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Microsoft Research TechFest 2009
Project Listing

Technology for Rural Education and Healthcare
Researcher(s): David Hutchful
Description: Rural environments in developing countries pose steep challenges in delivering effective
education and healthcare. While not all of them can be solved with technology, we present a couple of
examples in which technology plays a key role. In one series of experiments with education, we examine
how a single PC in a classroom can best support a time-constrained, technology-naïve teacher, both with
and without student interaction. In another, an electronic pillbox helps to verify that tuberculosis patients
receive their medications and take them on the right schedule.
Research Site: Not available

Recognizing Characters Written in the Air
Researcher(s): Lei Ma / Qiang Huo / Frank Soong
Description: This is a proof-of-concept demo for recognizing characters written in the air. To input
characters into devices such as Xbox and televisions equipped with a low-cost Webcam but no keyboard
or mouse, one can just face the camera and write the intended character in the air by using one’s finger
or a handy object. The gestures captured by the camera will be fed into a robust handwriting recognizer.
A short list of recognition results will be displayed on the screen for final selection. The recognition
vocabulary consists of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters, English letters, and numerical digits.

Concurrency Analysis Platform and Tools
Researcher(s): Madan Musuvathi
Description: Concurrency bugs are difficult to find and hard to reproduce. We will demo the Concurrency
Analysis Platform (CAP), which provides predictable control over thread interleavings. When a
concurrency bug is found, CAP can drive the program along the erroneous interleaving, providing an
instantaneous repro. CAP enables multiple concurrency-analysis tools that will be useful for developers
and testers. The demo will include CHESS, a systematic unit-testing tool for concurrency; Cuzz, a
concurrency fuzzer for obtaining more coverage from existing stress tests; FeatherLite, a lightweight data-
race detector; and Sober, a tool for finding memory-model errors.
Research Site: http://research.microsoft.com/CAP

Profiling the Performance of Distributed Systems
Researcher(s): Mihai Budiu / Moises Goldszmidt / Oliver Williams
Description: We will show a modular application designed for analyzing and troubleshooting the
performance of large clusters running data-center services. It consists of four modules: 1) distributed-log
collection and extraction, 2) a database storing the extracted data, 3) an interactive visualization tool for
exploring the data, and 4) a plug-in interface and a set of sample plug-ins that enable users to implement
data-analysis tools.
Research Site: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/artemis/

Closed-Loop Control Systems for the Data Center
Researcher(s): Navendu Jain / CJ Williams / Jim Larus / Dan Reed
Description: This demonstration shows a closed-loop, adaptive control system for Live Search that aims
to minimize energy usage while guaranteeing a service-level agreement (SLA) for search response time.
Power is a central issue in the design and management of data centers. Power consumption accounts for
as much as 30 percent of a data center’s operating costs. Idle machines consume a good fraction of this
power–only about 7.5 percent of CPU cycles executed in Microsofts data centers performs useful work.
Minimizing power usage during periods of low workload could save Microsoft money. Applications
deployed in the data centers, however, require a strong guarantee of their performance. For example,
Live Search requires the response time of at least 99 percent of queries to be less than 300 milliseconds.
A key challenge is to minimize power usage while meeting the desired SLAs. To address this challenge,

we present an energy-aware prototype built using 100 low-power Atom processors that execute a Live
Search benchmark with a scaled-down, 1-GB search index per node.

Content Services for Minority Languages
Researcher(s): Ahmed El-Shimi / Kareem Darwish / Motaz El-Saban
Description: Our demo has two parts: 1) Searching scanned books without the need for OCR: OCRLess
is a language-independent technology that enables search in printed documents for languages that lack
OCR or whose OCR quality is poor. By combining image-based matching with text-based indexing, Our
demo has two parts: 1) Searching scanned books without the need for OCR: OCRLess is a language-
independent technology that enables search in printed documents for languages that lack OCR or whose
OCR quality is poor. By combining image-based matching with text-based indexing, OCRLess overcomes
high character-error rates common to languages with complex orthographic features, surpassing the
search performance of traditional OCR-based systems. This is achieved by segmenting image documents
into shapes—words, parts of words, characters, or parts of characters; clustering similar shapes; and
indexing their unique IDs. Text queries then are drawn, segmented, and matched to the table of clusters
to produce hits. The demo encompasses English, Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, and hieroglyphics. 2) Trans-
Bulletization: We will present a tool that translates a document into English, then summarizes it into
bullets. Machine translation is effective in conveying meaning but lacks style and fluency, degrading the
user experience. By reducing the machine-translation output to bullets, the user’s expectation of fluency
and style are diminished. This is presented in the context of cross-language English-Arabic news search.
The system uses Microsoft Research phrasebased statistical machine translation, coupled with a custom
Arabic word breaker. For sentence reduction, we use state-of-the-art natural-language-processing tools,
including parsing, part-ofspeech tagging, and summarization.
Research Site: http://www.microsoft.com/middleeast/egypt/cmic/

