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Contents
- Emerging
Markets and Research Partners
- Hardware,
Devices, and Mobile Computing
- Search,
Interaction, and Collaboration
- Software,
Theory, and Security
- Systems,
Networking, and Databases
- UI, Graphics,
and Media
Emerging Markets
and Research Partners
Lingo: Vertical Search Engine for
English Writing
English is the most commonly used language in the
world, but non-native speakers have difficulty in
writing fluent English. We will demo a vertical search
engine for English as Second Language writing. We have
built a search engine to help the users. A large volume
of data―bilingual and monolingual sentences, for
instance―is collected and indexed. With the help of
sentence retrieval, users can get good example sentences
in different domains and different styles. We also will
show our technologies for using a paraphrasing engine
and a machine-translation engine to extend users'
writing styles.
Bilingual Built-ins That Break
Language Barriers
We will present exciting new applications of our
translation technology, showing how machine translation,
integrated into Microsoft’s products, can help eliminate
barriers to worldwide communication and bring users of
diverse cultures closer together. Our demo covers
interesting user scenarios and presents viable solutions
for making cross-language hurdles disappear.
Trident: a Workflow Workbench for
Oceanography
 Science is undergoing a sea change. Instead of the
small, private, periodic data sets currently being used,
large, sophisticated, remote-sensor systems soon will
bring enormous amounts of real-time data to be shared by
multidisciplinary scientists. One such example is
Project Neptune for oceanography. To cope with this
shift from data-poor to data-rich science, new tools are
needed to help scientists work effectively with these
systems and with the enormous amount of data that they
will generate. Trident is a collaborative scientific and
engineering partnership between the University of
Washington, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and Microsoft’s
Technical Computing Initiative to provide Project
Neptune with a scientific-workflow workbench for
oceanography. The Trident workbench is built atop the
Windows Workflow Foundation. Trident enables users to
automate, explore, and visualize data; to compose, run,
and catalog experiments; to create a workflow starter
kit that makes it easy for users to extend the
functionality of Trident; and to learn by exploring and
visualizing ocean and model data. We will illustrate how
Trident can be used to author workflows through a visual
interface, store workflows in a library for easy reuse,
and execute oceanographic workflows to create on-demand
visualizations. Our booth will include posters that
provide context for both the Neptune project and the
Trident workflow workbench.
E-Science: Science in the Cloud
We've been working with a number of collaborators on
a number of different, yet related, eco-science
projects. Common to all of them is helping scientists
cope with the landslide of data available today while
preparing for tomorrow's tsunami generated by ubiquitous
sensors. For smaller sciences, the ability to tap data
in the cloud is ever increasing. The data are more
science-friendly: further from the instruments and
closer to the science. We'll demo
http://www.hydroseek.org (used to find U.S.
Geological Survey, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency,
and other data),
http://www.fluxdata.org (a SharePoint site used by
the global carbon-climate community to access shared
synthesis data),
http://bwc.berkeley.edu/RussianRiver (a data cube
used for hydrologic analysis of the Russian River in
California), and other Internet science assets. We'll
also demo a UI used to plan sensor deployments, not the
simplest thing for scientists to do! All of these have
been developed in conjunction with research partners
such as the University of California, Berkeley, the
University of Virginia, the San Diego Supercomputer
Center, the University of California, Santa Barbara, the
University of Washington, and L’Ecole Parapente du Val
Louron.
BEE3: Revitalizing Architecture
Research
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. We are helping a number of universities sidestep
this problem.
Science for the 21st Century
Epidemics, bioengineering, climate change, species
extinction, cancer―at least one is a major daily news
headline. These are the defining challenges and
opportunities for the 21st century. Addressing them
requires major advances in understanding and integrating
the natural sciences across a wide range of scales, from
molecules, genes, and cells to whole organisms,
ecosystems, and our entire biosphere. New kinds of tools
in computing will prove critical to achieving this goal.
Microsoft Research Cambridge’s computational-science
groups are developing conceptual and technological tools
to create, enable, and accelerate fundamental advances
in these areas. We will present examples of this
research:
- Genes and networks:
Visual Programming of Gene Networks and Biological
Pathways.
- Ecosystems: Autonomous
Monitoring of Vulnerable Ecosystems.
- Biosphere: Exploring
and Analyzing Structures in Global Forest Dynamics;
Visualizing, Modelling and Analyzing Complex
Ecological Networks; and Regional Climate Modelling.
