Technology Theme Key

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Time

Room

Description

8:00–8:50

Continental breakfast

8:50–9:00

Kodiak

Faculty Summit Introduction and Welcome
Sailesh Chutani, Director of External Research & Programs, Microsoft Research

Webcast: Introduction and Welcome

9:00–10:20

Kodiak

Microsoft and Academia: A Dialog
William H. Gates, Chairman and Chief Software Architect, Microsoft Corporation
Maria Klawe, Dean of Engineering, Princeton University
Richard F. Rashid, Senior Vice President, Microsoft Research

Webcast: Microsoft and Academia: A Dialog

10:20–10:45

Kodiak

External Research & Programs
Sailesh Chutani, Director of External Research & Programs, Microsoft Research

Last year we initiated a radical transformation of the University Relations program, now called External Research & Programs, to make it more relevant to academia and to make the collaboration opportunities open and transparent. We will talk about our view of the developments impacting academia today and some of the programs that we have created in response to those developments. These include the Request for Proposals, the New Faculty Fellowship, as well as a three-tiered model of collaboration. Finally, we will describe the new initiatives that are being planned next year, including joint research institutes between universities and Microsoft, as well as research in Digital Inclusion.

Webcast: External Research & Programs

Presentation: External Research & Programs (Sailesh Chutani)

10:45–11:00

Break

11:00–12:00

Break-out Sessions

Cascade

Next-Generation User Interfaces and Media Platforms
Mira Dontcheva, University of Washington; Steve Drucker, Microsoft Research; Greg Schechter, Microsoft

As computing hardware becomes more powerful, user interfaces will leverage this performance for rich media experiences and fluid game-style interactivity. Today, complex interfaces can be difficult for research teams to prototype. This session looks at future visual interfaces and toolkits from two directions. First, Microsoft Software Architect Greg Schechter will showcase Microsoft’s new Avalon platform for user interface definition and accelerated rendering, and he’ll provide demos of interfaces that leverage this technology. Then, Steven Drucker from Microsoft Research will showcase his current UI explorations for rich media consumption and photo access as well as other relevant projects from Microsoft Research’s NextMedia research group.

Webcast: Next Generation User Interfaces and Platforms

Presentation: Next Generation User Interfaces and Platforms (Steven M. Drucker, Mira Dontcheva, George Petschnigg)

Rainier

Machine Learning and HIV Vaccine Design
David Heckerman, Microsoft Research; Nebojsa Jojic, Microsoft Research

Microsoft Research is working with leading doctors and scientists to use advanced computer science techniques in the fight to slow or stop the HIV/AIDS pandemic. David Heckerman and Nebojsa Jojic will describe their efforts in applying machine learning techniques to comb through millions of strains of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) to find the genetic patterns necessary to train a patient’s immune system to fight the virus.

Webcast: Machine Learning and HIV Vaccine Design

Presentation: Rational HIV Vaccine Design (David Heckerman, Nebojsa Jojic)

St. Helens

Longhorn Search and Organize User Experience
Paul Cutsinger, Microsoft; Ales Holecek, Microsoft; Kerem Karatal, Microsoft

We’re modernizing the way people organize, browse, and search for the information on their computer. Come see a demonstration of the user experience and learn how the development community can make use of the platform.

Webcast: Longhorn Search and Organize User Experience

Presentation: Longhorn Search and Organize User and Developer Experience (Paul Cutsinger, Kerem Karatal)

Baker

The Trustworthy Computing Security Development Lifecycle
Dave Ladd, Microsoft Research; Steve Lipner, Microsoft

With the growth of the Internet as a vehicle for commercial, governmental, and personal communications and information sharing, the importance of providing trustworthy computing facilities that will resist hostile attack has grown dramatically. In response to this growing need, Microsoft has developed the Trustworthy Computing Security Development Lifecycle (SDL), an integrated process for improving the security of commercial software as it is being developed. This presentation describes the phases of the SDL from initial requirements definition through the Final Security Review before software release, and it summarizes some of the improvements in security demonstrated by software that has completed the SDL. We discuss Microsoft’s initiatives in educating engineers to produce more secure software, some implications for the academic community, and explore some of the issues associated with measuring the effectiveness of a process such as the SDL.

Webcast: The Trustworthy Computing Security Development Lifecycle

Presentation: The Trustworthy Computing Security Development Lifecycle (Steve Lipner)

Hood

Computer Science Research Agenda in Latin America
Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Universidad de Chile; Carlos Henrique de Brito Cruz, Universidade Estadual de Campinas; Miguel Nussbaum, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile

This session will provide an overview of the research agenda in computer science in Latin America and the overall regional organization and existing cooperation programs. Several interesting projects will be discussed as examples of the success research stories in this emerging region. The number of science and engineering articles credited to Latin American organizational authors and published in the most recognized influential scientific and technical journals almost tripled between 1988 and 2001. This growth rate was greater than that of emerging and developing countries in other regions. The increase in the number of Latin American articles was concentrated in four countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico. During this session specific research projects from Brazil and Chile will be mentioned in addition to an overall perspective of the computer science research agenda in the region.