Lightweight Software Transactions for Games
Researcher(s): Sebastian Burckhardt
Description: To realize the performance potential of multiple cores, software developers must architect
their programs for concurrency. Unfortunately, for many applications, threads and locks are difficult to use
efficiently and correctly. Lightweight software transactions provided by Object-based Runtime for
Concurrent Systems (ORCS) are an attractive alternative for game programmers who want to exploit the
performance potential of multicores without devising complicated locking protocols. With ORCS,
programmers specify the tasks that execute in each frame and declare shared data using threadsafe
template wrappers. ORCS then automatically executes the tasks concurrently and in isolation by
replicating shared data and merging conflicting updates at the end of each frame. We will demonstrate
how ORCS can achieve competitive multicore performance without burdening the programmer.
Research Site: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/orcs/

Algorithms and Cryptography
Researcher(s): Paul Oka / Henry Cohn
Description: The last 10 years have seen a marked increase in the use of sophisticated algorithms, as
well as in the scope and breadth of the theory underlying them. This work has been spurred both by new
problems arising in areas such as Web search and algorithms and by classic problems fruitfully revisited.
We’ll present new algorithms for selecting which ads will be most profitable to display, for making use of
survey-propagation techniques from statistical physics to cluster data according to similarity, and for
building cryptographic systems that can withstand the disclosure of partial information about their secret
keys.
Research Site: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/labs/newengland/

Social Media and Learning Theory
Researcher(s): Paul Oka / Henry Cohn
Description: Networks and connectivity play a fundamental role in online behavior and in human society.
Who is, or should be, connected to whom? What can we infer from the structure of social networks? What
opportunities or pitfalls do different types of networks present for example, for advertising, for recruitment,

or for building buzz? To cope with the behavior of the independent agents who constitute a social
network, we use game theory to model them; to let computers adapt to constantly changing networks, we
use machine-learning theory. We’ll demonstrate how to measure the value of a game (how favorable it is
for each player), how to analyze similarity functions for use in learning and clustering, and how to design
a recommendation system that collects and weights opinions across a social network.

Low-Power Processors in the Data Center
Researcher(s): Janine A Harrison / Mark Shaw / CJ Williams / Jim Larus
Description: This demonstration will show an experimental prototype to study the use of low-power
processors in the data center (DC). These processors offer substantial fractions–33 percent to 50
percent–of the performance of the high-performance processors used in Microsoft’s data centers but
consume a disproportionally smaller amount of power–5 percent to 10 percent. Power consumption
accounts for as much as 30 percent of the total operating costs of a DC. Across Microsoft’s Internet
properties, about 10 percent of DC CPU cycles perform useful work. Remaining systems run at near full
power, because servers and Windows Server do not yet support low-power modes. To study the potential
of low-power processors in the DC, the Data Center Futures team built a prototype containing 100 dual-
core Atom processors. Half are attached to standard hard disks, and half are attached to low-power flash
storage, to study the tradeoffs of this technology in the DC. The processors are connected through the
Monsoon network. This prototype will be used to test new technologies–including flash, optical networks,
and FPGA accelerators–and for a variety of experiments, such as powering down idle processors. We
believe that data centers in the future will include many more low-power processors. This prototype is the
first step in demonstrating their potential cost savings and in developing the algorithms and software to
take advantage of these processors.

