9:00–9:30

10:45–12:15 

Future Web: Intelligence, Ubiquity, and Trust

Bing Dialog Model: Intent, Knowledge, and User Interaction

Session Chair: Evelyne Viegas, Microsoft Research

Yu-Ting Kuo, Microsoft; Harry Shum, Microsoft; Kuansan Wang, Microsoft Research

With Internet users growing ever more sophisticated, the decade-old search outcomes, manifested in the “ten blue links,” are no longer sufficient. Many studies have shown that when users are ushered off the conventional search result pages, their needs are often only partially met. To tackle this challenge, we optimize Bing, Microsoft’s decision engine, to not just navigate users to a landing page through a blue link but to continue engaging with users to facilitate task completion. Underlying this new paradigm is the Bing Dialog Model that consists of three building blocks: an indexing system that systematically and comprehensively harvests task knowledge from the web, an intent model that statistically infers and matches users’ needs to the task knowledge, and an interaction model that elicits user intents through mathematically optimized presentations. In this talk, I’ll describe Bing Dialog Model in details and demonstrate it in action through the innovative features recently introduced in Bing.

Special Topics

Cutting Edge Education Update—Jesse Schell, Carnegie Mellon University; Andrew Phelps, Rochester Institute of Technology

Jesse Schell talked about exciting trends in both technology and culture that define the 21^st century: things are becoming more beautiful, more customized, more shared, and more authentic. But is the same true for education? Jesse shows examples of how it is beginning to happen (such as achievement systems, connecting with Andy’s talk), but that there is a long way to go, and to fully realize this vision, some significant technology driven educational revolution is necessary.

 

Andrew Phelps discussed curricular trends in the Department of Interactive Games & Media at RIT, and in particular a set of initiatives that the department is planning around achievement systems, social networks, and student culture. Game design offers us lessons in the success of such systems in a certain context, but also comes replete with dramatic failures, relevant warnings, and a few emerging best practices. Can these systems be utilized in an educational setting, and even if they can, should they? Could these tools be utilized towards goals of curricular customization and student engagement? This portion of the talk focused on the preparations, planning, and thoughts of the IGM faculty as they begin to establish a research agenda in this space—what can we hope to learn?

 

After these brief presentations, Jesse and Andy engaged the audience in further discussion about how technology, design, and cultural changes can best be applied to the future of education.

12:15–1:15  

Design Mind + Engineering Mind: Secrets to Designing Compelling Product Experiences—Surya Vanka, Microsoft

Today, the nature of products is changing fast. Most products from phones to appliances to automobiles are a combination of software and services encased in hardware. These products are novel, dynamic, and content-laden. Their interaction often spans multiple platforms (hardware, application, web), multiple form factors (desktop, mobile, television) and multiple interfaces (keyboard, pointer, voice, touch, gesture). How do you make sure that it is real human needs and not the multitude of technologies that shape the experience of these products? In this talk, Surya Vanka described how breakthrough product experiences are created at Microsoft by employing a combination of the design mind and the engineering mind. The design mind’s ability to leapfrog established patterns and paradigms, and the engineering mind’s ability to optimize and actualize, are the foundations of great individual and team processes. Surya shared principles, practices, collaborations, and thoughts on organizational culture.

Memento: Time Travel for the Web—Michael L. Nelson, Old Dominion University 

The web is ephemeral. Many resources have representations that change over time, and many of those representations are lost forever. A lucky few manage to reappear as archived resources that carry their own URIs. For example, some content management systems maintain version pages that reflect a frozen prior state of their changing resources. Archives recurrently crawl the web to obtain the actual representation of resources, and subsequently make those available via special-purpose archived resources. In both cases, the archival copies have URIs that are protocol-wise disconnected from the URI of the resource of which they represent a prior state. Indeed, the lack of temporal capabilities in HTTP prevents getting to an archived resource on the basis of the URI of its original. This turns accessing archived resources into a significant discovery challenge for both human and software agents, which typically involves following a multitude of links from the original to the archival resource, or of searching archives for the original URI. The Memento solution is based on existing HTTP capabilities applied in a novel way to add the temporal dimension. The result is an inter-archive framework in which archived resources can seamlessly be reached via their original URI: protocol-based time travel for the web.

