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Time

Room

Description

8:00–8:50

Continental breakfast

9:00–10:00

Kodiak

Microsoft Research: An Overview of Projects
Daniel T. Ling, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Research
Johnson Apacible, Microsoft Research
Susan Dumais, Microsoft Research
Ken Hinckley, Microsoft Research
Nebojsa Jojic, Microsoft Research
Shaz Qadeer, Microsoft Research

Webcast: Microsoft Research: An Overview of Projects

Presentation: A Snapshot of Microsoft Research: 2005 (Daniel T. Ling)

10:00–1:00

McKinley

DemoFest
DemoFest provides an opportunity for leading academic researcher to see a sampling of exciting results from Microsoft Research. This unique three-hour event also gives faculty a chance to talk one on one with the Microsoft researchers and to see a few of the sponsored research projects from the University Relations group.

11:45–12:00

Box Lunch Pickup

12:00–1:00

Lunch and Brown Bag Sessions

Cascade

Innovations in Teaching OS Concepts by Using Native Windows
Dave Probert, Microsoft; Arkady Retik, Microsoft

Want to integrate Windows kernel internals into your Operating Systems (OS) courses? Do your students want more real-world illustration of the principles being taught? Looking for better concept-to-effort ratio for OS projects? This brown bag session introduces new academic instructional material and resources to support teaching operating system concepts using Microsoft Windows XP. In particular, the talk will focus on the Windows OS Internals Curriculum Development Kit (CDK), freely available to supplement OS lectures with Windows kernel illustrations, and a novel environment for low-level OS projects (code named ProjectOZ) which leverages the native Windows layer to simplify OS experimentation for teaching and research.

Webcast: Innovations in Teaching OS Concepts by Using Native Windows

Presentation: Innovations in Teaching OS Concepts Using Native Windows (Arkady Retik, Dave Probert)

Rainier

Gaming for Computer Science Instruction
John Nordlinger, Microsoft Research; Josh Yelon, Carnegie Mellon University

This brown bag session focuses on computer gaming concepts and assets to enhance the declining interest in computer science. John and Josh will discuss current trends in gaming and academia and provide examples from CMU, which includes a supporting NSF paper that shows the power of a virtual environment (ALICE) to entice CS students to do better and stay in class. (Talk will include a demo of ALICE.)

Webcast: Gaming for Computer Science Instruction

Presentation: Using Computer Gaming to Enhance Computer Science (John Nordlinger)

St. Helens

Creating the Personal Supercomputer
Kyril Faenov, Microsoft

As computing power has increased, so have the complexities of our computer simulations. We’re at a point now where many scientists, engineers, and researchers are hitting the upper limit of their high-end workstations, further driving the need for supercomputing resources. Microsoft’s goal in entering the high-performance computing space is to enable what we call “personal supercomputing,” which sounds like an oxymoron. What we want to do is move supercomputing resources out of distant labs and bring them closer to the people that use those resources. In most cases it would be a workgroup sized system with 32 or 64 nodes, but in the most extreme case, the personal supercomputing case, it would mean a small 4-8 node cluster sitting in a scientist’s office running off 15-Amp wall power. Come hear why we think this is the direction of supercomputing and how we’ll make it a reality.

Webcast: Creating the Personal Supercomputer

Presentation: The Microsoft Perspective on Where High Performance Computing is Heading (Kyril Faenov)

Baker

University and Industry Collaborations
Ken Leppert, Microsoft

Microsoft Research engages with the academic research community in a number of ways. This session will focus on the legal and other issues raised by these partnerships and suggest guidelines for ensuring that they are successful. There will be an open discussion about engaging with industry in general, and the presenter will answer questions about engaging with Microsoft in particular.

University and Industry Collaborations

Presentation: University and Industry Collaborations (Ken Leppert)

1:00–2:15

Break-out Sessions

Cascade

Mobile Device Futures: The New Windows Mobile 5.0 Platform
Neil Enns, Microsoft; Nishan Jebanasam, Microsoft; Larry Lieberman, Microsoft

Mobile computing has been an extremely hot research area in recent years. Microsoft recently unveiled the new Windows Mobile 5.0 platform, with significant architectural updates and enhanced APIs to enable current trends in mobile software development. This session will feature technical leads from the Windows Mobile and Visual Studio group to discuss features of Visual Studio 2005, .NET Compact Framework 2.0, SqlMobile 3.0 that are relevant to applications in academic mobile device research.

