MS TechFest 2007 Unveils New Products

Microsoft Research TechFest 2007 has unveiled more than 100 innovations for the IT industry and customers.

Products showcased at the event included a ‘World-Wide Telescope’ that allows people to turn their PC into one of the most powerful ground-based telescopes in the world. The technology draws on tens of millions of digital images of stars, galaxies and quasars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a project started several years ago to map out a large part of the universe.

Microsoft Research Senior Vice President Rick Rashid said, “What we’ve done is give people the ability to become digital astronauts. You can explore deep space from the comfort of your living room."

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Rashid also unveiled ‘Mix: Search-Based Authoring’, a technology that pulls data from many sources such as different Web sites an d the computer’s hard drive and databases to integrate the data into one document that can be easily shared with friends, family members or co-workers. He said, “Think of Mix as a kind of high-tech, living scrapbook. You can create a page that has digital pictures of your family, e-mails you exchange with family members, and links to places you love to visit together. And you can send that page to any other member of your family all without having to build a Web page."

Another technology unveiled at Microsoft’s TechFest 2007 was the Boku, which utilized the ‘Xbox as Teaching Tool for Future Scientists’. According to researchers at Microsoft, Boku is a virtual robot in a simulated world, debuted as a research project to teach kids basic programming skills in a fun and entertaining way. Rashid said, “There is an ongoing and deepening crisis in computer science. Our goal is to stem the tide by showing young kids the magic of software programming. Using Xbox, kids as young as four years of age can program a robot to interact with its world, travel around among various objects the kids create, and even eat an apple. It’s very much like playing a game, but it’s a serious endeavor that we believe will begin to interest kids in programming and eventually make them more comfortable tackling the really big challenges in computer science."

Microsoft Research TechFest involves hundreds of researchers from Microsoft’s worldwide labs in China, England, India and the United States, who gather for the annual event at the company’s corporate headquarters in Redmond, Wash. They come together to exchange ideas with colleagues, show off their latest innovations, and shine a light into the future of computing.