Beyond Binary

Update at 9:20 a.m. PDT: Comments from Lili Cheng added.

Ray Ozzie is getting more social.

No, the infrequent blogger and Microsoft's chief software architect has not decided to Twitter his every move. Rather, Ozzie has set up a new social computing lab at Microsoft, to be headed by Microsoft Research veteran Lili Cheng.

The Future Social Experiences (FUSE) group brings together three existing efforts: Cheng's creative systems group from Microsoft Research and two units that were already part of Ozzie's world--the Media Labs and Startup Labs group.

Ozzie sent an e-mail Thursday to Microsofties talking about the move and its importance.

"The three groups being combined have concrete skills and code in areas where 'social' meets sharing; where 'social' meets real-time; where 'social' meets media; where 'social' meets search; where 'social' meets the cloud plus three screens and a world of devices," Ozzie wrote in the memo, which was seen by CNET News.

"FUSE Labs will bring more coherence and capability to those advanced development projects where they're already actively collaborating with product groups to help them succeed with 'leapfrog' efforts. Working closely with (Microsoft Research) and across our divisions, the lab will prioritize efforts where its capabilities can be applied to areas where the company's extant missions, structures, tempo or risk might otherwise cause us to miss a material threat or opportunity."

In the memo, Ozzie also noted the changing nature of social computing.

"For many years, technology-based 'social' innovations have been most commonly viewed through the lenses of communications and collaboration: messaging, chat, calls, meetings, conferences, co-editing, document sharing, collaboration, multiplayer gaming and the like," Ozzie said.

"More recently, many factors have begun to transform all that which is 'social': the ever-present, high-bandwidth internet both wired and wireless; the ease of connecting people; the dramatic rise in digital cameras, camera phones and 'app-capable' phones; net-connected game consoles & TVs; and so on."

Cheng, who will head the new lab, has specialized in social computing but has also worked in other areas, including helping Microsoft's Jim Allchin with the design of Windows Vista.

The new group will consist of around 80 people initially, Cheng said in an interview Thursday.

She noted that social computing is becoming central to all types of computing tasks, from gaming to search to business.

"When you think of what people do on their PCs, so much of it is (to) connect to other people and view information shared with them by their friends," Cheng said. "That's what people do on their computers."

The challenge, she said, is that personal computers weren't really designed with that in mind. Even networking, she notes, was an afterthought.

"It just feels early to me," Cheng said. "It feels like nothing works really well."

Businesses in particular, are still trying to figure out how to adapt social computing into their world, which also has rules and boundaries.

Although Microsoft has been doing a lot of research in social networking, the company is often not thought of as a leader in the area--something Cheng hopes will change.

"I'd love when people think of those tools to think of Microsoft," she said.

Cheng, who spoke to me just after meeting with her new team in Cambridge, Mass., said she is still trying to get a handle on all of the projects now in her purview.

"I didn't even have a chance to tweet myself," Cheng said.

Microsoft made other changes on Wednesday in its engineering ranks, shifting several projects under the auspices of Peter Loforte, general manager of Engineering Excellence and Technical Strategy & Community. Loforte will now head a team that includes the company's engineering "excellence," technical community, strategic technical recruiting, distributed development strategy, as well as the technical strategy team responsible for ThinkWeek--Microsoft's brainstorming process that used to be headed by Bill Gates, who would amass technical papers from across the company and review them twice a year.

Many people think that the browser is starting to replace the operating system as the center of the personal computer.

Naturally, the view that Windows is on a path to irrelevance is not one generally espoused by Microsoft. That said, at least some inside Redmond's walls argue that the Web browser needs to start acting more like an operating system.

"Some of today's browser policies are not very safe," says Microsoft researcher Helen Wang.

Wang, who has been at Microsoft since getting her doctorate from University of California at Berkeley in 2001, argues that the Web browser should act as more than just a file clerk that rubber-stamps each request that comes its way. Rather, it should act more like a traffic cop, keeping things moving smoothly and ensuring that the computer's resources are fairly allocated.

In short, Wang says, the browser needs to act more like Windows does--making sure that different Web applications are protected from one another--even those running within the same site. So Wang and her team came up with a prototype, called Gazelle, that does just that.