Webcast: Mobile Device Futures: The New Windows Mobile 5.0 Platform

Presentations:
Windows Mobile 5.0—New Features for Developers (Larry Lieberman)
Native Device Development in Visual Studio 2005 (Nishan Jebanasam)

Rainier

Smart Clients in Action
Rob Barker, Microsoft; Dan Fay, Microsoft Research; Patrick Hogan, NASA; Greg Quinn, University of California at San Diego

Smart clients are easily deployed, managed client applications that provide an adaptive, responsive, and rich interactive experience by leveraging local resources and intelligently connecting to distributed data sources. See how smart clients can change how users interact and manipulate data by using Web services. This session will describe the Collaboration Notebook Project and the NASA World Wind application.

The Collaboration Notebook application is being developed by the Desktop and Mobile Data Management/Visualization Group at the San Diego Supercomputer Center to assist researchers and knowledge workers manage the large amounts of data they need to handle on a daily basis. The application is a development framework that provides third-party developers with resources and APIs to create powerful data manipulation applications. This session will provide an overview of the Collaboration Notebook’s functionality and describe how it can be used to develop Smart Client-type applications.

For more information about Smart Client development, see MSDN Smart Client Developer Center.

Webcast: Smart Clients in Action

Presentations:
Smart Clients in Action (Rob Barker)
NASA World Wind Planetary Visualization Tool (Patrick Hogan)
Creating Smart Clients with the Collaboration Notebook (Greg Quinn)

St. Helens

Designing Novel Visualization and Interaction Techniques That Scale from Small to Jumbo Displays
Mary Czerwinski, Microsoft Research

An important research goal for our community is to design effective visualization and interaction techniques that span the full spectrum of devices and displays. We have been studying how end users actually interact with user interface elements on small to very large displays, with an eye toward important opportunities for innovation and redesign. We have observed that many user interface designs do not scale well to the available screen real estate. Windows can be hard to access on very small or very large display configurations. Windows management becomes more problematic for display sizes at the ends of the continuum and windows are often improperly sized for their contents or the available screen real estate. Very small displays are often hard to navigate and do not typically provide useful overviews. To address these issues, our research group has worked to position and scale the presentation of a user’s information clusters appropriately for the real estate and devices available. I will provide an overview of a few of our solutions for how to make important content available and easy to interact with on any device and on any surface. This is an area of human-computer interaction research that is ripe for investigation, and I hope to challenge and inspire others to explore it—hardware advances often drive innovation in software user interface design.

Webcast: Designing Novel Visualization and Interaction Techniques That Scale from Small to Jumbo Displays

Presentation: Novel Visualization and Interaction for Small to Jumbo Displays (Mary Czerwinski)

Baker

Buffer Overruns
Jon Pincus, Microsoft Research

Simple answers to eradicating buffer overruns range from “get better developers” to “use non-executable stacks and heaps" to “don’t use standard string libraries.” Unfortunately, these “solutions” take an inherently complicated problem and try to propose silver bullets that aren’t sufficient. This talk will look at taxonomies for buffer overruns that go beyond just “stack” and “heap,” as well as explore real-world techniques for preventing and detecting vulnerabilities both when code is created and during the development and QA process. It will also focus on approaches to mitigating the exploitation of vulnerabilities at system runtime—and how new categories of exploits defeat those mitigations.

Webcast: Buffer Overruns

Presentation: Buffer Overruns (Jon Pincus)

Hood

Gaming Technologies
John Nordlinger, Microsoft Research; Craig Peeper, Microsoft; Peter-Pike Sloan, Microsoft

This talk will discuss how the multiple targets (consoles, PDA, and PCs), larger worlds, larger teams, and new trends make writing today’s games ever more challenging. We cover how the next generation of the graphics stack has been designed to address these issues. We briefly discuss and demo precomputed radiance transfer, a technique that has migrated from the research community into the DirectX API. These issues provide a rich opportunity for computer science instruction and research.

