On completion of another year of the Microsoft research India, a decent public symposium was arranged. I was one of the few hungry visitors to know, whats in store of Microsoft for public access and what they are up to. On few projects, I was pretty excited with the technology used but with few OMG I was amazed to know how come a good initiate end up as a visible crap. I have some favorites and odds, in brief this is what I carried out of the Leela palace show off.
Demos: -
Microsoft Surface: - Seen a lot of videos about his prolific machine, wanted to see it live and touch it & the wish came true. Windows vista was running so smooth on the surface, but the "Microsoft Surface" makes u feel what the technology can be one day, things are just t taking shape.
Writing in Air: - One of my favorite demo on display, reminded me of the movie "Minority Report" movement in air and things done. It was about a orange ball with the dot marked on it, the dot was tracked by the web cam attached to the computer. The movement of the ball (i.e. the dot associated), assisted in making the meaning out of the shape carved in the air, with an auto suggestion against an unclear detection ( u get these in new mobiles with hand writing softwares). Some trouble was noticed when a RedHat (T- shirt tag says so) guy with orange T-shirt tried to use the device, orange background led to some disturbances.
Enabling Sharing During Mobile Calls: - Awesome display of the thought process well implemented. The telephonic conversation between the two end users is the authentication for the file sharing to be initiated between smart devices or the computers via the cloud. The sharing is not dependent on the smart phones, but on Internet but for authentication on the active calls. A dumb idiot (must be the youtube fan), tried to kill the show by trying to record the videos, showing he attending conference, blocking view with his movements, but the demo was charming.
Photosynth: - Lets make the pic 3D with photosynthesis, more the pics you have the better is the 3d representation. Nice part of this presentation was the meet with the engineer involved in the project (answered lot of questions the best way). The project is in use with more modifications (core methodologies preserved) in archaeological departments of china etc. Just watch the movie "Italian Job", and what the computer guy do in it.
Cell Phone as a Platform for Healthcare in Underserved Communities, Biometric device and doctor on web: - Presented by the most energetic lady of the event. A collection of smart devices, a thin band around the neck, a clip at ear etc. In case you donn have the doctor around, use the setup, get the body feature scanned and send it to the nursing home and take the advice. The current setup displayed, made more meaning for the communication between two medical centers wherein one end needs advice from other. The setup was still under lot of changes but usage is unlimited. It was Cool stuff but crowded. I didn't get to clear a doubt I had, but will contact the makers for some information.
Speeding the Mobile browsing: - I donn know why this counter was not crowded but this was the demo with more information on display, from stats to live show. It showed that by tunneling all the elements of the webpage via a single connection object can speed up the browsing. second part was the compression which makes the content to download lighter and hence the browsing quick. Like what Opera did in their recent browser, but the equation is not equal as the browser doesn't uses the winzip like compression but some in-house Microsoft compression algo. Nice stuff that can be more realistic and ready to find space in the consumer usage.
SkyFinder, Searching inside the image: - This demo was towards how the feature inside the image is scanned and can be put to usage. Best way, suppose one searches for the image of "leopard under sky" in the Google, now, you got the pic but this time you need a blue sky as background then search the pics available for that specific feature in the filtered results as this the best result you will get any way. A part of it is implemented in the Bing search engine under the illustrations section on right bottom of all search results. A full concept is still under implementation (keep watching Bing for changes). I didn't get the questions answered as the presentation was made by an engineer on behalf of the makers.
Voice messaging center (Egoists showcasing half baked cake):- The presentation from the MIT, The idea was shown on the scale for which it was not completely thought of. If I want to send a message I will dial in a toll free number drop my voice mail and thats it, recepients receives it. Now the idea was for mass usage and large scale implementation, with no backing of how to maintain so many messages at the back-end, what about duplicate voice mails for the same cause? how will one decide before goin though the complete voice message what the message is about, to manage his preference (which is more critical)? the person or the organization going to implement this will definitely be a good friend of Mr. Gates (only he can afford to dumb millions for half baked cakes.).
For more details visit:-
Papers,
Papers on showcase were not as I expected them to be (few were really good). Most of the papers were from the PHD grads from IISc, IITs etc. and majority of the presenters were there to impress their PHD professors, so go to the counter when u have a Professor around. I had to attend a counter twice to learn the fact, to actually understand the details of the presentation.
Balancing the Heuristic, (improving ignorance): - The paper was about the intelligent analysis of the information and training the neural network. This paper was for the usage in the medical word, but I found it interesting as I deal with heuristics some way or the other at my workplace with similar loopholes. This paper says to club the the lower valued and less weighed sections in a common collection and considering the same as a unit during analysis. The individual value of the category is maintained, by mapping it with the solution mentioned earlier. The deviation and error rate found to be coming under control and the performance improved. This fundamental was referred for the bio-devices but sounds interesting for implementation in the regular AI jobs. This was my favourite on the show of paper counters.
Control and Automata (Equivalence Checking in Complex Embedded System Design Verification): - This paper described well how to get the parallel and looping transforming stages well serialized and control, when the states are getting transformed. some of the theories brought back the terror of the college days towards the "Instrumentation and control" subject. Thanks to the presenter who kept everything sweet, the best part of the theory was, when ever there is control analysis on the state transitions the flow becomes more serialized and came neatly calculated at the end. The transitions can be regulated in any flow using the technique with checkpoints to keep exceptions at bay.
For more information visit: -
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/events/techvista2010/postersession.aspx
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Though many more presentations were on displays, but these were some which marked an impression and made me feel good to know that I traveled all the way to Bangalore with no sleep for 30 Hours for an event not to be missed.
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