Dubai, 24–26 April 2004

Microsoft Research Academic Days in Dubai is a conference for Faculty in the Middle East and Africa on the technologies embraced by the Microsoft .NET platform. This workshop will provide attendees with technical information about the .NET architecture, its components, and its implementation from Microsoft. Additional lectures will also discuss aspects of the upcoming version of Windows, codenamed Longhorn. Lectures will stress the technical details that are of interest to computer scientists. Speakers come from Microsoft Research, Microsoft Corporation and academics who are working with Microsoft technologies. In the final section, several talks by academics will discuss the issues related to teaching using Microsoft technologies as example implementations.

Speakers and presentation

Behrooz Chitsaz: The R in R&D at Microsoft

Biography: Behrooz joined Microsoft in October 1991 as a program manager in the Messaging Business Unit. During the 6 years in that division Behrooz was responsible for the directory services and the security features of Microsoft Exchange and a number of email gateways. In March 1997 Behrooz was appointed the Group program manager for the Windows Server Directory Services (Active Directory). Behrooz joined Microsoft Research in March 2001 and is currently responsible for strategic activities.

Abstract: With over 700 employees in the Research division and 5 labs around the world, the research division at Microsoft is chartered with driving innovation into Microsoft products. This talk will give an overview of Microsoft research, the technology, social and industry trends that are driving Microsoft Research projects, some current projects and the process and challenges in transferring research technology into products.

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Rafal Lukawiecki: A Subjective View of Next Decade in IT: Emergence of Knowledge Workers

Biography: In his role as eVisioneer and Director at Project Botticelli Ltd, Rafal is responsible for analysing, planning and forecasting the changes in the field of Information Technology. Amongst his past experiences, Rafal was also one of the founders of Bot Inc., a Seattle software development company. In his other previous roles at Oxford Computer Group Ltd and at Aris Corporation Rafal gained extensive practical experience in consulting and professional technical speaking on a variety of subjects, which he continues to perform at Project Botticelli Ltd. His frequent conference keynotes and other speeches have been sought after by many company directors, CEOs and business leaders. More recently, Rafal has been invited to speak at a Bill Gates summit in front of hundreds of Europe's prominent CEOs.

Rafal specialises in three fields: study of programming models, security and cryptography, and project and operational management of IT. His work focuses mainly on: team building, management of software development ventures, designing successful IT support and operations, current and future software design patterns, e-Business, Microsoft .NET strategy, IT security, OO development, and messaging. In his spare time, Rafal has been writing a new book on Microsoft Solutions Framework aimed at its practitioners. Rafal also holds an MSc in the Foundations of Advanced Information Technology from Imperial College, University of London.

Abstract: Starting with an overview of recent breakthroughs in IT, and taking into account evolving needs of businesses, we will paint a picture of how IT might develop in the course of the next ten years. We will discuss new technological innovations in hardware as well as software-based breakthroughs in a way that puts them together into a certain coherent path leading to the emergence of "knowledge workers". While some of the discussed innovations may be already known, the way all of them interact with each other is certainly new and offers, perhaps controversially, an insight into the future.

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Rafal Lukawiecki: Overview of IPV6

Biography: See above.

Abstract: You may have heard that even if every organisation in the world used no more than one IP address (perhaps with the help of NAT etc.), we would run out of IP addresses in the next few years halting the growth of the Internet. This would be extremely unpleasant considering that we are just envisaging massive increase in numbers of always-on fully interconnected devices and systems. IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) has been developed over the past 6 years in order to resolve this problem and many other ailing of the current version of IP known as IPv4. Its additional benefits, such as: better ways to deal with security, heterogeneity, multicasting and, above all, really clever ways to do streaming should ensure its rapid adoption. All of that means that whatever your companies business, you will have to prepare for the deployment of IPv6 soon! This session will give you an intensive overview of IPv6 together with its benefits and differences from IPv4. We will pay special attention to the issues of addressing, mobility, deployment, migration and co-existence with IPv4. Please note that a working knowledge of IPv4 is useful in order to gain most from this session.

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Ronny Bjones: End-to-end application security

Biography: Ronny Bjones works for Microsoft EMEA headquarters, in the trustworthy computing team, as security program manager. He has 20 years experience in ICT. Since 89 he has been active in the field of Information Security doing large projects for the European Central banks, Police forces, big financial institutes, European Commission, etc. Ronny Bjones was one of the four founders of Utimaco Belgium, where he work ten years as R&D director. Before Utimaco Ronny worked for a Belgian EFT specialist called Prodata and one of the first firms to specialize in cryptography in Europe called Cryptech. Ronny Bjones is an active speaker on conferences and acts as auditor for government sponsored projects.

Abstract: Security should be a standard part of each design/development process. How is security integrated into the product release process within Microsoft? One of the key models used within Microsoft during the security reviews is the STRIDE model. This presentation will explain the model and how it can be applied during the design phase. We are currently reaching out to the community to see how STRIDE could be applied more widely and also on the scale of smaller development teams. The current ideas how this can be done, will be shared with the audience.

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Alex Laxos: Microsoft data access current and future. Importing and exporting Data from SQL Server as XML and an introduction to ObjectSpaces

Biography: Alex Laskos is a Lead Program Manager in the WebData group at Microsoft, Redmond USA. Alex works on the mapping technologies that the next release of the SQLXML and ObjectSpaces are built on.

