA Framework John Nordlinger, Microsoft Research (Chair); Mitch Walker, Microsoft Come learn about how the XNA Framework will help you make great games. You’ll get an overview of the XNA Framework, where it fits in the XNA vision, and a detailed look into the various pieces of the framework. We’ll have plenty of demos and get our hands dirty writing code! | ||
| Baker | Windows CardSpace (Formerly InfoCard) John Spencer, Microsoft Research (Chair); Steven R. Woodward, Microsoft Windows CardSpace (formerly InfoCard) is the name for an end-user experience Microsoft is creating in support of the Identity Metasystem. The Identity Metasystem is an industry-wide initiative to solve federated user authentication for both Web site and Web server authentication. | ||
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| Sonora | Hands-on: Engaging Students with Ubiquitous Presenter and WriteOn Patrick Bristow, Microsoft Research (Chair); Beth Simon, University of California at San Diego; Joe Tront, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University In this talk, Beth Simon will explore uses of a Tablet PC-based system, called Ubiquitous Presenter, to support active learning – even when students don’t have Tablet PCs. She’ll also review interesting pedagogical uses by instructors and report on student use of the system to engage in the classroom and to review after class. Next, Joe Tront will uncover WriteOn, a tool that is used to annotate dynamic demonstrations of screen presentations in classroom and distance learning environments. With WriteOn, the user can place a virtual transparency on the screen and annotate screen activity as it occurs on the lower layer. Screen images or movies can be saved for later review. Future broadcast capabilities will allow students to receive the presenter’s screen and personalize the notes on their tablets.
Presentation: Using WriteOn to Engage Students (Joseph G. Tront) |
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| 3:45–4:00 | Break | ||
| 4:00–4:30 | Kodiak | Using Computer Science to Develop Very Large Operating Systems Jim Allchin, Co-President, Platforms & Services Division, Microsoft The increasing complexity of developing and testing Windows, combined with the rise in security attacks, have underscored the need for more effective ways to find and prevent code deficiencies. Microsoft has used computer science itself to re-engineer its software development process by incorporating automated tools for project planning, visualizing dependencies in the source code, enforcing “Quality Gates” to prevent the creation of code deficiencies, and verification testing. This has resulted in a dramatic improvement in the efficiency of the engineering process and has raised the quality level of the code checked into the Windows Operating System code base. | |
| 4:30–5:00 | Kodiak | Microsoft Research Faculty Summit 2006: Final Thoughts and Next Steps Sailesh Chutani, Microsoft Research; Tom Healy, Microsoft Research; Harold Javid, Microsoft Research (Chair); Kevin Schofield, Microsoft Research
Presentation: Final Thoughts and Next Steps (Tom Healy) |
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| 5:15–7:00 | Dinner, Microsoft Visitor Center and Company Store |