Natural User Interaction

Beneath the Surface—Introduction—Daniel Wigdor, Microsoft

The notion of a “Natural” user interface is a well-defined design goal, which can be targeted, built towards, tested, and used to evaluate to enable iteration. In this presentation, I describe some of the misunderstandings of this goal, with a particular emphasis on the notion that it is a means, rather than a goal for design. I also describe some of the work done on the Surface team to better define it and utilize it as a tool to achieve good design.
 

Beneath the Surface Projects—Mark Bolas, University of Southern California; Steve Feiner, Columbia University

Professor Feiner presented recent work performed by the Computer Graphics and User Interfaces Lab at Columbia University for the Beneath the Surface project sponsored by Microsoft Research.

 

Professor Bolas presented recent work performed by the USC Interactive Media Division for the Beneath the Surface project, with focus toward Creative Production Environments, sponsored by Microsoft Research.

Future Web: Intelligence, Ubiquity, and Trust

Privacy and Trust in Future Web

Session Chair: Evelyne Viegas, Microsoft Research

This session describes work on providing privacy guarantees for dynamically changing data and addresses how to deliver end-to-end trust.

Privacy of Dynamic Data: Continual Observation and Pan Privacy—Moni Naor, Weizmann Institute of Science

Research in the area of privacy of data analysis has been flourishing recently, with the rigorous notion of differential privacy defining the desired level of privacy as well as sanitizing algorithms matching the definition for many problems. Most of the work in the area assumes that the data to be sanitized is fixed. However, many applications of data analysis involve computations of changing data, either because the entire goal is one of monitoring, e.g., of traffic conditions, search trends, or incidence of influenza, or because the goal is some kind of adaptive optimization, e.g., placement of data to minimize access costs. Issues that arise when providing guarantees for dynamically changing data include:

• How to provide privacy even when the algorithm has to constantly output the current value of some function of the data (Continual Observation).
• How to assure privacy even when the internal state of the sanitizer may be leaked. This is called Pan Privacy. We aim to design algorithms that never store sensitive information about individuals, so in particular collectors of confidential data cannot be pressured to permit data to be used for purposes other than that for which they were collected.

(Based on joint papers with Cynthia Dwork, Toni Pitassi, Guy Rothblum, and Sergey Yekhanin.)

 

Delivering End to End Trust: Challenges, Approaches, Opportunities—Jeffrey Friedberg, Microsoft

As people, businesses, and governments connect online, new valuable targets are created spawning greater cybercrime. How can we reduce the risk and increase accountability while preserving other values we cherish such as personal freedoms and anonymity? What building blocks are needed? What are the biggest gaps? The latest efforts to address this challenge was discussed. Research into improving the usability of privacy and security features was also presented.

Special Topics

Computational Science Research in Latin America

Session Chair: Jaime Puente, Microsoft Research

Carlos Alfredo Joly Universidade Estadual de Campinas; Ricardo Vencio, Universidade de São Paulo; Celso Von Randow, Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais

SinBIOTA 2.0: New Challenges for a Biodiversity Information System—Carlos Alfredo Joly Universidade Estadual de Campinas

In the last three decades. many initiatives have been developed aiming to fill gaps in global knowledge about biodiversity and to facilitate access to data. The Catalogue of Life, that is becoming a comprehensive catalogue of all known species of organisms on Earth has now 1.1 million species registered, GBIF—The Global Biodiversity Information Facility, provides up till now access to 190 million species occurrence records. However this global initiatives lack specific tools and applications to assist decision makers, and the current rate of species extinction is far from reducing as aimed by the Convention on Biological Diversity with the 2010 targets (http://www.cbd.int/2010-target/about.shtml).

 

In March 1999, the State of Sao Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) launched the Research Program on Characterization, Conservation, Restoration, and Sustainable Use of the Biodiversity of the State of Sao Paulo, also known as “BIOTA/FAPESP: The Virtual Institute of Biodiversity (www.biota.org.br).

