Microsoft Research holds its annual TechFest event this week in Redmond, where the smartest of the smartest at Microsoft will show off their projects. You can follow along via a blog by Microsoft Research writer Rob Knies (Warning: yes, it is on the rah rah side...."the burgeoning anticipation was palpable" he writes! But you can probably learn about some pretty cool projects, too.)

You can check out keynote videos here from Microsoft Research head Rick Rashid and others.

Here's a look at some of the technologies being demoed, as described by Microsoft Research:

Lingo: Vertical Search Engine for English Writing

"With the help of sentence retrieval, users can get good example sentences in different domains and different styles. We also will show our technologies for using a paraphrasing engine and a machine-translation engine to extend users' writing styles."

E-Science: Science in the Cloud

"We'll demo http://www.hydroseek.org (used to find U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and other data), http://www.fluxdata.org (a SharePoint site used by the global carbon-climate community to access shared synthesis data), http://bwc.berkeley.edu/RussianRiver (a data cube used for hydrologic analysis of the Russian River in California), and other Internet science assets."

LucidTouch

Enables end users to touch the back of a screen on a mobile device to get their jobs done.

BLEWS: What the Blogosphere Tells You About News

"While typical news-aggregation sites do a good job of clustering news stories according to topic, they leave the reader without information about which stories figure prominently in political discourse. BLEWS uses political blogs to categorize news stories according to their reception in the conservative and liberal blogospheres."

Rethinking Spectrum Allocation in Wi-Fi Networks

"IEEE 802.11 divides the frequency spectrum into channels of fixed width... . Over the past six months, we have been exploring the feasibility and the benefits of varying the channel width. In our demo, we will show that changing the channel width is achievable even with current hardware and beneficial in a number of scenarios."