Additionally, we will demonstrate our DISCOVERY
Toolkit concept―a new framework for hosting and running
such models―and two demos from our joint research labs.
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Hardware, Devices,
and Mobile Computing
LucidTouch
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. LucidTouch is a
mobile-device interface that addresses this limitation
by enabling a user to control an application by touching
the back of the device. The key to making this usable is
what we call pseudo-transparency: By overlaying an image
of the user’s hands onto the screen, we create an
illusion of the mobile device itself being
semitransparent. This pseudo-transparency enables users
to acquire targets accurately while not occluding the
screen with their fingers and hand. LucidTouch also
supports multitouch input, giving users an ability to
operate the device simultaneously with all 10 fingers.
We will present initial study results that indicate that
many users found touching on the back preferable to
touching on the front, because of reduced occlusion,
higher precision, and an ability to make multifinger
input.
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Search, Interaction,
and Collaboration
GeoLife: Search Your Life over Maps
GeoLife is a GPS-log-driven application over Web
maps. It focuses on visualization, organization, fast
retrieval, and effective understanding of GPS track logs
for both personal and public use. Given a GPS track log
and associated multimedia data people have created,
GeoLife helps users visualize their personal events on
Web maps and understand their life patterns. By
publishing their GPS tracks, users can share their life
experiences with others and absorb rich knowledge from
others’ GPS tracks. Based on the public data, more
knowledge, such as popular travel routes, popular
places, and traffic conditions, could be mined. Further,
a spatial-temporal search function, which enables a user
to give a spatial range over maps and/or temporal
intervals as a query, is offered in GeoLife to help
people learn effectively about the GPS tracks that
interest them. The search function not only facilitates
people’s ability to get information efficiently from
other people’s life experiences, but also supports each
person’s recall of events. Search maps to reflect on
your past life, and search maps to plan your future
life.
Query-Specific Portals for Search
We have developed a strategy that leverages entities
present in Web documents, such as people, locations, or
products, to enrich users’ search experiences. While
preserving the simple, keyword-based search paradigm, we
enhance the results to include ”super-pages” that
display a ranked list of relevant entities. We exploit
existing structured data to return additional
information about the retrieved entities, such as
categories and attributes. The combination of search
results and structured data creates a portal-like
display of the search results, which the user can refine
further. Our strategy uses a mix of online and offline
techniques to provide efficient functionality for large
data sets. We will present a search interface that
showcases our entity-extraction and -categorization
techniques in the context of people entities in live.com
search.
New Search UIs for Collaboration and Persistence
 We will demo three search UIs offering new
experiences in persistence and collaboration: SearchBar,
SearchTogether, and CoSearch. 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.
SearchBar is a new type of browser history that supports
complex Web investigations by assisting with task
resumption and information re-finding. SearchBar
accomplishes these goals by proactively and persistently
storing query histories, browsing histories, notes, and
ratings in an interrelated fashion. Current UIs also
treat search as a solitary experience, but users often
need to collaborate on searches, such as students
working together on homework or families jointly
planning a vacation. SearchTogether enables groups of
remote users to collaborate on Web search, synchronously
or asynchronously, by providing group query histories,
shared comments and ratings, automatic distribution of
search results, session summaries, and integrated chat.
CoSearch enables groups of collocated users to
collaborate when sharing a single PC, as often occurs in
schools and libraries, by enabling group members to use
their phones as input devices: Users can send text
messages to the computer to queue up query terms and can
use their phones’ joysticks to operate cursors on the PC
to queue up browser tabs for group viewing. Relevant
products: IE, Live, Messenger, Communicator.
BLEWS: What the Blogosphere Tells
You About News
While typical news-aggregation sites do a good job of
clustering news stories according to topic, they leave
the reader without information about which stories
figure prominently in political discourse. BLEWS uses
political blogs to categorize news stories according to
their reception in the conservative and liberal
blogospheres. It visualizes information about which
stories are linked to from conservative and liberal
blogs, and it indicates the level of emotional charge in
the discussion of the news story or topic at hand in
both political camps. BLEWS also offers a “see the view
from the other side” functionality, enabling a reader to
compare different views on the same story from different
sides of the political spectrum. BLEWS achieves this
goal by digesting and analyzing a real-time feed of
political-blog posts provided by the Live Labs Social
Media platform, adding both link analysis and text
analysis of the blog posts.