Microsoft first outlined Gazelle earlier this year, but has only recently started to detail its thinking. Wang plans to present a paper on Gazelle at the Usenix security conference next month, and last week Microsoft posted an article on its Web site explaining more about Gazelle.

Wang isn't trying to suggest Windows is going away. Indeed, she says, Gazelle depends on Windows, acting merely as the middleman for Web pages seeking to access a computer's resources.

"We're really trying to leverage the decades of operating system experience and apply that in the Web and browser setting," Wang said.

Microsoft is also trying to be clear that Gazelle is not the immediate replacement for Internet Explorer, which has been losing share to rivals, including Mozilla's Firefox and Apple's Safari. The company has yet to commit to commercializing Gazelle in any way, meaning it remains just one of scores of projects incubating inside the company's research labs.

Many outside Redmond, though, see the browser finally starting to take on the preeminence that many had assumed it might back in the early days of Netscape. Google's decision to offer Chrome, some think, was more about having an engine for running its Web applications than it was offering an alternative means for serving up traditional Web pages.

Modern browsers, Wang said, have taken a step in the right direction by isolating different browser tabs so that if one tab crashes, the whole browser doesn't get taken with it. Wang said that Chrome and Microsoft's IE 8 take steps toward increasing the reliability of Web browsing, but she argues far more drastic steps are needed.

"I think Gazelle marks a significant departure from all previous browsers, including Chrome and IE 8," Wang said.

For now, Gazelle is very much a prototype. It borrows much of its actual rendering technology from Internet Explorer itself. And although it can display 19 of Alexa's top 20 Web sites, there are still plenty of things it can't do. It also runs more slowly than Internet Explorer, particularly when opening new Web sites.

But Wang said it offers Microsoft--and the industry--a road map for how the Browser should evolve.

"I think this is the right way to go and I think this can be practical," Wang said. "It will also take a lot of work."

Johnny Chung Lee, the former Carnegie Mellon researcher known for finding creative ways to adapt the Wiimote, has revealed himself as one of the minions behind Project Natal, Microsoft's effort to add motion-sensing capabilities into the Xbox 360.

Lee, who is now a researcher at Microsoft, said in a blog posting that he has been working on the motion-sensing project.

"Now, I should preface by saying I don't deserve credit for anything that you saw at E3," Lee said in the blog, which he posted on Monday night. "A large team of very smart, very hard-working people were involved in building the demos you saw on stage. The part I am working on has much more to do with making sure this can transition from the E3 stage to your living room - for which there is an even larger team of very smart, very hard-working people involved."

Microsoft demoed Project Natal on Monday as part of its press conference at the E3 trade show. The technology allows a person to act as their own remote, with a depth-sensing camera capturing their motion, and software then translating it into actions.

Lee notes that he can't reveal anything beyond what Microsoft shared, but does talk a little about the technology that underlies Natal.

"The 3D sensor itself is a pretty incredible piece of equipment providing detailed 3D information about the environment similar to very expensive laser range finding systems but at a tiny fraction of the cost," Lee wrote. "Depth cameras provide you with a point cloud of the surface of objects that is fairly insensitive to various lighting conditions allowing you to do things that are simply impossible with a normal camera."

The hard work, he said, is then converting that cloud of points into human actions, something which requires some pretty sophisticated algorithms. That said, the work could lead in some even cooler directions.

"At times, working on this project has felt like a miniature 'Manhattan project' with developers and researchers from around the world to coming together to make this happen," Lee wrote. "We would all love to one day have our own personal holodeck. This is a pretty measurable step in that direction."

Before joining Microsoft, Lee gained attention for his projects using the sensor bar and remote of the Nintendo Wii to work as head-tracking devices, a multitouch user interface and more.

Lee has continued showing off his Wiimote projects since joining Microsoft, presenting at this year's Mix09 event in Las Vegas. (There's a video below, but it requires Silverlight.)

Update 2:25 p.m. I had a chance to chat with Lee briefly by phone.

For his part, Lee said he thinks Microsoft doesn't get the credit it deserves in the consumer arena.

"It's sort of a bummer that Microsoft gets kinds of a bad rap," Lee said. "It's a lot of very ambitious groups trying to do big things. Not everything makes it out the door."

Lee, who works in an applied science group that sits between the research and product arms at Microsoft, says that the company is working on some very cool stuff, though he could not go into a lot of details.

