Newsmaker: Microsoft's interest in research is healthy, chief says

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(Sensor technology) will have an impact. Increasingly, you are going to be able to put small computers on just about anything. The question is: How do you take advantage of that? What good is it? What are some of the issues that have to be confronted?

People are looking at, for example, being able to create sensor networks just to keep track of the human body. We've been looking at technology for aiding people with memory disorders. There are all sorts of things that will be possible as you deploy these arrays of sensors. It will happen.

So why is speech recognition always five years away from being a mainstream user interface?
Rashid: There are two different answers to that. One answer is, "You weren't paying attention: It's become a mainstream user interface." If you call a lot of customer service departments, the chances are excellent you are speaking to a speech recognition system and not a human being when you first get them.

We've had a huge impact on the search technologies that are used in Vista.

We're seeing a fairly significant use of speech recognition, for example, in Windows and Office for accessibility reasons. People who can't use traditional interfaces use the speech interfaces because it gives them an ability to use a computer that they might not otherwise have. I think we really are having an impact.

When you set the bar as "another human being," then speech recognition is still going to take awhile. I don't know if it is five years or 10 years. Human beings are really, really good at speech recognition. That's partly because they are not just solving the speech problem. Human beings have knowledge of the world that they have developed over decades. You know this if you spend much time talking to a 3-year-old. It's a very different communications act than it is when you are talking to an adult or a teenager.

I use a smart phone, and I dial it with voice command. There are no buttons on my smart phone for dialing. It's one of those Pocket PC phones that just has the normal four buttons that a Pocket PC has. That's how I call. I don't ever use anything but the voice interface for calling anyone.

Can you talk about some of the ways that Microsoft Research contributed to Vista?
Rashid: One of the least visible ways, but is something I like to talk about, is the work we did on what's called the Static Driver Verifier. People who develop device drivers for Vista can verify the properties of their drivers before they ever even attempt to test that. What's great about that technology is there is no testing involved. For the properties that it is proving, they are either true or false. You don't have to ask yourself "Did I come up with a good test case or not?"

That change is going to have dramatic impact over the next five to 10 years, as we begin to bring these proof tools to bear on larger and larger problems in the software space. We are already doing research on saying, "How would you create an operating system environment from scratch, knowing that you have this kind of proof technology available?" It's a project we have called "Singularity."

Other areas--obviously, we've had a huge impact on the search technologies that are used in Vista. We've been doing information retrieval research within Microsoft Research going back really to the mid-'90s. Those technologies have made (their) way into our Live Search product on the Web but also into our desktop products.

If we sit down and have a conversation on the 25th anniversary of Microsoft Research, what do you hope to be telling me you have accomplished?
Rashid: First off, I think computing technology has a lot to offer in terms of health care and really being able to improve people's lives in a significant way. I certainly would hope that in 10 years, I can look back and say computing technologies and some of the technologies created at Microsoft Research are prolonging people's lives or making the quality of their life better in some significant way.

I think we can dramatically improve the sustainability of our environment through the technologies that we are developing. We have done a lot of work in areas such as traffic analysis. We've licensed some of those technologies to new start-ups that are trying to be able to map in real-time traffic patterns and be able to provide that data to people so they don't have to wait in traffic jams for huge periods of time. Or to provide it to urban planners so they can design the roads better.

I hope that we will be able to say that our software systems are dramatically more reliable because of technologies that we've developed within research.

Do you think you will still be going strong at MSR 10 years from now?
Rashid: I'm sure Microsoft Research will still be going strong. Hopefully, I will too. Everybody gets older, but I hope I will continue to be in good health and doing my job.  

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