Salsa: Social Networking for
Business
Salsa is a business-oriented social-networking system
integrated into the user’s Outlook client. E-mail is the
core of online communication for most business users.
Our goal is to create an active, fun, and productive
social network at Microsoft, eventually extending it to
external audiences such as alumni, former interns, and
partners—and to other companies. Enterprise-oriented
social networking typically suffers from a lack of
critical mass, because of the ”closed” nature of the
network and because new communication tools require
learning in an environment already overloaded with
information. Salsa serves as a bridge to many existing
social networks, aggregating and displaying information
from a variety of sources—such as SharePoint, Facebook,
Twitter, Windows Live Messenger, and Office
Communicator—and provides contextual awareness of people
you care about.
C2: Social Networking for the Client
Web 2.0 and social networks give us new models for
sharing, aggregating, and discovering new people and
content. Facebook makes us think of applications and
viral content in new ways. What if the Web could reach
into the desktop and change it? What would we need to do
to the desktop with regard to aggregation, organization,
privacy, and sharing? C2 lets users access data from
across different sources, managing private and public
information. The project features three parts:
aggregation, with a sharing privacy model; user
experience; and a unified model for traditional and
emerging communication tools, such as e-mail, social
networks, and instant messaging.
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Software, Theory,
and Security
Probability and Networks
Early models for the formation of self-organized
networks, such as the Internet and the World Wide Web,
were based on preferential attachment: A new site is
likely to link to existing sites that are already
popular. We analyze refined variants of preferential
attachment that incorporate prior fitness and
competition effects. We also study geometric
representations of disordered networks, where some edges
can become faulty. Finally, we consider matching with
random inputs: Imagine a collection of servers and
clients, located randomly in the plane, that need to
pair up. Different pairing schemes produce markedly
different results; we will compare globally optimal
matching with stable matching, in which individual
agents are autonomous.
Algorithms and E-Commerce
We will consider fundamental problems in
combinatorial optimization with applications in search
and e-commerce, such as the “traveling salesman”
problem, satisfiability, and clustering. These are known
to be hard in the worst case and extremely
time-consuming to solve in practice, even when involving
only a few hundred variables. We analyze new algorithms,
inspired by statistical physics and information theory,
that, in practice, succeed in typical instances with
hundreds of thousands of variables. We also will present
an innovative approach to page-ranking and Web-spam
detection, and a hands-on demonstration of the gap
between greedy and global optimization.
Privacy Integrated Queries
The Language Integrated Query (LINQ) framework
enables tuple-oriented, unified data access to a large
class of data stores; examples include standard C#
enumerable, SQL back ends, and even Dryad-backed compute
clusters. The tuple-oriented nature of 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. With a bit of randomization, scaled to
match the maximum influence of any one tuple, privacy
can be preserved formally for many LINQ queries. We will
present a simple checker that audits queries submitted
through LINQ's IQueryable interface, assesses the impact
of tuples, and proposes or applies randomization to
ensure privacy.
Privacy in Personalized Search and
Shared Sensing
We will present a pair of ways to provide shared data
while maintaining users’ privacy preferences. One
explores the rich space of possibility where people
doing search can opt to share, in an ongoing or
real-time manner, personal information in return for
expected enhancements in the quality of an online
service. We have analyzed a year of toolbar data and, in
conjunction, performed a user study with 1,400
participants. We will show that a significant level of
personalization can be achieved using only a small
amount of information about users. The other provides a
mechanism to enable data from privately held sensors,
such as GPS systems, to be shared and aggregated within
the constraints of privacy preferences of the sensors’
owners. We will show how the methods work on real-world
data.
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Systems, Networking,
and Databases
Better Bug Reporting with Better
Privacy
 Software vendors collect bug reports from customers
to improve the quality of software. These reports should
include the inputs that make the software fail, to
enable vendors to reproduce the bug. But vendors rarely
include these inputs in reports because they might
contain private user data. We describe a solution to
this problem that provides software vendors with new
input values that satisfy the conditions required to
make the software follow the same execution path until
it fails but are otherwise unrelated with the original
inputs. These new inputs enable vendors to reproduce the
bug while revealing less private information than
existing approaches. Additionally, we provide a
mechanism to measure the amount of information revealed
in an error report. This mechanism enables users to make
informed decisions about whether to submit reports. We
have implemented a prototype of our solution and have
evaluated it with real errors in real programs. The
results show that we can produce error reports that
enable software vendors to reproduce bugs while
revealing almost no private information. We will show
how we generate a bug report for a document that crashes
Word. The bug report includes a new document that
crashes Word in the exact same way yet contains
virtually none of the textual content of the original
document.