Audio Spatialization and AEC for Teleconferencing
Researcher(s): Wei-ge Chen / Zhengyou Zhang / Qin Cai
Description: In multiparty conferencing, one hears voices of more than one remote participant. Current
commercial systems mix them into a single mono audio stream, and thus, all voices of remote participants
will appear to come from the same location. This is in sharp contrast to what happens in real life, in which
each voice has a distinct location. We will demonstrate technologies to enhance the user experience in
multiparty conferencing by using highly realistic, immersive spatial audio for both loudspeakers and
headphones. This is proven to improve the conferencing experience significantly, because each
participant easily can differentiate the current remote talker and focus on the content being discussed.
Multichannel Acoustical Echo Cancellation (AEC) is a crucial component to enable a quality audio
experience during conferencing, especially without a headset. We also will demonstrate the AEC
capability in real time so that the remote side will hear only the near-end participants’ speech without their
own echoes. Performance comparison among multiple AEC algorithms will be provided.
Research Site: http://research.microsoft.com/~zhang/SpatialAudioConferencing/

Specification Inference for Security
Researcher(s): Ben Livshits / Aditya Nori / Sriram Rajamani
Description: The last decade has seen a proliferation of static and dynamic analysis tools for detecting
security vulnerabilities in programs. Much of this interest is because of the large increase in the number of
vulnerabilities, such as cross-site scripting and SQL injections. Tools checking for these vulnerabilities
require a specification to operate, and the effectiveness of these tools is only as good as their input
specifications. Unfortunately, writing a comprehensive specification is a major challenge. We will demo a
new algorithm that automatically infers explicit information-flow security specifications from program code.
Beginning with a data-propagation graph, which represents the flow of information in the program, and a
partial specification of methods, our algorithm aims to complete the specification using probabilistic
inference. We experimentally validate the approach by applying it to 10 large, businesscritical Web
applications analyzed with CAT.NET, a state-of-the-art static analysis tool for .NET. We find a total of 167
new confirmed specifications, which result in a total of 302 additional vulnerabilities across these 10
benchmarks.
Research Site: http://research.microsoft.com/merlin

Predicting Performance Problems in the Data Center
Researcher(s): Moises Goldszmidt / Peter Bodik
Description: The HiLighter analytics engine provides the ability to understand and manage the health,
status, and behavior of a service or system. The approach is based on statistical machine learning, and it
automatically extracts from measurements the relevant metrics for modeling performance. It also finds
early indicators of performance crises for predicting performance problems. We have evaluated HiLighter
on real data from November 2006 to May 2008 from the Dublin data center running Extended Hosted
Services. The evaluation consisted of HiLighter making a prediction every 15 minutes and updating its
models online, starting with data from one performance problem. HiLighter correctly predicted 50 of 64
performance crises, with a lead time of almost an hour, and had less than one false alarm per day.

Commute UX: Dialog System for In-Car Infotainment
Researcher(s): Ivan Tashev / Mike Seltzer / YC Ju / Alex Acero
Description: With the deployment of Blue&Me by Fiat and Sync by Ford, in-car dialog systems are
morphing from cool gadgets that amaze people and sell more cars to integral parts of in-car infotainment.
This raises the bar for the functionality, usability, and reliability of these systems. The presented in-car
infotainment system contains novel technologies from Microsoft Research that enable natural-language
input; expose a multimodal user interface including speech, a GUI, touch, and buttons; and use state-of-
the-art sound-capture and processing technologies for improved speech recognition and sound quality.
Research Site: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/CommuteUX/

GeoLife 2.0: A Location-Based Social Network
Researcher(s): Yu Zheng / Xing Xie
Description: The increasing availability of GPS-enabled devices is changing the way people interact with
the Web and brings us a large number of GPS trajectories representing peoples’ location histories. Such
real-world location histories imply, to some extent, users’ interests and intentions and enable us to
understand people and locations. GeoLife 2.0 is a location-based social-networking service on Virtual
Earth that enables people to build connections with each other using their location histories. With multiple
users’ GPS trajectories, GeoLife helps us not only understand an individual and a location, but also
explore the similarity between users and the correlation among locations. By mining the similarity
between people’s location histories, this system can help a user automatically discover potential friends in
a community who might share similar interests. Thus, the user can deliver invitations conveniently to
persons in the community and hence sponsor, with minimal effort, a social activity such as hiking, cycling,
or traveling. From these potential friends’ past experiences, a trustworthy resource, the user is more likely
to discover places that might match the users’ tastes. We have had 112 people using this system over a
period of a year. We have collected more than 7 million GPS points, and the total distance of the data set
surpasses 170,000 kilometers.
Research Site: http://research.microsoft.com/geolife/