 

SinBiota, the Environmental Information System of the BIOTA/FAPESP Program, was developed to store information generated by researchers involved with the program. In addition, the system integrates this information with a digital cartographic base, thus providing a mechanism for disseminating relevant data on Sao Paulo State's biodiversity to the scientific community, educators, governmental agencies, and other decision and policy makers.

 

Between 2006 and 2008, BIOTA-FAPESP researchers made a concerted effort to synthesize data for use in public-policy-making. Scientists worked with the state secretary of the environment and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) such as Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy, and the World Wildlife Fund. The synthesis was based on more than 151,000 records of 9405 species (table S1), as well as landscape structural parameters and biological indices from over 92,000 fragments of native vegetation. Two synthesis maps, identifying priority areas biodiversity conservation and restoration, together with other detailed data and guidelines have been adopted by São Paulo state as the legal framework for improving public policies on biodiversity conservation and restoration, such as prioritizing areas for forest restoration (as one means of reconnecting fragments of native vegetation) and selecting areas for new Conservation Units. There are four governmental decrees and 11 resolutions that quote the BIOTA-FAPESP guidelines.

 

In June 2009, more than 300 scientists and students associated the BIOTA/FAPESP Program or to biodiversity in general, discussed priorities and an agenda for the next ten years of the Program. As a result, a Science Plan & Strategies document was drafted, revising the goals of the original proposal. Furthermore, 10 critical points have been elected as top priorities for the next ten years, and one of them is the evolution of the SinBiota information system.

 

In December 2009, FAPESP approved the new Science Plan & Strategies document, renewing its support to the Program up to 2020 (available at http://www.fapesp.br/biota/10scienceplan.pdf)

 

In a project funded by Microsoft Research and FAPESP, we are developing the new Biodiversity Information System SinBiota 2.0 that will incorporate new tools and interfaces, aiming to fulfill the expectations of the research community and decision makers in the next 10 years. It might also be used as template for other regions and for the Brazilian SISBIOTA planed by the National Research Council/CNPq.

Information Technology Applied to Bioenergy Genomics—Ricardo Vencio, Universidade de São Paulo

There is no doubt that one of the greatest challenges to mankind on this century is energy production. For geopolitical, economical and, most pressing, environmental reasons, no ordinary form of energy production is the solution, making renewable and environmentally-friendly options mandatory. All major global economies are organizing themselves to tackle this issue and Brazil is no exception. Since it is recognized that biofuels may be part of the solution to such pressing problem, São Paulo State, the main biofuel producer in Brazil, launched an aggressive research program called BIOEN - FAPESP Program for Research on Bioenergy. There are several scientific and technological goals in this program related to environmental impacts, social impacts, next-generation fuels, production technology and so on. 

 

Network of Environmental Sensors in Tropical Rainforests—Celso Von Randow, Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais

The interaction between the Earth’s atmosphere and the terrestrial biosphere plays a fundamental role in the climate system and in biogeochemical and hydrological cycles, through the exchange of energy and mass (for example, water and carbon), between the vegetation and the atmospheric boundary layer, and the main focus of many environmental studies is to quantify this exchange over several terrestrial biomes.

 

Over natural surfaces like the tropical forests, factors like spatial variations in topography or in the vegetation cover can significantly affect the air flow and pose big challenges for the monitoring of the regional carbon budget of terrestrial biomes. It is hardly possible to understand the air flow and reduce the uncertainties of flux measurements in complex terrains like tropical forests without an approach that recognizes the complexity of the spatial variability of the environmental variables.

 

With this motivation, a partnership involving Microsoft Research, Johns Hopkins University, University of São Paulo and Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (INPE, the Brazilian national institute for space research) has been developing research activities to test the use of prototypes of environmental sensors (geosensors) in the Atlantic coastal and in the Amazonian rain forests in Brazil, forming sensor networks with high spatial and temporal resolution, and to develop software tools for data quality control and integration. The main premise is that the geosensors should have relatively low cost, what enables the formation of monitoring networks with a large number of sensors spatially distributed.