MashupOS for Web Browsers
The advent of AJAX and client mashups has turned Web
browsers into a multiprincipal operating environment.
But browser support for Web programmers has lagged
behind and remained in a single-principal world: The
Same Origin Policy that dictates today's
browser-security model offers either no trust through
complete isolation between principals (sites) or full
trust by incorporating third-party code as libraries.
The consequences of such limited support include
cross-site-scripting attacks that seriously plague
today's Web and undesirable programming practices that
make tradeoffs between security and functionality. In
the MashupOS project, we address this deficiency. Our
goal is to enable a browser to be a multiprincipal OS.
Our initial focus is on protection and communication
abstractions. Protection is to provide default isolation
boundaries among principals (sites), while communication
enables custom, fine-grained access control. We have
designed our abstractions to be backward-compatible and
easily adoptable. We have built a MashupOS prototype
that we will demonstrate. Our experience and evaluation
show that our abstractions make it easy to build more
secure and robust client-side Web mashups and can be
implemented easily in browsers with negligible
performance overhead.
Reliable Wireless Connectivity on
the Go
Many people want to stay connected while traveling
and commuting, which is driving the demand for network
access from moving vehicles. But the reliability and
performance of such connectivity today is severely
limited by frequent "blackouts" that the
vehicle-to-infrastructure backhaul links suffer. We have
designed a system that, unlike existing "commuter
networks," such as Sound Transit or the Microsoft
Connector system, uses multiple backhaul links for added
reliability and performance. Our system fuses these
links together using novel striping mechanisms that
intelligently decide which link individual packets must
use, based on current performance and load. We have
instantiated our design in the context of providing
CorpNet access on Microsoft shuttles and the Connector
service. Unlike the current Wi-Fi service on the
Connector, our system does not require users to log in
via the RAS service to access internal sites. To them,
it appears as if they are directly attached to the
corporate wireless network, just as they would be from
their offices. We have partnered with the Microsoft
shuttle service to demonstrate our system on the
shuttles that will ferry TechFest attendees.
Rethinking Spectrum Allocation in
Wi-Fi Networks
IEEE 802.11 divides the frequency spectrum into
channels of fixed width. For example, 802.11bg divides
80 MHz of the 2.4-GHz spectrum into 11 channels, each of
20MHz width, three of which are non-overlapping. Over
the past six months, we have been exploring the
feasibility and the benefits of varying the channel
width. In our demo, we will show that changing the
channel width is achievable even with current hardware
and beneficial in a number of scenarios. For example,
contrary to popular belief that increasing communication
range requires an increase in battery-power consumption,
we will show that reducing channel width increases
communication range while actually reducing
battery-power consumption. We will explore the design
challenges in a Zune-like system and show that such
systems can benefit from adapting channel widths. We
also will discuss various challenges and present a
solution that performs better than any non-adaptive
channelization scheme.
SixthSense: RFID-Based Enterprise
Intelligence
SixthSense is an RFID-based enterprise-intelligence
system. We consider an enterprise environment where
people and their personal objects are tagged with cheap,
passive RFID tags and there is good coverage of RFID
readers in the workspace. SixthSense is an integrated
system that combines information from RFID-based sensing
with data from other sensors, such as cameras and Wi-Fi,
as well as enterprise systems, such as calendar and
presence, to draw inferences about people, objects, and
their association and interaction. We are building
several applications atop this substrate, including a
lost-object finder, video-event tagging, and enhanced
calendar and presence, while safeguarding user privacy.
We will demo the SixthSense system and some of these
applications.
Mobile-Systems Distributed Operation
for Sensing
 While mobile phones quickly are becoming the primary
computing platform for many users, these devices are
programmed and used in a manner akin to miniature PCs,
each in a silo and interacting primarily with the cloud.
We will propose a distributed software platform to break
out of this mold and enable capabilities and
applications that take advantage of the computing,
communication, and sensing capabilities of an ensemble
of mobiles, whether in proximity or across a wide area.