Image-Centric Advertisement Platform
Researcher(s): Matt Scott / Xing Xie / Jonathan Tien / Ruochi Zhang
Description: In existing online-advertisement platforms, the relevance between advertisers and users is
decided largely by advanced keyword matching. Typically, in a pay-per-click model, advertisers specify
the words that should trigger their ads and the maximum amount they are willing to pay per click. When a
user enters a search query, browses a Web page, or interacts with text, the advertisement platform will
select and show relevant ads based on the text content in the query or the page. Though other context,
such as location, time, and user profile, can be taken into consideration, text understanding remains the
main technology. We will present an image-centric advertisement platform in which advertisers bid on
images instead of keywords. For example, a toy seller could bid on the image of a related movie poster,
while a restaurant could bid on the image of a cooking-magazine cover. Users would receive ads based
on the content of images they recently browsed or used. Components of this platform include an
advertisement editorial tool and image-content-understanding, imagematching, and user-understanding

modules. This platform is suitable for application scenarios in which images are the main input of
consumed content, such as Multimedia Messaging Service or content-based image retrieval.

Opinion Search
Researcher(s): Jian-Tao Sun / Xiaochuan Ni / Jian Hu / Gang Wang / Zheng Chen
Description: Opinion data are almost everywhere. They exist in the form of user reviews on shopping
and opinion sites, as posts on forums and blogs, and in direct user feedback. At the same time, many
users want to use opinion data to help them conduct product research, understand the pains and gains of
others, or improve products and services. But the current search engine is not effective in satisfying
users’ opinion search needs; search results are not well organized, and the snippets are not descriptive
enough to indicate users’ opinions. We will propose a new vertical search engine, Opinion Search, to
provide a different search experience for users. The system will return documents holding opinions about
the input query. The documents indexed by the system are collected from various sources, including user
reviews, blogs, and news. The search results are ranked according to both their relevance to a particular
query and the strength of the opinion about the query. The snippet text gives a brief summary of user
opinion from each result document. For some queries, the system even gives a structured summary for
opinions contained by all the result documents. The system also helps users filter results according to
opinion polarity, as in positive and negative opinions.

Digital Past to Digital Presence
Researcher(s): David Kirk / Sian Lindley
Description: We will show two sets of concepts related to digital archiving and communication. The first
set will include Family Archive, an interactive, multitouch device for the home designed to help capture,
manage, integrate, display, and store both digital and physical memorabilia. We also will present Time
Card, a much simpler device for the home, designed to display a digital record of a person’s activities,
one that can be navigated and sorted in various ways that highlight different renderings of that person’s
past. The second set will show devices that can enable people to communicate in new, expressive ways.
Wayve represents the culmination of a variety of home messaging concepts. It is an appliance that, based
on a field trial in the United Kingdom, has shown itself able to connect people playfully and creatively,
representing a new genre of communication for the home. A second concept is CellFrame, a small,
standalone, wireless display and communication device, designed to bring people who have remained
outside social networking into the experience and the benefits that it can provide.
Research Site: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/groups/sds/

Real-Time Stitching of Mobile-Generated Videos
Researcher(s): Ayman Kaheel / Motaz El-Saban / Mahmoud Refaat
Description: Mobile phones are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, and a large percentage of these
devices have built-in cameras. This makes mobile phones great for capturing and sharing multimedia
content. It is likely that in public and private settings, many users will be recording the same event
simultaneously using their mobile phone’s cameras, perhaps from different viewpoints. Typically, any
single video stream from one of these mobile phones would capture a rather small field-of-view (FOV) to
maintain high resolution. We aim to enable multiple mobile phones to collaborate in recording an event
and then, in real time or near real time, construct one higher-resolution video from the resulting video
streams. We will show a real-time video-stitching system from mobile-phone cameras offering a wide
FOV experience with high resolution. Potential applications could be in events such as emergencies,
where people on site offer a real-time feed for rescuers until they reach the location; virtual attendance of
family gatherings by members living abroad; citizen journalism; and providing multimedia-tomultimedia
links for multimedia-sharing sites.
Research Site: http://www.microsoft.com/middleeast/egypt/cmic/