 

Envisioning a possible wide deployment of geosensors in Amazonia in the future, the team is currently working on three main components: 1) assembly and calibration of prototypes of geosensors of air temperature and humidity, with reproductive and reliable ceramic sensor elements that will adequately operate under the environmental conditions observed in the tropics; 2) development of software tools for management, quality control, visualization and integration of data collected in geosensor networks; and 3) planning of an experimental campaign, with the installation of the first tens to hundreds of sensors in an Amazonian forest site, aiming at a pilot test of the system to study the spatial variability of temperature and humidity within and above the rainforest canopy.

2:45–4:15

Natural User Interaction

A Whole NUI World: A New Fantastic Point of View

Session Chair: Desney Tan, Microsoft Research

Scott Hudson, Carnegie Mellon University; Johnny Lee, Microsoft; Michael Medlock, Microsoft; Dan Morris, Microsoft Research; Daniel Wigdor, Microsoft Research

Scott Hudson, Carnegie Mellon University

Rich new sensors are noisier than the more mature and highly focused input devices we are used to working with. Further, the recognition needed to deal with rich new classes of user actions introduces additional uncertainty. (Really good recognizers are wrong 1 in 20 times!) Technology in these areas may progress. But even if we were to somehow make these technologies nearly perfect tomorrow, human behavior is full of ambiguity. And, while we sometimes think of that ambiguity as a kind of flaw, in fact it often serves important, sometimes vital purposes in human-to-human interaction. So if you want to think seriously about “natural” interaction then you inevitably must deal with ambiguity and uncertainty. In this presentation I talk briefly about the challenges and directions for new research that this perspective implies.

 

Johnny Lee, Microsoft

Thanks to Moore’s Law, the form factors of computing devices today are dominated by the interface hardware. The computing industry has also identified it as a major product differentiating feature. However, the notion that there will be a broad reaching new interface technology that will alter the way we interact with all computing is a counter-productive myth. As specialized and diverse devices become increasingly economical to produce, the interfaces will also become increasingly specialized and diverse. What will be intuitive and “natural” is the result of a good pairing between applications and interface capabilities and, ultimately, good design.

Michael Medlock, Microsoft

The folks in this room have made or will make great things. But many of these great things will never see the light of day. Why? There are lots of reasons. I’ll give you some of the reasons that I get to see up close and personal while working on many different kinds of products in a big company like Microsoft. I focus on user experience reasons…but I touch on business and technology reasons too.

Dan Morris, Microsoft Research

 As computing progresses toward being smaller and more readily available in more scenarios, we pay an increasingly high price for the physical devices on which we’ve become dependent for input: buttons, touch screens, etc. We propose that the use of on-body sensors for computer input will allow us to make a critical leap toward always available computing, and in this talk I discuss some of our work in this space. Perhaps even more interesting than input modalities, though, is the implications that “always-available computing” has on the applications we can build. Consequently, I look forward to discussing—with the audience and the panel—the new application spaces we can create as we approach the long-awaited natural user interface.

Daniel Wigdor, Microsoft Research

The notion of a “Natural” user interface is a well-defined design goal, which can be targeted, built towards, tested, and used to evaluate to enable iteration. In this presentation, I describe some of the misunderstandings of this goal, with a particular emphasis on the notion that it is a means, rather than a goal for design. I also describe some of the work done on the Surface team to better define it and utilize it as a tool to achieve good design.

Future Web: Intelligence, Ubiquity, and Trust

Latest Advances in Bing Maps User Experience and Ecosystem—Eyal Ofek, Microsoft; Greg Schechter, Microsoft

Online mapping represents a great opportunity to organize and present an incredible variety of information having spatial characteristics. Come see and hear about where we’re at with Bing Maps here, some of the experiences available, our approach to encouraging third-party application development, and learn more about various technologies in use in Bing Maps. And, of course, lots of demos along the way.

Special Topics

The Future of Reading, Writing + Scholarship—Tara McPherson, University of Southern California; Amit Ray, Rochester Institute of Technology

Tara McPherson, University of Southern California

In her presentation “Animating the Archive: New Modes of Scholarly Publishing,” McPherson examined how scholarly publishing is changing through the development of online multi-media journals that transcend the limitations of print publishing and offer authors more control and wider dissemination of their scholarship. She also discussed a new publishing initiative that links archives, scholars, and presses in a more seamless workflow utilizing a new lightweight platform called Scalar.