For instance, a traffic-monitoring application could
have a set of mobile nodes in particular locations
gather data from their GPS, accelerometer, and
microphone sensors, perform custom processing of the
sensed data in their local neighborhood to detect
unusual traffic conditions, and report the processed
data back to a server for aggregation and reporting. Our
technology consists of a trusted core that includes
services such as localization, communication, and
accounting, and a software sandbox for securely
executing untrusted application code that builds on
these services. We will demo the system in operation and
show a couple of applications that illustrate its
capabilities: rich traffic monitoring and an on-demand
Webcam.
HomeMaestro: Order from Chaos in
Home Networks
Home networks constantly are increasing in
complexity: Multiple devices, such as desktops, laptops,
IP phones, and game consoles, running applications such
as e-mail, Web access, peer-to-peer, voice-over IP,
video streaming, online gaming, media sharing, and
telecommuting, are expected to be part of the next
generation of the home ecosystem. Such applications are
characterized by different performance goals, and they
fight for the same network resources, such as the
broadband-access link and the in-home wireless medium.
Moreover, home users have different, often conflicting,
performance objectives and priorities; for example, a
file-sharing application of one home user can degrade
the performance of the voice communication of another.
HomeMaestro aims to provide a distributed system for
monitoring and instrumentation of home networks.
HomeMaestro performs extensive measurements at the host
level to infer application types and network
requirements, and to identify significant changes in
application behavior, such as problems stemming from
limited available capacity of the wireless link. By
correlating metrics across devices, HomeMaestro can
infer how applications affect each other and then use
prioritization as a first stage of a distributed-control
mechanism. HomeMaestro strives to put order into our
home networks by identifying network problems and
enabling users to prioritize application traffic. We
will show the benefits of HomeMaestro in typical home
scenarios.
Diagnosing Home-Networking Problems
with NetPrints
Today’s home networks include a number of
components―multiple desktops and laptops,
wireless-access points, routers, printers, and modems.
In such a setting, it is not uncommon for users to be
stymied by configuration problems. Today, the debugging
process for such problems is largely manual―trial and
error, searching the Web, posting on mailing lists,
calling tech support―with the consequent cost in time,
money, and user frustration. NetPrints seeks to automate
this debugging process by tapping into the ”shared
wisdom” of participating clients. The client component
of NetPrints periodically gathers network signatures of
successful and unsuccessful application runs and reports
these to the NetPrints server, along with configuration
information, such as network-address-translation or
firewall settings, gathered from the client host and the
home router. The NetPrints server sorts through this
mass of data to identify configuration settings
associated with successful application runs, which are
then used to identify misconfigurations when a new
client reports a problem. We shall demonstrate the
NetPrints system in action in the context of a few
common configuration problems that arise in home
networks to illustrate the power of this approach.
Tiny Web Services
 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. The Web-service
interface makes it easy for multiple programmers to
develop home-control applications using devices
manufactured by different OEMs without learning new
programming technologies. Our system also provides a
uniform setup experience for users, enabling them to
integrate multiple home devices into a single network.
We also will demonstrate how a home network can be
connected safely to the Internet to be accessed from
cloud services. We will present a feedback-based,
multiradio scheduling algorithm for energy-efficient
communication among battery-operated devices. Finally,
we will demonstrate an energy-management application
that saves energy by actively monitoring weather and
energy price variations using cloud services without
compromising user comfort. This example application can
be used to connect the 166 million U.S. homes and
several million more worldwide to the Microsoft cloud
for providing energy management. This application can
generate a steady revenue stream for Live services that
does not depend on user clicks. It also reduces our
carbon footprint and leads to a greener lifestyle.
Auto-Shift: Energy-Aware Server
Provisioning
With the explosive growth of Internet services, the
energy consumed by computer servers and data centers is
skyrocketing. Dynamic server provisioning can turn off
unnecessary servers to save energy, but such techniques
face challenges for connection-intensive servers that
host lots of long-lived TCP connections, such as in
Windows Live Messenger. Such servers limit the number of
new connections they can accept per second, so they
cannot be fully utilized immediately after being turned
on. Turning off servers also might involve many
migrations or reconnections. We have a systematic
approach for joint analysis and design of dynamic
server-provisioning and load-dispatching algorithms for
connection-intensive servers, and we will show their
effectiveness on Windows Live Messenger. Our techniques
provide significant energy saving—as much as 30
percent—without sacrificing user experiences.