Situated Interaction
Researcher(s): Dan Bohus / Eric Horvitz / Zicheng Liu

Description: This project aims to enable a new generation of interactive systems that can reason about
their surroundings and embed interaction deeply into the natural flow of everyday tasks, activities, and
collaborations. As an initial sample challenge in this space, we have developed and will demonstrate a
situated conversational agent that can act as a Microsoft front-desk receptionist, performing tasks such as
making shuttle reservations and registering visitors. The system integrates a large number of artificial-
intelligence technologies, such as speech recognition, person and group detection and tracking, intention
recognition, and attention and engagement modeling into a conversational framework that enables it to
engage in mixed-initiative, natural-language interaction with one or multiple participants.
Research Site: http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/people/dbohus/research_situated_interaction.html

Mobile Content-Casting and Social Exchange
Researcher(s): Richard Harper / David Kirk / Milan Vojnovic / Thomas Karagiannis / Dinan Gunawardena
/ Alexandre Proutiere
Description: We will offer two insights into the problems posed by mobile ad hoc networks and the
opportunities they provide. The first is a platform for seamless content dissemination across a mesh of
mobile devices. The platform leverages user encounters for device-to-device data transfer, as well as
occasional cloud connectivity. When devices meet, content is exchanged automatically. The goal is to
optimize across multiple objectives: getting content the user values the most; best serving communitywide
interests by enabling efficient, multihop content dissemination; and maximizing battery life. The content
might span any type of social–networking-application content or data, such as Facebook feeds, photos,
blogging, and news. The system even can be useful for dissemination of geo-local content,
advertisements, alerts, and software updates. The second demonstrates three concepts that show how
mobile social-networking applications can support and deepen face-to-face interactions. Digital Gifts will
demonstrate how automatic Bluetooth device recognition, linked to Windows Live IDs, can enable users
to undertake semi-automatic exchange of Windows Live photos with co-present, rather than remote,
parties. Tangible Mesh will show how access rights to remote files can be exchanged via infrared or
Bluetooth on mobiles registered with Live. Pictureplace will show how GPS data can be used to create
indexes of and access rights to photos taken in the same locale but by different devices.

Solver Foundation: Mathematical Optimization
Researcher(s): Lengning Liu / Tanj Bennett / John Oberon / Lin Xiao
Description: Microsoft Solver Foundation is a new framework and managed-code runtime for
mathematical programming, modeling, and optimization, with a focused goal of helping businesses make
nearoptimal, strategic decisions. The possible applications cover a vast range: real-time supply-chain
optimization, data-center energy-profile management, online-advertizing profit maximization, logistics of
large-conference scheduling, and risk analysis of investment portfolios. There are also direct applications
to graphics and machine learning for which Solver Foundation acts as a runtime for such systems. All of
these decisions are encoded through a declarative model specification, one that focuses the modeler and
developer on stating the what rather than the how of the business decision to be made. This rapidly
accelerates solution engineering and increases the degree of what-if? analysis possible. Solver
Foundation has several specific solvers that are good for one or more domain and modeling situations,
such as linear programming (simplex and interior-point-methods-based), SAT solving, CSP, and quadratic
programming. Eventually, solvers will include constrained, convex nonlinear programming.
Research Site: www.solverfoundation.com

Renlifang: Web-Scale Entity Summarization
Researcher(s): Zaiqing Nie / Ruochi Zhang / Gang Luo / Yohn Cao / Yunxiao Ma / Xin Zou / Ji-Rong
Wen
Description: The need for collecting and understanding Web information about a real-world entity
currently is fulfilled manually through search engines. But the information about a single entity might
appear in thousands of Web pages. Even if a search engine could find all the relevant Web pages about
an entity, the user would need to sift through all the pages to get a complete view of the entity. We will
show Renlifang, a Web-scale entity-summarization system that efficiently generates summaries of Web
entities from billions of crawled Web pages. Specifically, Renlifang automatically generates a biography

page for a person, a social-network graph for a person, a shortest-relationship path between two people,
all titles of a person that are found on the Web, and all the structured data we have in our local database
about a person.
Research Site: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/entitycube/

