Microsoft

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.

Helen Wang

(Credit: Microsoft)

"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."

CAMBRIDGE, England--At Microsoft Research's open day here recently, a certain line was heavily promoted. That line: fundamental research helps generate new technologies that give companies competitive advantages.

In some cases, that's unarguable. If Intel shut down its research, it would die overnight. But what would happen if Microsoft stopped doing research? Based on the researchers' demonstrations, I see the answer as not very much.

The ideas on show at the site in Cambridge, while good and interesting, did not address Microsoft's core problems, nor even any of its minor ones. There was research into ecological systems, into displaying networks of influence, into low-power network hardware, into capturing people's lives as a timeline. Try matching those with any known Microsoft strategy--or any conceivable one--in a way that makes compelling sense.

With Intel, you can see the research up on the screen. I've had a briefing from a solid-state physicist on a new transistor design and seen it emerge as a major strand of processor strategy three years later. With Microsoft, it's hard to trace such developments--easier now than it has been, but the link between bright idea and bottom line is very weak.

It's not as if you can't just shut down fundamental R&D. Apple had a classic operation in its Apple Research Labs, which did good work in networking, data recognition, human-computer interaction, and so on. It was highly thought of. Some of its legacies live on in QuickTime, and many other ideas spread throughout the Web and software development.

It ran for 11 years. Two months after he regained control of the company in 1997, Steve Jobs shut it down.

Apple survived the operation. Microsoft would too, purely in terms of the products it makes. That's because big company research in this instance is not primarily about the science and technology, it's about marketing--marketing of a kind Apple decided it just didn't need, but Microsoft needs more than ever. And they're not 21st- or even 20th-century ideas at work: the principles go back much further.

Common misconception
This is hidden by a common misconception about fundamental research. Ask someone to describe a scientist or inventor at work, and you'll get a picture of an eccentric loner crouched over a bench in a deserted lab late at night.

What research is, really, is networking. It's about influence and status and competition and being the first to know, all of which only work well in a large group of peers. Becoming part of a big industrial R&D operation while continuing an academic style of working is landing a plum; there's money, and brand recognition among the laity. And so, the entire research community warms to the idea--and its sponsor.

This works all the way up the chain. The director of a big R&D organization will find doors open and ears pricked at the highest level of universities and government; the divisional head will be lionized at conferences.

You can see why Jobs found this a useless distraction in building the Apple brand, which stands for direct user experience. Microsoft, on the other hand, relishes every chance to become part of the infrastructure of influence. Individuals don't buy Microsoft products: they get them from organizations or by default. Microsoft's most important marketing is to those in power, and what could be a finer advertisement of your suitability for partnership than a big building in Cambridge University filled with happy academics? It worked for King Henry VIII; it can work for Steve Ballmer.

In its own way, the company is influenced too. Being a high-profile public supporter of a social good like fundamental research means you have to look very much as if you take it seriously. The first open-source Microsoft software came from Research's work in IPv6; the academic necessities of collaboration and openness feed both ways and that does the company more good than it'll ever admit on the record.

What research is for, in cases like Microsoft, is status. It's a very tax efficient, with many valuable and wonderful side effects that occasionally benefit the company, but its primary task is marketing. It's proof, even in these most distressingly modern of times, that patronage works.

Rupert Goodwins of ZDNet UK reported from Cambridge.

Developed by Microsoft Research, Viveri is designed to be a sandbox where Microsoft can try out new search ideas.

(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET Networks)

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.

Photos: Tinkering around at TechFest 2009

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.

Photos: Tinkering around at TechFest 2009

View the full gallery

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.

Brockett

(Credit: Microsoft )

"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.

Chronicling our lives has been part of our culture for as long as we have kept personal diaries. Today, technology offers many different ways of recording our thoughts and feelings, which makes the task far easier.

Ten years ago, Gordon Bell, a principal researcher at Microsoft, set out to chronicle his life by recording everything that happened to him. Visit him in his office and you will face microphones and video cameras. As he travels, he goes "laden down with stuff."

The Microsoft-funded project is still going, and Bell sees it as "one of the most important things I have done."

Seventy-four-year-old Bell is no stranger to ambitious projects. A computer engineer, he joined Digital Equipment Corporation (now part of HP), in 1960 and is best known as the designer of the some of the early PDP minicomputers and of the VMS (virtual machine extended) operating system in the 1980s. The operating system was for a while Unix's most important competitor with widespread adoption in industry, commerce, and academia, and is still in use as OpenVMS.

Bell talked to ZDNet UK about the challenges posed in chronicling a life at the Digital Lives conference, hosted by the British Library in London on February 10.

Q: How did you get involved with Microsoft?
Bell: Nathan Myrvold contacted me 10 years ago and said "we want you to run research" or "we want you to find someone to run research," neither of us can remember which.

I don't want to run anything so I thought I would help him find someone. But from there I started with Microsoft.

How would you describe what you do now?
Bell: It was really to capture everything in my life. The project was called MyLifeBits, and in 2001 I said that what we want is to do is capture everything. That became a kind of "let's see what all this is about."

Basically, I came at it from an engineering perspective of "what good is this" and I firmly believe that what we are doing and what we have done is the natural progression for the PC. It is the ultimate personal computer. This is what the computer is all about.

This is a memory surrogate, so I think of a machine as a memory aid and then, incidentally, your life ends up there as a residue because everything goes through there.