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UI, Graphics, and Media
Adding Detail to Low-Dynamic-Range
Images
We will introduce high-dynamic-range image
hallucination for adding high-dynamic-range details to
overexposed and underexposed regions of a
low–dynamic-range image. Our method is based on a simple
assumption: High-quality patches exist in the image with
similar textures to the regions that are poorly exposed.
Hence, we can add high-dynamic-range details to a region
simply by transferring texture details from another
patch that might be under different illumination levels.
In our approach, a user needs only to annotate the image
with a few strokes to indicate textures that can be
applied to the corresponding poorly exposed regions, and
these regions automatically are hallucinated by our
algorithm. Experiments demonstrate that our simple, yet
effective approach can significantly increase the amount
of texture detail in a wide range of common scenarios
with only a modest amount of user interaction.
Music Steering
By “music steering,” we mean interactive
music-playlist generation through music-content
analysis, music recommendation, and music filtering.
With thousands of songs stored in our portable devices,
such as smartphones 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.
Multichannel Acoustic-Echo
Cancellation
This demo presents newly developed technology for
multichannel acoustic-echo cancellation, assisted with a
microphone array. This technology enables removing the
sound from multiple loudspeakers, such as stereo and
surround sound, from the signal captured by the
microphones. The potential scenarios are a
voice-controlled Media Center and high-end communication
systems.
In-Depth Image Editing
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.
An HMM-Based Talking and Singing
Head
This demo will show a trainable, audio-visual
synthesis system. In the training and adaptation phase,
audio and/or video features, along with the
corresponding scripts—text, lyrics, and melodies—are
used to drive a statistical, hidden Markov model
(HMM)-based training procedure. The HMM thus trained can
be adapted further with data from a specific speaker or
singer to give it a new, personalized flavor. In the
audio-visual synthesis phase, scripts of text, lyrics,
and melody are inputted into a script-analysis module
that generates a sequence of consecutive units. The
parameters of the HMMs are retrieved, and final
audio-visual data, speech, or singing with facial
expressions and head movements are synthesized. The
HMM-based talking and singing head is based on a 3-D
model. The audio-visual models are parametric and
statistically trained. They can capture a person’s
characteristics. They are also easy to modify to meet a
specific vocal requirement.
Video Collage
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.
Furthermore, Video Collage can be printed into booklets
or albums. Users thus can browse those booklets or
albums just as if they were browsing ordinary photo
albums. When they want to watch a certain segment
indicated by a thumbnail in the booklet, they can use a
camera phone or a similar device to capture the
corresponding thumbnail. Then the captured image is sent
to a computer via a wireless network, automatically
retrieved in a video library, and the corresponding
video segment is presented to the user. Video Collage
provides a novel user interface that enables users to
browse video content in a more compact, visually
appealing, and natural way, in contrast to many existing
video browsers. Video Collage can be integrated easily
into existing video-management systems, video-sharing
sites, and video search engines to support an attractive
video-browsing and -sharing experience.
Real-Time Soft Global Illumination
In previous TechFests, we demoed fast soft shadows on
the GPU. We have made the technique simpler, faster, and
more robust by accumulating the blocking effect of
dynamic objects such as moving characters in image space
instead of over mesh vertices. We also include indirect
reflections, as well as shadowing. The result is
realistic global illumination effects that can be
rendered in real time and are practical for current 3-D
games and visualization applications.
Real-Time Rendering of Smoke
Animation
Rendering of smoke presents a challenging problem in
computer graphics because of its complicated effects on
light propagation. Within a smoke volume, light
undergoes absorption and scattering interactions that
vary from point to point because of the spatial
non-uniformity of smoke. In static participating media,
the number and the complexity of scattering interactions
lead to a substantial expense in computation. For a
dynamic medium such as smoke, the intricate volumetric
structure of which changes with time, the computational
costs can be prohibitive. Despite the practical
difficulties of smoke rendering, it nevertheless remains
a popular element in many applications, such as films
and games. To achieve the desired visual effects of
smoke, a designer should be afforded real-time control
over the lighting environment and vantage point, as well
as the volumetric distribution and optical properties of
the smoke. 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. With only
moderate preprocessing time and storage, this technique
generates rendering results comparable to those from
offline rendering algorithms such as ray tracing.
WorldWide Telescope
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. WorldWide
Telescope, created with Microsoft's high-performance
Visual Experience Engine, enables seamless panning and
zooming across the night sky blending terabytes of
images, data, and stories from multiple sources over the
Internet into a media-rich immersive experience.
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