Alex has 12 years experience in building applications ranging from large scale business critical applications through to applications to aid scientific research.

Alex graduated from the University of Melbourne with degrees in Science (Physics & Mathematics) and Electrical & Electronic Engineering. Alex continued his involvement in the Physics department and built software to simulate a microprobe and allow the exploration of microprobe data by researchers.

Abstract: SqlXml is a mapping technology that first shipped in SQL 2000 and enables users to create an updateable Xml view over the relational schema. This session will show you how easy it is to treat the database as an origination or destination point of Xml. Moving forward Microsofts mapping technology will be extended to enable creating object views as well as Xml views over the database. This will use a common schema-based programming model. This technology decreases the coding effort required to load and save XML and Objects from the database and helps build flexible applications.

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Peter Drayton: SSCLI in depth

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Erik Meijer: C# 2.0

Biography: You might know me as the "Head In The Box" from the wildly popular VBTV show, as "Professor ILDasm" from a series that never went beyond the first pilot episode, but my real job is technical lead in the WebData group at Microsoft. Prior to joining Microsoft I was an associate professor at Utrecht University and adjunct professor at the Oregon Graduate Institute in Portland. I am one of the proud designers of the standard lazy functional programming language Haskell98.

My holy grail is to hide complicated mechanisms behind simple abstractions. Programming languages are an ideal medium to achieve this, and I am continuously looking for widely used APIs and often occurring programming pattern boilerplate to promote into first class language features. Currently my targets are XML and SQL, and asynchronous concurrent programming.

Abstract: In "Whidbey", the Visual C# language will be extended with a variety of constructs across a broad spectrum of research and industry languages. These new features include generics for improved code reuse (designed and implemented by Microsoft Research Cambridge), iterators to simplify implementation of enumerator patterns, and anonymous methods to ease working with delegates, and partial types to simplify development and code maintenance.

Presentation Slides

Nat Ballou: The Storage User Experience in Windows Longhorn

Biography: Nat Ballou is currently a software architect in the Windows Client division. Nat has held various, senior positions at Microsoft prior to his current position, including group program manager with the Exchange and SQL Server product teams. Nat also worked on the Microsoft Commercial Internet System (MCIS) and several MSN releases. Prior to Microsoft, Nat worked with AT&T and Digital Equipment Corporation for 12 years. Nat has published numerous articles in various technical journals and publications, and holds a BS and MS in Computer Science.

Abstract: As hard drives grow ever larger, and new data types like digital music and photos proliferate, traditional file systems dont do enough to help users deal with their data. Windows Longhorn provides a new user experience for organizing, searching, and sharing data, based on a new storage system derived from both file system and database technologies. Learn about Microsoft's approach and the philosophy that motivated these exciting enhancements.

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Natasa Milic-Frayling: WWW Challenges: Publishing, Searching, and Browsing the Web

Biography: Natasa Milic-Frayling is a researcher at Microsoft Research, Cambridge, working on technology development and prototype design of advanced information management systems. Most of her recent work has been in information persistence, organization, and access in the Web environment.

Prior to joining Microsoft Research, Cambridge in June 1998, Natasa was working at Claritech Corporation (currently Clairvoyance Corporation), a spin-off company from Carnegie Mellon University, focused on developing CLARIT System, a comprehensive toolkit for building commercial information management applications. There she served as Director of Research.

Natasa has published and presented her work in Machine Learning, Information Retrieval, and Web related conferences. In collaboration with her fellow researchers she has organized a number of Workshops that attracted experts in text mining, information retrieval, natural language processing and related areas of research. Her published and on-going work spans a range of topics from algorithm design to complete prototype system development and usability studies, reflecting her versatile interest.

Natasa obtained her B.S. in Applied Mathematics from University of Zagreb, Croatia in 1984 and Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA in 1988.

Abstract: The World Wide Web is a large scale, highly distributed and dynamic information environment that is accessed by users through a variety of devices. This poses many challenges for designers of Web information services and applications. Addressing these challenges requires full awareness of the nature of the Web and understanding of the impact it has on the design and usability. In this presentation we focus on issues that are relevant for the design of browser interfaces for the desktop and mobile devices.
We consider three important Web characteristics: (1) disassociation between information requests aimed at information services and delivery of documents, (2) separation of document authoring from generation of metadata needed by information services, such as searchable indices, and (3) lack of a standard and flexible document format for document viewing on devices with different display specifications. We show how these can be addressed by a mixed strategy of enhancing the client and changing the publishing practices on the Web. We present demos of the client enhancements and architecture for creating, delivering, and exploiting metadata about the Web content.

Damien Watkins:  SSCLI: Past, Present and Future

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Prof Peter Wentworth: Web Services and ADO.NET Makes It Easier...

Biography: Peter Wentworth is a Professor and former Head of Department of the Computer Science Department at Rhodes University, South Africa. He actively promotes .NET technologies in the research and teaching programs. He is also a founding director of a software company linked to the University that is delivering .NET-based software into the international marketplace.

Abstract: Designing systems as a collection of Web-based Services, and the new ADO.NET data access model changes the way we build distributed services, and the way we interact with our databases. These changes are filtering down into our teaching.

This talk will show some hands-on demonstrations of how to build a web service, how to build a client, and how to work with the new style of data access, and will discuss how some of these building blocks underpin some Web Service activity at Rhodes University.

Presentation Slides