Webcast: Gaming Technologies

Presentations:
Gaming Technologies (Craig Peeper)
Precomputed Radiance Transfer (Peter-Pike Sloan)

Sonora

Pen Computing, Digital Ink, and Research for the Tablet PC
François Guimbretière, University of Maryland; Ken Hinckley, Microsoft Research; Hod Lipson, Cornell University

Digital Ink is a new, rich data type linked to a powerful underlying Tablet PC API that enables many functions previously difficult, impossible, or simply unavailable to computer users. The applications and research directions examined in this session represent the latest thinking and efforts to reduce the gap between the digital world and the paper world, open up entirely new metaphors for expression and gestures for collaboration, and provide innovative 3D drawing paradigms, among other capabilities.

Ken Hinckley and François Guimbretière will discuss a number projects they have worked on both separately and in collaboration together. These include but are not limited to: Stich, an interaction test bed for discovering rapid and intuitive interaction techniques for pen-enabled computing in which they use gestures to enable file sharing as well as a number of other activities, and Scriboli, which proposes the fundamental building blocks of a grammar for pen input by linking together object, verb, and indirect object in fast fluid, unambiguous commands. They will also cover other projects such as PapierCraft and HoverWidgets, and the latest work with CrossY, a crossing-based drawing application.

Hod will demo his very powerful, intuitive, and stunningly easy to use design tool, 3D Accelerator, which enables a robust array of capabilities for designing three dimensional objects, and which allows rapid, intuitive prototyping of design ideas that can then be reality-tested, interactively and in real time.

Webcast: Pen Computing, Digital Ink, and Research for the Tablet PC

Presentations:
People, Pens, and Computers (François Guimbretière, Ken Hinckley)
Scriboli: High Performance Pen Interfaces (Ken Hinckley, Patrick Baudisch, Gonzalo Ramos, François Guimbretière)

1:00–3:00

Kodiak

Design Expo
The Design Expo is a Microsoft Research forum where the top graduate design institutions showcase their prototype interaction design ideas. Microsoft Research sponsors a semester long class at six interdisciplinary leading design schools and invites the top class projects to present their ideas as part of the Faculty Summit. This years topic is “time.” Future interaction concepts will illustrate how people want and need better access to various time facets of their life and how they best want to share this with others will be demonstrated. Concept prototypes, visual and industrial designs, supported with ethnographic results will be included in their media based presentations. This year’s schools include participants from NYU, RISD, UCLA, Brazil, Delft, and Sweden with a breadth of social and cultural aspects. Prototypes showing social, shared, scalable, worn, and circular designs will be shown for use by families and friends in a variety of environments. These will be illustrated in crafted media-rich presentations.

Webcast: Design Expo

2:15–2:30

Break

2:30–3:45

Break-out Sessions

Cascade

Extended Computing Through Mobile Devices
Steve Glener, Microsoft Research; Brad Myers, Carnegie Mellon University; Jian Wang, Microsoft Research

Over the past decade, the ecosystem of computing hardware has expanded far beyond the desktop and now includes a wide array of devices that define users’ ever-expanding digital lifestyle. This session will showcase several research projects that explore ways that mobile devices can work together with desktop computers, servers, and consumer electronics to enable new scenarios of use. Researcher Jian Wang from Microsoft Research Asia will demo projects that explore pen-and-paper computing (not Tablet PC), while Steve Glenner from Microsoft Research Redmond will show a phone-based media browser for content stored on the user’s desktop computer. The session will close with a vision of future potential research directions provided by Professor Brad Myers.

Webcast: Extended Computing Through Mobile Devices

Presentations:
Visions for Mobile Devices Beyond Their Current Role (Brad Myers)
Reinventing Printed Document (Jian Wang)

Rainier

Future of Scientific Computing Panel
Fran Berman, University of California at San Diego; Jay Boisseau, University of Texas at Austin; Dave Lifka, Cornell Theory Center; Marvin Theimer, Microsoft

Hear from leaders of three supercomputer centers where scientific computing is going in the next 5–10 years and how computer science technologies can help change scientific research.

