For the last couple of decades, architecture research has been moribund, because people doing it can't build state-of-the art chips. FPGAs offer an alternative to this.

BLEWS uses political blogs to categorize news stories according to their reception in the conservative and liberal blogospheres. It visually represents the number of conservative and liberal blogs that link to a news story, and it indicates the level of emotional charge in the discussions from both political views.

We propose new techniques for manipulating conventional photographs. Uninteresting images are populated with objects or people borrowed from other pictures to create a much more compelling composition. High-quality, automatic color balancing also will be demonstrated.

Microsoft Research Redmond Director Rico Malvar talks about TechFest 2008, happening March 5–6, 2008 at Microsoft Redmond campus, with Channel 9.

Touch is a compelling input modality for interactive devices, but touch input on the small screen of a mobile device is problematic because a user’s fingers occlude the desired graphical elements. Lucid Touch is a mobile-device interface that addresses this limitation by enabling a user to control an application by touching the back of the device.

With thousands of songs stored in our portable devices, such as smart phones and Zunes, selecting songs to hear has become a challenge. Music steering helps us explore and enjoy our personal song collection in a new way.

Today’s UIs treat search as a transient activity, but people often conduct complex, multi-query investigations that span long durations and that are interrupted by other tasks. We will demo three search UIs offering new experiences in persistence and collaboration: SearchBar, SearchTogether, and CoSearch.

The tuple-oriented nature of Language Integrated Query (LINQ) lends itself easily to several recent privacy technologies aimed at preserving the privacy of any tuple in the input; no one should be able to observe the presence or absence of any specific tuple.

We present a real-time algorithm for rendering of smoke under dynamic low-frequency environment lighting. Our algorithm can be implemented easily on a GPU, thus enabling real-time manipulation of viewpoint and lighting, as well as interactive editing of smoke attributes, such as extinction cross section, scattering albedo, and phase function.

Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research, addresses an audience of Microsoft customers and partners, at Microsoft Research TechFest 2008.

We will demonstrate a low-power, low-cost Web-service implementation for devices that must run on batteries for several years, such as smoke detectors and window-break sensors. In particular, we will show a prototype system of WSDL/TCP/IP over a low data rate 802.15.4 radio used in home automation.

Video Collage is a compact representation of video. It uses one automatically synthesized image to summarize the content of a video. Video Collage selects the most representative frames from a video, extracts salient regions of interest (ROI) from these frames, and seamlessly arranges ROIs on a given canvas.

The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a rich visualization environment that functions as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from the best ground- and space-based telescopes in the world to enable seamless, guided explorations of the universe.