"I played a little bit with the depth cameras before Microsoft," he said. "The technology I have been able to play with since coming to Microsoft is a lot better."

LAS VEGAS--Microsoft's research unit on Wednesday released a tool that allows Web developers to let users translate their Web site into other languages without having to leave the page.

The company said a tech preview version of the Microsoft Translator widget is available for download, allowing developers to offer users a pull-down menu to translate a Web page in multiple languages.

The main benefit of the widget is it allows users to translate the page without having to leave a site, unlike other approaches which require a user to go to another Web site first.

Microsoft announced the translation widget at the Mix 09 event here.

REDMOND, Wash.--Microsoft has a lot of ideas on how Web searching could be better. The problem is figuring out which ideas are the good ones.

In an effort to help sort that out, Microsoft has created a second search site, aimed at testing out new ideas. Known as Viveri, the site is being made available this week to all Microsoft employees, and the company hopes to make it publicly available soon.

Viveri uses Microsoft's core search technology, but then acts as a sort of sandbox where researchers can try out new ideas. In its initial incarnation, the site differs in several ways from the main Live Search. Best viewed on a large monitor, Viveri brings up a standard result screen, as well as smaller separate windows to the right with things such as image search results, a tag cloud of related searches as well as results from other, vertical search engines such as WebMD or Amazon.

"Viveri is like a showroom for concept cars," said Microsoft researcher Scott Imig. Not all of the ideas will make it to the final product, but some will, often in a slightly different form. The goal, he said, is to encourage risk--something that is a key goal of Microsoft's overall research effort.

Part of the idea behind Viveri, Imig said, is to recognize that one answer doesn't fit all search queries.

"Rather than being a department store, this is a mall," he said, noting that Microsoft points people to results from specialty search sites and also offers tools aimed at further refining search terms. In addition to the tag cloud option for related searches, Microsoft also highlights terms in search results that could themselves make for new queries.

Imig said Viveri would be made public "in the fairly near future." There is already a teaser site in place.

Microsoft is clearly still searching for answers in this market. The company has been in the business for years. Its market share has bounced up and down, but remained in the single digits and well behind Yahoo, not to mention Google.

In an interview Tuesday, Microsoft Research chief Rick Rashid took issue with the notion that too much of Microsoft's search innovation has not made it into Microsoft's product.

"There has been huge improvement in our search technology," Rashid said, noting that improvements in product search and other areas came right from research. Microsoft's research effort, he said, has helped Microsoft's product teams keep pace with Google even though its business is much smaller.

"They look at Microsoft research as a tremendous advantage," Rashid said.

In addition to Viveri, Microsoft also showed off several other search-related projects at this year's TechFest including Geolife 2.0, which Microsoft bills as "a GPS-data-driven social network that runs on Microsoft Virtual Earth" as well as a new interface for image search and what Microsoft says is a better way of collecting and storing opinion data to help would-be buyers.

See the rest of our coverage from TechFest 2009 here.

REDMOND, Wash.--Microsoft already has several tools that stitch together a bunch of smaller photos to create a larger representation. With Photosynth, Microsoft even uses a collection of still images to re-create a three-dimensional experience.

Now a team of researchers is trying to do the same thing with video, in real time. The idea is that, at any given event, there are lots of people with cell phones capable of recording video. But the resolution of any one of those videos is pretty limited.

At the company's annual TechFest internal science fair on Tuesday, Microsoft showed how, in real time, multiple cell phone video streams can be stitched together to create one higher resolution video. The idea was developed by a trio of folks in Microsoft's Cairo, Egypt, labs as a way to provide video of class lectures. Pretty quickly, though, the team realized that the technique had much broader uses, everything from citizen journalism to live streaming a family wedding to distant well-wishers.

"There are lots of people that have mobile phones in their pockets," said Ayman Kaheel, a development manager at Microsoft's innovation center in Cairo and one of three people involved in that project. (I've embedded a video below of Kaheel talking about the project and giving a quick demo.)

A few steps over, Darren Edge was showing a project called Notes Scape that aims to create virtual sticky notes that travel with you wherever you go, appearing on any cell phone or laptop that you have nearby. I was a little fuzzy on the technology, but someday Edge said the approach could help visualize and organize information, particularly once we all start walking around with the kinds of heads-up displays that remain largely the stuff of science fiction.