Sticky Notes in Augmented Reality
Researcher(s): Darren Edge
Description: Over time, we transform the areas surrounding our desktop computers into rich landscapes
of information and interaction cues. Of the variety of at-hand physical media we use to support our virtual
activities, none are as flexible and ubiquitous as the simple sticky note. Sticky notes can be placed on any
surface, as prominent or as peripheral as desired, and can be created, posted, updated, and relocated
according to the flow of our activities. When we engage in mobile computing, however, we lose the
benefit of an inhabited interaction context. The sticky notes we create at our kitchen table cannot stay
there, nor are they visible from the living-room sofa. Moreover, our willingness to share our notes with
family and colleagues does not extend to the people around us in public places, such as coffee shops and
libraries. Our system addresses these problems by enabling users to post and manipulate virtual sticky
notes in real 3-D space, anchored relative to the screen of their portable computer. These interactive
notes exist in mixed reality, viewed on the virtual screen of a portable computer by moving a Webcam or
camera phone through the physical space around it. Whenever the camera is at rest, the computer
screen reverts to its normal display. In this way, portable computer users periodically can scan their
private virtual sticky notes wherever they are, taking advantage of a persistent interaction context created
and manipulated through embodied physical interaction.

Color-Structured Image Search
Researcher(s): Jingdong Wang / Xian-Sheng Hua
Description: We propose a novel method for image-search result refinement by exploiting color spatial-
relation information, called color-layout-sensitive image search. Given image-search results, this method
enables users to specify color layout of interest and then reorders image-search results by promoting the
images whose color layouts are more accordant to color layout of interest. Specifically, this method
performs an offline process to extract color-layout features as metadata, with the advantages of low
storage and cheap computational cost. For the online refinement of image-search results, an efficient,
effective color-layout similarity-evaluation scheme is proposed by investigating the consistency between
the specified color layout of interest and the color layouts of searched images, with regard to the interest
colors and their spatial relationship. This evaluation scheme is fast, which makes the online refinement
respond immediately. Moreover, a convenient, interactive interface is presented to enable users to specify
color layout of interest flexibly. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the
proposed approach. We are investigating color-structured image searches, but this technique also could
be extended to other kinds of semantic structures.

Tool Kit for Visualizing Large-Scale Data
Researcher(s): Zhitao Hou / Min Wang / Haidong Zhang / Dongmei Zhang
Description: Our tool kit provides a set of Silverlight/Ajax controls for visualizing large-scale structured
data from various data sources. Those controls can be used to expose graphically the structure of the
data, trends, and relationships of data properties. We also provide a platform that enables rapid
development of large-scale data-explorer, analysis, and reporting tools. We will demonstrate several
individual controls and a demo application built atop our tool kit. This demo application lets users explore
a large set of article, image, and video data directly and easily.

SecondLight: Bringing the UI into the Real World
Researcher(s): Shahram Izadi / Alex Butler / Steve Hodges / Nicolas Villar / Stuart Taylor / Dan
Rosenfeld / Andy Wilson / Hrvoje Benko

Description: SecondLight is a new surface-computing technology that can project images and detect
gestures in mid-air above the display, in addition to supporting multitouch interactions on the surface. It
works by using an electrically switchable liquid-crystal diffuser as the rear-projection display surface. This
material is continually toggled between diffuse and clear states, so quickly that the switching is
imperceptible. When it is diffuse, the system behaves like a regular surface computer, but when clear, it is
possible to project into and image the area above the display surface. This enables magical new forms of
interaction in which the UI is no longer bound to the display surface, but becomes part of the real world.
Research Site: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/shodges/papers/secondlight_cr3.pdf