From a Digital Lives perspective this is what you live and breathe, and everything is there, so what more do you want?

Do you see the MyLifeBits project as a device or as software or something else?
Bell: Actually, I see it as the collective set of data that we call "e-memory."

(The project) has evolved from something that was more a personal computer--where everything is kept in one place, on the computer--to what we have today where the information, the memory, is distributed in all kinds of places and in all kinds of devices, in particular the mobile phone.

That is itself a personal computer with a lot of function, and is also a place where there is a lot of capture. All of that information has to map back into the server space for your memory.

This has come at the right time. I know that when I was working, I went to Bill (Gates) at one of the anniversaries of the PC, and at the event people were asking: "What's next?" I told them that I know what's next.

So what you are saying is, don't worry about the format?
Bell: Exactly. Get on with it. Whether you decide to throw it away or not, that is another thing. The fact that you have a computer working on this stuff is important. Look at the archiving with people sitting and gnawing on each piece of data, and you know it is not a task for humans at all. It is unfit for human consumption.

So you should just digitize everything?
Bell: You can digitize a substantial amount and for the stuff you can't digitize, it is a question of how much you want. There are feelings about the past but, in terms of the future, it is a question of how much you want to guide people.

You know, there was a survey they had (at the British Library) which showed that people don't really understand e-mail and how to handle it, and file it, and so on. You know, I think that there is not as much knowledge as you think about this. I think a lot of people do not understand what a file is. People say I wrote a letter, but how do I ever find the thing again?

They see it as just like a magic typewriter that lets them write a letter but if they want to change anything, or move it, then: "That's magic." Computers are so easy to use, but then you have a kind of training issue I think.

Some people want to keep everything?
Bell: Keep it, absolutely. Do not throw it away.

But you can't keep everything, where would you put it?
Bell: Physical stuff? Then there is no reason not to discard everything but once it is digitized, don't throw anything away. Don't ever delete an e-mail.

What do you see as the next step?
Bell: I want to see that more and more of the stuff that we've done gets into the product (MyLifeBits). What happened is that we were on a course to get this implemented with (the Microsoft file system) WinFS. Then WinFS got thrown out of Vista. You see all of the stuff that the archivists are talking about (at the conference) really revolves around the data and the metadata.

You see, if I want to send a bunch of my files, then the files will need metadata. Well, metadata I probably already have, and it should be there, but that probably requires a much more robust file system, a database file system.

The problem is that by not having a database (for MyLifeBits), what's happened is (Microsoft has) seven databases now. For media, I've got Zune and another one but, actually, you have four, all pointing at the same song. For Money, I've got a database, for Outlook, I've got a database, for photos, I've got a database. And a lot of these databases have information that, if they could copy each other, using a common database would be much better.

So when you see Steve Ballmer your first words are: "I want a database?"
Bell: That's right. The other thing is transaction processing, because a message comes in and it gets lost in the database. Time and place are great search terms, so they are both in there. And "place"--well, we are seeing great things happening around place.

But I don't think people got what happened in this last decade, in that we ended up with this factor of 1,000 in data-storage capability. Remember we were at a gigabyte and now on a desktop it is a terabyte. And that factor-of-1,000 increase is a big deal. Half-a-billion hard-disk drives were manufactured last year.

Look at this library we are in (the British Library), and with 1,000 drives you probably have the whole thing. We are at another amazing time, and it is a storage thing and the fact that video is becoming so prevalent. That's going to have a major impact.

Colin Barker of ZDNet UK reported from London.

Microsoft Research on Thursday is releasing software that gives musicians, both casual and professional, a new way to speed up song development. Called Songsmith, the $29.99 application creates musical accompaniment based on whatever is sung into the computer's microphone.

In order to do this, the software processes the pitch and tone of what's recorded and lets users hear how it might sound if they had a little backup in the form of a virtual piano, drums, and keyboard. Microsoft is expecting them to use the new track either as inspiration for further song development or as a simple way to create karaoke-quality recordings for friends and family members.

The software lets users change the feel of a song completely using various sliders that adjust mood, volume levels, tempo and what instruments are being used. Users are also able to purchase additional instruments from Garritan for a small fee that can drastically change the way a track sounds. Each purchased instrument comes wrapped in a special installer that automatically adds it to Songsmith. Dan Morris of Microsoft Research tells me there may eventually be a marketplace for other sample providers, although for now the software is using it exclusively because of its the only compatible format.

Songsmith lets you simply sing into your computer's microphone to hear what it would sound like if you had a back-up band.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Songsmith is starting out as a digital download only, and will be available from Microsoft's recently launched digital downloads store front. Morris says there are no current plans to make the software part of a larger suite of music oriented products from Microsoft. Competitor Apple has offered a slightly similar feature in its Garageband software that gives you virtual band mates that can accompany you as you record music with an in-line microphone, however each of the instruments must be programmed by the user.

One interesting thing to note is that the technology is fully capable of providing automated accompaniment in near real-time. Morris says the only hurdle there is that the programming does all its magic by seeing where users are going with a melody and compensating accordingly. Morris also says a Web based version of the software could be possible later on down the line, although development in that area has been slowed down due to latency and recording quality bottlenecks.

Embedded below are before and after clips of what Songsmith is capable of. As mentioned before, to change the sound of this song users simply need to adjust a slider or two.

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.