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by Tim Sneath.
Original Post: Rashid: Microsoft Research
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Microsoft Research has over 700 employees located across five locations worldwide.
Rick Rashid demonstrated some of the innovations covering presentation, storage and
communication - three of the Longhorn pillars.
Presentation Microsoft presented 11 out 80 papers at SIGGRAPH this year. We're seeing
an increasing reliance on the GPU: it's turning into one of the most important components
in a system. A paper on "precomputed radiance transfer" demonstrated complex reflection
and shading techniques that aren't currently available in real-time applications,
including an object creating shadows on itself. It's the kind of thing you could imagine
showing up in future releases of DirectX.
Water rendering is one of the most complex graphical tasks: it involves simulating
reflection and refraction. Generating a water texture requires simulating microfacets
on a water surface (the surface isn't flat at any one time but the reflective / refractive
surface is constantly changing with different angles at each location). Other textures
MSR are investigating include fur and grass.
Storage Back in 1998 Microsoft made a big splash about the TerraServer - one of the
first terabyte databases to be made available on the web. Now, a terabyte of storage
can be purchased for £1000. Now Jim Gray (one of the founding fathers of modern database
theory and Turing Award winner) and his research colleagues have been working on SkyServer,
like TerraServer but looking the other way. http://skyserver.sdss.org.
This is a digital sky survey of the northern 1/3rd of the universe, covering 10TB
of pictures plus 1TB of catalog information and containing a total of 3 billion records
inside a SQL Server database. http://skyserver.sdss.org/dr1/en/tools/chart/navi.asp shows
an XML web service for accessing this information. You can even query the database
using T-SQL here (http://skyserver.sdss.org/dr1/en/tools/chart/list.asp).
We've also built a virtual observatory at http://skyquery.net.
This is a federated database that combines databases from about 10 separate observatories.
This enables you to treat all these observatories as if they were just one giant database.
Everything here is in the public domain: http://www.skyserver.org has
everything you need to build your own Sky Server! The code itself is written in C#
and ASP.NET.
Communication Social computing is focused on building software that can improve the quality
of interaction between people. Lili Cheng's team has been working on ways to enable
people to identify their relationships. Personal Map is a piece of software that builds
relationship mappings based on the interactions that I have with them. Having identified
people with whom you have relationships, it's possible to map that onto things like
file shares to understand which are the important items to those social groups. Wallop
(http://mywallop.com) is a blog-style application
that brings these concepts together to allow people to interact and create connections.
Wallop allows you to collaborate on individual blogs or moblogs, uploading photos
to other people's sites too. (One of my colleagues, Mike Platt, says this is similar
to a bliki; that's a new term on me...)
Smart Personal Objects (SPOT) are a new class of device that have been incubating
in MSR for the last three years. These are everyday devices whose core functionality
is amplified and improved with the addition of software. SPOT devices include a tiny
CLR running with < 1MB.
The University of Washington have been experimenting with collaborative teaching environments
where teaching materials are recorded and annotated and available for on-demand streaming.
MSR have also been working on the "Student Tablet PC" - including tools that provide
specific support to the learning environment. MathPad^2 and Magic Paper II are examples
of these applications.
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