Codename Viveri: A Platform for Search Incubation
Researcher(s): Scott Imig / Robert Rounthwaite
Description: We will demo an externally facing search engine that serves as a platform for incubation
that will be released to the Web this summer. Experimental search interfaces can be too unusual or
jarring to trial directly on unprepared users of our primary search engine, but refinement and improvement
rely on interaction with real users. Our technology aggregates content from multiple sites, presenting
multiple user-interface elements and types of information for each query, enabling the exploration of
multiple experimental ideas at once, as well as demonstrating the possibilities of the search engine as a
platform. A search idea can be developed easily and deployed with little integration work. The Webslice
API facilitates rapid deployment of existing technology, while Silverlight concurrency provides scalability
and low latency. An arbitration algorithm targets the most appropriate set of user interfaces and auxiliary
information to display based on query features. We will present the interface and API, as well as a set of
technologies shipping to the Web in the first release.

Core Tools for Augmented Reality
Researcher(s): Michael Cohen / Simon Winder
Description: This demo will explain the development of a new kind of image feature that can be used to
for a variety of applications, ranging from image stitching to augmented reality. The features already are
finding their way into Microsoft products and are being considered for many new applications. We will
demo a fun example application: a treasure hunt. By using the posters and other graphics on display
during TechFest, we will let users borrow a device that augments the world with virtual clues to find
hidden treasure.
Research Site: http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=74480

Helping Writers Find the Right Words
Researcher(s): Chris Brockett / Bill Dolan
Description: Writers often need help in choosing words. They might be seeking to introduce variety into
their prose or to avoid an awkward or inappropriate phrase. Often, they will consult an online thesaurus.
In other instances, as when writing technical documents, writers might need to use terminology aligned
with organizational standards and refer to a style manual, possibly stored on a corporate intranet.
Conventional thesauri and terminology lists, though, are static and usually quite unhelpful with regard to
usage in context. We will demonstrate a tool that provides writers with inline, contextual thesaurus help
and offers a potential path to a new generation of online writing-assistance applications. We combine a
paraphrase model, derived from aligned translation corpora and other corpora-based wordsimilarity data,
with a large language model to provide suggested rephrasings that might be appropriate in the writer’s
intended context. Optional Web-search functionality provides further examples of realworld use. By
swapping in, or combining in, new, domain-specific language models, it also becomes possible to tailor
editing assistance to specific domains or corporate clients. This application can help both native speakers
of English and those for whom English is a second or foreign language.

Social Desktop
Researcher(s): Lili Cheng / Tom Laird McConnell
Description: Today, it’s easy to share a Web page or a blog post, because items on the Web have
unique IDs: URLs. We don’t have this on the desktop. Social Desktop adds URLs to the files and folders

on your desktop, letting you share anything on your computer with anyone who can click on a URL.
Persons receiving links can either access via e-mail or comment, tag, and search across all shared items
via our Web page. We implement this by using a .NET service, but it is possible to create a universal
namespace for every device and data source for a user, providing a universally addressable namespace
with universal access, which means the same URL works from any device in the world; universal sharing;
universal tagging and commenting; and freedom from legacy paths, so that data isn’t limited by file-
system concepts and you can have a URL drill into a subportion of a document or a PowerPoint deck, or
data could come from a Web service or a database. Social Desktop is a local service that maps the user’s
local data into a .NET service bus service, enabling local data to be accessible through firewalls. Social
Desktop also provides a Web-service view over the same data, with inherent RSS event streams for any
container. New data sources can be mapped into the URL hierarchy, enabling a distributed view to be
built. There are simple sharing paradigms that enable URLs to be shared temporarily or permanently.

Social Views of E-Mail
Researcher(s): Andrzej Turski / Shane Williams / Lili Cheng
Description: Incoming feeds of information become increasingly overwhelming as more people use
social networks, e-mail, instant messaging, and other forms of communication. Our work automatically
analyzes a user’s communication and organizes the feed into groups. Depending on when and with whom
a user is communicating, a different stream of information can be presented as contextually appropriate.
The goal of automatic group discovery is not only to detect the initial grouping, but also to discover slow
changes to groups over time, thus freeing the user from manual group management. We also will show
different ways to visualize an incoming stream of information, from a condensed overview for a small
screen to a lush, immersive experience. Peripheral information can be squeezed into less space by
employing time-sharing presentation: a ticker. Users can zoom into additional pages to get older
messages in the thread or context. A search for information also can be done via a timeline-based
presentation.