While many projects are aimed at evolving traditional objects into their ultra-high-tech equivalent, the team from Microsoft Research India takes a different tactic. As part of their efforts to bring technology to the rural poor, the group often looks at what might be the lowest level of technology needed to solve a particular problem.

A few years back, the team discovered that a TV and DVD player was a far more effective way of showing improved agricultural methods to rural farmers than trying to use laptops.

This year, the team from India is showing a couple of education projects that try to take advantage of the limited technology that is already pervasive. In one, the group has taken books and digitized them to play on a standard DVD, using the fast-forward button to move from page to page. At TechFest, Microsoft showed a Dr. Seuss book running from a standard DVD, with audio added in the background.

"DVDs are a very cheap medium, much cheaper than textbooks," said Microsoft researcher Sarubh Panjwani.

Thousands of books can fit on a single DVD, said Panjwani. That means a school that can't afford many books can still have a library. It also means that the school can have a means to send books home with students. Even in rural areas, more than 70 percent of people have access to a TV and DVD players are also fairly common.

Plus, a book on TV can be shared by an entire classroom if need be, Panjwani said.

"A TV is big enough to share the content," Panjwani said.

I'll have more from TechFest in a little bit, including details on more research projects, more videos and pictures, as well as an interview with Microsoft Research head Rick Rashid.

See the rest of our coverage from TechFest 2009 here.

A team of researchers at Microsoft is looking to beat Roget at his own game.

Aiming to build a better thesaurus, the Writing Assistance project within Microsoft's research unit is tapping techniques developed to translate from one language to another.

Although thesauri are good at finding lots and lots of synonyms, they require the user to pick the right one because they aren't very good at understanding the context of what is being said. That's where the experience from doing machine translations comes in.

"We've taken the actual translation tables...and what we've done is we've taken those and said if a word in Chinese maps to two different English words maybe those two words are synonyms with some probability," said Christopher Brockett, a computational linguist and one of the Microsoft researchers leading the project.

The approach has two key benefits over a static thesaurus. First of all, the newer approach can do phrases, as opposed to single words. Also, it can draw on the context in which the phrase is used.

Brockett plans to show off a prototype of the tool next week at TechFest, Microsoft's annual internal science fair. It's just one of dozens of projects that will be shown as part of an effort to expose Microsoft's business units to the work being done in Microsoft's research labs. (Check back next week for CNET's on-the-ground coverage of the event, which kicks off Monday night at Microsoft's campus in Redmond, Wash.)

TechFest is sort of like "The Dating Game" for Microsoft's research and product development arms. Research teams at Microsoft set up booths, somewhat like a high-school science fair, while product teams shuffle through looking for something that might give their efforts a leg up on the competition.

For the public, TechFest can also offer a glimpse at future product directions. For example, researcher Andy Wilson showed off a number of surface computing projects in the years leading up to the debut of Microsoft's Surface product.

As is the case with most of the projects, the thesaurus effort is still in its infancy.

"We're still working on the algorithms and how much work we give to the language pairs," Brockett said. "We have to get the quality up. There are usability issues that have to be looked into."

Over time, though, Brockett hopes the technique could be used to effectively translate whole sentences. Microsoft has a demonstration of that up on its Web site, but Brockett acknowledges such a treatment shows both the potential and the current limitations of the technology.

But would-be high-school plagiarists beware. Yes, the technology could someday translate the whole Wikipedia article for you, but it would likely translate the article the same way for all your classmates as well. And plagiarism detection software is evolving along with the science of machine translation.

As for the thesaurus itself, the technology would be a natural fit for Word, which already has a built-in traditional thesaurus. But the technology could also help Microsoft in another key area: search.

That's because while search engines are good at finding things like names, that have just one form, they have a harder time finding expressions that can be phrased in multiple ways.

That's less of an issue when searching across the whole Web. For example, searching "Who shot Abraham Lincoln?" "Who killed Abraham Lincoln" and "Who assassinated Abraham Lincoln" all direct you to a page with John Wilkes Booth.

However, when it comes to searching smaller universes, such as a company's intranet, that might not be the case.

"You might not find it if the words are different," Brockett said. In such cases, automatically searching using similar phrases might boost the likelihood of finding a result.