Webcast: Future of Scientific Computing Panel

Presentations:
The Future of Scientific Computing (Fran Berman)
Future of Scientific Computing (Dave Lifka)
Future of Scientific Computing (Marvin Theimer)

St. Helens

The Digital Memories (Memex) Research Kit and Research Opportunities
Jim Gemmell, Microsoft Research; Ken Wood, Microsoft Research

Building on Vannevar Bush’s “memex” vision, the Digital Memories (Memex) research kit gives a jump-start to perform research around storing all of an individual’s lifetime information, novel capture methods (for example, Bush’s head-worn stereo camera), linking of information, and use of meta-data. The Digital Memories (Memex) research kit includes a SenseCam, a camera enhanced by sensors to automatically take pictures at “good” times and a software package that includes collaboration with the Microsoft Research MyLifeBits, VIBE, and Phlat groups. It has database storage for many types of objects, and it supports capture of files, Web pages, IM chat sessions, e-mail, GPS, and SenseCam. It has logging software to track window, keyboard, and mouse activity that can simplify user testing as well as providing useful information for the user. It is easy to plug new visualizations into the Memex shell or to build new applications that directly access the database.

Webcast: The Digital Memories (Memex) Research Kit and Research Opportunities

Presentation: Digital Memories (Memex) (Jim Gemmell, Ken Wood)

Baker

Digital Inclusions: Connections Through Innovations
Akhtar Badshah, Microsoft; Victor Bahl, Microsoft Research; Todd Needham, Microsoft Research

Innovation in the use of information technology is happening in ways we can’t imagine. There are countless examples of people around the world acquiring basic technical skills and then using technology in ways developers never dreamt. The question for us is how do we support these innovations and make technology that helps people reach their full potential? The community where this innovation takes place is where businesses, corporations and the non-profit sector can and should come together.

Webcast: Digital Inclusions: Connections Through Innovations

Presentations:
Connections Through Innovation (Akhtar Badshah)
Connections Through Innovations (Victor Bahl)

Hood

Building with Source: Using Microsoft Visual C++ and Other Tools to Create Custom Games Based on the Half-Life 2 Engine
Ken Birdwell, Valve; Mike Dussault, Valve; Chris Green, Valve; Brian Keller, Microsoft; John Nordlinger, Microsoft Research; Bay Raitt, Valve

Valve Software, makers of the wildly popular Half-Life series of video games, will present an overview of the Source engine used in the development of Half-Life 2 and explain how you can use this engine within your classroom experience to teach video game development concepts. The talk includes a brief history of the mod scene and how it grew during Half-Life’s lifetime, a tour and explanation of the primary technical features and tools Valve developed for Half-Life, and an overview of academic licensing for Half-Life 2 and Visual C++.

Webcast: Building with Source: Using Microsoft Visual C++ and Other Tools to Create Custom Games Based on the Half-Life 2 Engine

Sonora

Classroom Presenter: Hands-on Lab
Richard Anderson, University of Washington; Chris Moffatt, Microsoft Research

Classroom Presenter is a Tablet PC–based classroom interaction system built on the ConferenceXP research platform. Classroom Presenter supports active learning in the classroom by distributing exercises to students on slides, which the students answer on their tablets and send back to the instructor. The instructor can review the slides to evaluate student understanding and selectively display the slides on the public display to incorporate student work into class discussion. This demo will give audience members an opportunity to play the role of the students in a technology supported classroom.

Webcast: Classroom Presenter: Hands-on Lab

Presentation: Classroom Presenter: Using Tablet PCs to Promote Classroom Interaction (Richard Anderson)

3:45–4:00

Break

4:00–5:00

Kodiak

The Future of Technology
Craig Mundie, Senior Vice President, Chief Technical Officer, Advanced Strategies and Policy, Microsoft

5:15–7:00

Dinner, Company Visitor Center (Microsoft Museum and Microsoft Company Store)