Microsoft this week held its annual Microsoft Research Faculty Summit, the annual get-together of Microsoft researchers with engineers and scientists from academia. The goal of the two-day conference, which took place at Microsoft’s Redmond campus and ended Tuesday, is for the attendees to yap about technology in research and for Microsoft to show off what it can offer to the research community.
The highlight for Microsoft is its DemoFest, an exhibition of some 40 of its projects and technologies. Among the projects it demonstrated to delegates include Windows Vista and its Tablet PC technology. But it also demo’d some of its other research including:
- Crypto KeyTote: a physical device that allows users to move cryptographic keys from a new device to a home store.
- Radio-Frequency Certificates of Authenticity: Microsoft’s answer to RFID – credit-card-sized COAs that contain information about a product that can be read within a relative far field and whose authenticity can be verified within its near field, explains the developer.
- Surface computers: A means to display information on anything other than a monitor, for example on a table surface, while being able to interact with the program. Think “Minority Report”.
- Protecting Personal Information Online: A client browser plug-in that identifies important personal information, such as addresses, phone numbers and credit card numbers, and tracks where it has gone.
- Dryad Data-Parallel Pogramming: Aimed at developers of large or complex apps, Dryad enables programmers to implment and deploy large apps with petabytes of data running on data-center clusters with thousands of computers, or a single multiprocessor or multicore computers.
For the full details of what Microsoft showed off at its DemoFest click here, and for general details of the conference click here.
Linda Leung, lleung@nww.com