See the rest of our coverage from TechFest 2009 here.

LOS ANGELES--You may not know it, but you are carrying 100 watts of power inside you.

The problem is, much to the lament of all those whose cell phones and iPods run out of battery juice, researchers haven't found a very good way to harness that energy.

In an interview with CNET News, Microsoft research chief Rick Rashid said the best that researchers have come up with is to put solar panels on a hat or perhaps harness some power by putting something in one's shoe.

"You can get power, but not a whole lot," he said of the shoe approach. On the solar front, he said, "It really would only work in Los Angeles."

The issue is, it takes quite a bit of energy to power all our digital devices. In part, he said, that's why we hear every now and then about a cell phone or PC catching fire when a battery glitch occurs.

"Your typical laptop is a bomb," Rashid said. Even an iPod or cell phone battery has a whole lot of potential energy in a small space. "If you at any point thought that would be released all at once you wouldn't put that in your pocket. It would blow a nice hole in you."

We also talked about more pleasant subjects--in particular, some of the work that Microsoft researchers have been doing to deliver basic technology to get farming tips and health care to the rural poor.

The company's Project Green uses DVDs to bring farming tips to remote farmers in India, while another effort aims to distribute information on crop conditions to shared community cell phones via text messages.

Update: One other interesting tidbit--Microsoft plans to change the name of Boku, the programming tool for kids that Rashid demonstrated in his keynote on Wednesday.

The thing is, a Google search for Boku turns up some extremely not-safe-for kids images. This time, Rashid said Microsoft will look for a name that has no association to anything, just to be safe. I suggested Visual Studio 2010 Junior Edition, but I don't think that's the route they will go either.

Check below for a video interview I did with Rashid on Project Green and health-related initiatives. Sorry, no battery talk in the video.

LOS ANGELES--As he began his speech on Wednesday, Microsoft Research chief Rick Rashid talked up his ties, not just to Microsoft's products, but also to those from Apple.

"If you use a Macintosh or an iPhone, which honestly I would not recommend, you would be using code that I wrote more than 25 years ago," Rashid quipped to a crowd of developers at the company's Professional Developer Conference here. In his Carnegie Mellon days, Rashid helped create the Mach kernel that is at the heart of Mac OS X (Note: I originally stated that it was at the heart of FreeBSD, but others have pointed out that's not accurate).

Rashid noted that it's also a testimony to the staying power of core technology ideas.

"If you'd asked me 25 years ago if I thought code I was (writing, would be) running today on a cell phone, my reaction would have been 'what's a cell phone?'" Rashid said.

"It just shows you things really do survive and get used in interesting ways," Rashid said.

Later in his talk, Rashid is expected to show off some of the latest technology from the labs. (I'm betting we see Microsoft's Sphere surface computer, since Microsoft started the keynote Wednesday with a thank you note to the company that makes the display that powers Sphere.)

Update, 9:12 a.m. PDT: Microsoft put out a release noting some of the things Rashid will cover.

Microsoft plans an update to its Worldwide Telescope software and also detailed the Microsoft CCR and DSS Toolkit 2008, software developer tools that aim to "make it easier to develop loosely-coupled concurrent and distributed applications."

Other topics include: DryadLINQ (a project that enables ordinary programmers to write large-scale data parallel applications to run on large PC clusters), a tool to help kids learn to program known as Boku, as well as Second Light, a surface computing research project I wrote about earlier this month.

Meanwhile, Microsoft researcher Feng Zhao is discussing how computers factor into the world's energy use. In the U.S. for example, computing uses about 1.5 percent of all electricity, according to a 2006 EPA report. However, computers can also be used to make other systems, such as heating and air conditioning, more efficient.

Zhao showed a sensor map from Microsoft research that helped chart the temperature in the main convention hall over the last couple of days. He noted that Microsoft uses 10,000 such sensors throughout its data centers.

"It's...good for our customers," he said. "It's also good for the world."

Update, 9:45 a.m. PDT: Rashid discussed the update to the telescope software, which Microsoft is calling the "equinox" update.

The new update, going live now, offers more than double the data of the original release, including 55 new panoramic images from the Apollo moon and Pathfinder Mars missions.

The demos drew loud applause as Rashid showed a wide range of views, including a display of the entire viewable universe.