Amit Ray, Rochester Institute of Technology

Wikipedia is a collaborative endeavor. No single author can solely determine content. Individuals require the consent of their peers in order to generate, edit and moderate a Wikipedia entry. These dimensions of the text are recorded in both the talk and history pages, where all changes to an entry, as well as discussion about that entry, are archived. As a result, Wikipedia provides a dynamic and continuous written record of human interactions that is historically unprecedented. Until recently, this activity has largely been limited to individual languages.

 

Over the last two years, cross-linguistic activity has burgeoned on Wikipedia. In this talk, I provide a brief overview of how distributed authorship on Wikipedia operates in order to address this emerging translational activity. Currently more than 270 different languages are represented, 94 of which have 10,000 articles or more. Generally speaking, many of these Wikipedia communities are organized, transparent and self-reflexive. As a result, translational activity has increased steadily, enabled by a methodically ordered clearinghouse for human-mediated translation. I analyze these structural features in order to reflect on dimensions of power as they relate to languages and translation. Do cultural flows on Wikipedia resemble those found in other dimensions of transnational culture? In what ways do they differ? To what extent do open access models such as Wikipedia facilitate and/or resist neo-liberal forms of globalization and what are the implications for not only what we read, but how?

4:30–5:30 

6:30–9:00

9:00–10:15 

11:45–12:45

12:45–2:15 

Operating in the Cloud

Cloud Data Center Architectures

Session Chair: Dennis Gannon, Microsoft Research

Dileep Bhandarkar , Microsoft; Yousef Khalidi, Microsoft

Watt Matters in Mega Datacenters?—Dileep Bhandarkar, Microsoft

This presentation provided an overview of emerging datacenter and server challenges and share some best practices that present opportunities for our industry to improve the total cost of ownership and energy efficiency.

Energy efficiency has been a major focus of our industry and members of the Green Grid have made the use of PUE as a useful metric for data center power usage effectiveness. While we believe that PUE is a good metric and we track it in all our datacenters, there is more to achieving energy efficiency. We see rightsizing our servers and optimizing for work done per KW as a more important metric.

 

We look at the Total Cost of Ownership that includes server purchase price, datacenter capital costs, and application specific power consumption, PUE and management costs. Using this holistic approach that that accounts for both server and datacenter designs allows us to achieve the best overall efficiency.

 

Performance per Watt per Dollar is a key metric that we focus our attention on.

 

Cloud Computing—Challenges and Opportunities—Yousef Khalidi, Microsoft

Cloud computing has the well-publicized advantages of reduced costs and increased agility. To reap these benefits, resources are typically allocated from a global large-scale computing infrastructure, highly shared among many applications and customers. This talk starts with an overview of Windows Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, as a concrete example of a large scale highly shared cloud. The talk then presents some of the challenges of cloud computing, including security, evolving applications for cloud computing, and the federation of multiple clouds. The talk explores the tension between, on one hand, the desire for reduced cost and increased agility, and on the other hand, securing applications and their data. The talk also discusses the need to evolve the application model to truly attain the advantages of cloud computing.

Special Topics

NodeXL – Social Network Analysis in Excel—Natasa Milic Frayling, Microsoft Research; Ben Shneiderman, University of Maryland; Marc Smith, Connected Action

Businesses, entrepreneurs, individuals, and government agencies alike are looking to social network analysis (SNA) tools for insight into trends, connections, and fluctuations in social media. Microsoft's NodeXL is a free, open-source SNA plug-in for use with Excel. It provides instant graphical representation of relationships of complex networked data. But it goes further than other SNA tools—NodeXL was developed by a multidisciplinary team of experts that bring together information studies, computer science, sociology, human-computer interaction, and over 20 years of visual analytic theory and information visualization into a simple tool anyone can use. This makes NodeXL of interest not only to end-users but also to researchers and students studying visual and network analytics and their application in the real world. NodeXL has the unique feature that it imports networks from Outlook email, Twitter, flickr, YouTube, WWW, and other sources, plus it offers a rich set of metrics, layouts, and clustering algorithms. This talk describes NodeXL and our efforts to start the Social Media Research Foundation.