User-Interaction Advertising Platform
Researcher(s): Ron Karidi / Moshe Tennenholtz / Hen Fitoussi
Description: One ad, a world of interactions—we will introduce a new, dynamic, end-to-end user
experience for online advertising. This new experience promotes user-centric interactions in the
advertising ecosystem by engaging users with an exciting exploration experience, accompanied by
comprehensive information encapsulated within the ad and readily accessible; empowering advertisers to
manage the advertising experience smoothly and consistently into an extension of their Web sites;
helping publishers keep more users on their Web pages; and providing agencies with tools to deliver
additional value to advertisers. User-interaction zoom ads suggest a new way of content navigation,
powered by Silverlight and Deep Zoom, to optimize the use of ad real estate. We also are introducing an
intuitive, simple design tool for creating the ads. This tool enables designers to take advantage of built-in
zoom functionality to embed an unlimited amount of content into a standard-sized ad. They dynamically
can link different regions within an ad and configure menu-driven navigation. With zoom ads, getting drill-
down information is only a mouse-wheel away.

Interactions with an Omni-Directional Projector
Researcher(s): Hrvoje Benko / Andy Wilson / Bill Chen / Eyal Ofek
Description: We will present a combination of a standard projector with a wide-angle lens capable of
projecting data onto the entire, 360-degree surrounding environment from a single position. This setup
provides an immersive experience similar to existing, much more expensive planetarium projectors or
virtual-reality CAVE projectors, on which all of the surfaces in the room can receive projections. We have
added an infrared camera that shares the wide-angle lens with the projector and is capable of detecting a
user’s hands and tracking freehand gestures in mid-air, without additional gloves or tracking objects. This
demo integrates several Microsoft technologies into a stunning presentation: We will offer a hemispherical
dome in which users can interact with data from Virtual Earth and WorldWide Telescope.

Gale-Berlekamp Light-Bulb Game
Researcher(s): Paul Oka / Christian Borgs
Description: This demo uses a replica of the Gale-Berlekamp (GB) switching game to demonstrate a
new, linear time-approximation scheme for approximating GB-game problems to within given precision.
The physical model is a 10-by-10 array of light bulbs on which the adversary chooses an arbitrary subset
of the light bulbs to be initially “on”.ﾝ Next to every row and every column of light bulbs is a switch, which
can be used to invert the state of every light bulb in that row or column. The protagonist’s task is to
minimize the number of lit light bulbs by flipping switches.

Tools and Services for Data-Intensive Research
Researcher(s): Roger Barga / Christophe Poulain / Tim Chou / Evelyne Viegas
Description: We will show efforts in Microsoft Research to collaborate with external researchers to
explore the application of new technologies, specifically Dryad and DryadLINQ, to big data-research
problems in science. We also highlight our efforts to provide software and services to academics across
the world, through the binary release of Dryad with associated programming-user documentation, as well
as a Microsoft Research initiative to provide researchers with access to computational resources. Finally,
we will discuss initiatives to provide both services for data analysis and safe access to sensitive PII data.
The demo will include two lighthouse eScience applications, Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST)
image simulation and analysis of biological sequences. Researchers from the University of Washington
will discuss the science behind the demos and explain how this represents a paradigm shift in the
research. We will run live demos using a cluster in the Microsoft Research shared infrastructure,
highlighting the ability to marshal the computational resources of hundreds of cores to analyze data using
Dryad. Our booth will include a poster prepared by the University of Washington to provide context for
both LSST and associated science and biology applications from Lee Hood’s lab at the Institute for
Systems Biology and a poster that illustrates the Dryad computing graph and how it enables a
programmer to manage a distributed application over a Windows cluster.
Research Site: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/collaboration/tools/dryad.aspx

Back-of-device touch input
Researcher(s): Patrick Baudisch
Description: Most mobile devices have small displays and require some form of human (touch) input.
With much of the real estate in mobile devices consumed by the display, touch input can be a problem,
either from image occlusion or from a lack of tactile feedback when trying to input text. We will
demonstrate a device with touch input on the back and one with a clear tactile overlay directly on the
display.
Research Site: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/baudisch/projects/nanotouch

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