Data-Driven Software Engineering

Dynamic Languages and the Browsers of the Future

Session chair: Wolfram Schulte, Microsoft Research

Judith Bishop, Microsoft Research; Steve Lucco, Microsoft; Ben Zorn, Microsoft Research

The Common Language Runtime of the .NET framework was recently extended to enable scripting languages – JavaScript, Lisp, Python, Ruby – to communicate with other infrastructures and services, including Silverlight and COM. This session introduces the DLR and goes on to consider how dynamic languages have enabled today’s Web 2.0 world. Firstly, we explore how real web applications use JavaScript and consider whether benchmarks, such as SunSpider, are representative of actual applications. This comparison is useful in understanding the best ways to design JavaScript engines further empower increasingly important web applications. Surprisingly, until recently, the behavior characteristics of JavaScript programs have not been examined. Then we look at Microsoft’s upcoming offering, IE9 which will feature a new Javascript engine called Chakra. At the latest platform preview release of IE9, Chakra was substantially faster on the Sunspider benchmark than Firefox and was nipping at the heels of Safari 5. We’ll explore some of the technical decisions that make Chakra especially effective at loading Web pages. We’ll also take a look at some details of how the Chakra engine speeds up web applications such as Office Web Word. Finally, we’ll talk about the architecture of the Chakra memory recycler, which supports fast interactive response and simple interoperation with native code.

The Challenge of Large Data

Visualizing a Universe of Data—Walter Alvarez and Roland Saekow, University of California, Berkeley; Curtis Wong, Microsoft Research

 Our knowledge of human history comprises a truly vast data set, much of it in the form of chronological narratives written by humanist scholars and difficult to deal with in quantitative ways. The last 20 years has seen the emergence of a new discipline called Big History, invented by the Australian historian, David Christian, which aims to unify all knowledge of the past into a single field of study. Big History invites humanistic scholars and historical scientists from fields like geology, paleontology, evolutionary biology, astronomy, and cosmology to work together in developing the broadest possible view of the past. Incorporating everything we know about the past into Big History greatly increases the amount of data to be dealt with.

 

Big History is proving to be an excellent framework for designing undergraduate synthesis courses that attract outstanding students. A serious problem in teaching such courses is conveying the vast stretches of time from the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago to the present, and clarifying the wildly different time scales of cosmic history, Earth and life history, human prehistory, and human history. We present “ChronoZoom,” a computer-graphical approach to dealing with this problem of visualizing and understanding time scales, and presenting vast quantities of historical information in a useful way. ChronoZoom is a collaborative effort of the Department of Earth and Planetary Science at UC Berkeley, Microsoft Research, and originally Microsoft Live Labs (http://www.chronozoomtimescale.org/).

 

Our first conception of ChronoZoom was that it should dramatically convey the scales of history, and the first version does in fact do that. To display the scales of history from a single day to the age of the Universe requires the ability to zoom smoothly by a factor of ~10¹³, and doing this with raster graphics was a remarkable achievement of the team at Live Labs. The immense zoom range also allows us to embed virtually limitless amounts of text and graphical information.

 

We are now in the phase of designing the next iteration of ChronoZoom in collaboration with Microsoft Research. One goal will be to have ChronoZoom be useful to students beginning or deepening their study of history. We therefore show a very preliminary version of a ChronoZoom presentation of the human history of Italy designed for students, featuring (1) a hierarchical periodization of Italian history, (2) embedded graphics, and (3) an example of an embedded technical article. This kind of presentation should make it possible for students to browse history, rather than digging it out, bit by bit.

 

At a different academic level, ChronoZoom should allow scholars and scientists to bring together graphically a wide range of data sets from many different disciplines, to search for connections and causal relationships. As an example of this kind of approach, from geology and paleontology, we are inspired by TimeScale Creator (http://www.TSCreator.com).

 

ChronoZoom, by letting us move effortlessly through this enormous wilderness of time, getting used to the differences in scale, should help to break down the time-scale barriers to communication between scholars and scientists, and to make the past at all scales comprehensible as never before.

5:15–5:30