Webcast: Computer Science Research Agenda in Latin America

Presentations:
Transforming the Classroom Experience: Face to Face Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (Miguel Nussbaum)
A Profile of Brazil in R&D and IT (Carlos Henrique de Brito Cruz)
Research and Academic Collaboration in Latin America (Ricardo Baeza-Yates)

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)

12:00–12:15

Box Lunch Pickup

12:15–1:15

Lunch and Brown Bag Sessions

Cascade

Gender Equity Efforts—A Critical Look at the Opportunities and the Organizations
Revi Sterling, Microsoft Research

Grace Hopper’s conferences, graduate women’s workshops, university-level Women in CS programs, distributed mentoring programs, myriad booklets and videos—what is working to increase the numbers of women in the academic pipeline, and where are we throwing good money and energy after bad? This will be a round table discussion to map out and discuss the gender equity ecosystem and to highlight and critique regional and national attraction and retention programs. What efforts have established a foothold at your school, show potential, or are time sinks? Where are the program holes? Join Revi Sterling for what will undoubtedly be a lively exploration of current opportunities and organizations. We will use the outcome of this conversation to further feed requirements and brainstorm with the national organizations and coalitions that have pipeline programs, such as the Anita Borg Institute, National Center for Women and IT, MentorNet, ACM, and CRA.

Webcast: Gender Equity Efforts—A Critical Look at the Opportunities and the Organizations

Presentation: Gender Equity Pipeline Efforts: What’s Working, What’s Not (Revi Sterling)

Rainier

Microsoft Research 2005 New Faculty Fellows: Research Projects
Tom Healy, Microsoft Research

Image synthesis and capture. Complexity theory. Natural language processing. Embedded distributed systems. Data mining. Today’s investigation of such subjects could fuel the innovations of tomorrow. Microsoft Research is helping to support such creativity with the announcement of the five inaugural winners of the Microsoft New Faculty Fellowship Program. The fellowships, announced May 25, are the culmination of the first year of the program, introduced during the 2004 Microsoft Research Faculty Summit. The five fellows receive two annual installments of $100,000 with which to pursue innovative research. This Brown Bag session will introduce the five recipients of the 2005 Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellowships to the faculty summit audience. Each of the five fellows will give a short overview of their research work.

The 2005 Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellows:

• Frédo Durand, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Subhash Khot, Georgia Institute of Technology
• Dan Klein, University of California at Berkeley
• Radhika Nagpal, Harvard University
• Wei Wang, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Webcast: Microsoft Research 2005 New Faculty Fellows: Research Projects

Presentation: Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellowship 2005 (Tom Healy)

St. Helens

MIT iCampus: Disseminating Innovations, Sharing Technology, Building Community
Phillip Long, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Paul Oka, Microsoft Research

MIT iCampus—based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), supported by Microsoft Corporation, conducted in collaboration with Microsoft Research—is a program that supports faculty and student initiatives in educational technology. The iCampus program sponsors innovation, helps to incubate innovative technologies through classroom use and it promotes their adoption, evaluation, and continued evolution within MIT and through worldwide multi-institution collaboration. The central theme behind all MIT iCampus projects is the support and encouragement of “active learning” in a constructivist approach to education.

Over the past six years, iCampus has provided creative approaches to fostering active learning and leveraging technology in a variety of disciplines. An initial set of these research projects has been selected and freely distributed through iCampus. Successful dissemination of technology in education requires more than just making it easily available. The MIT iCampus Affiliates Program seeks to share tools, build community, and evaluate the impact of this work. Come learn about the projects, the program, and ways you can participate.

Webcast: MIT iCampus: Disseminating Innovations, Sharing Technology, Building Community

Baker

Robotics for Instruction
James Hamblen, Georgia Tech; Illah Nourbakhsh, Carnegie Mellon University; Stewart Tansley, Microsoft Research; C.J. Taylor, University of Pennsylvania

This Brown Bag session will introduce our thoughts on the use of robotics technology for instruction—particularly in the general CS curriculum at university level. We will share some views of our own, some experiences of others that we have come across, present evidence of interest towards greater utilization of robotics in this context, identify some of the open questions and challenges, and highlight our hopes and expectations for this exciting spin on CS instruction. As an informal, provocative, discussion-based session, we encourage your contribution and predict a lively debate!

Webcast: Robotics for Instruction

Presentations:
Robotics for Instruction (Stewart Tansley)
Engaging Undergraduate Students with Robotic Design Projects (James Hamblen)
Educational Robotics and TeRK (Illah Nourbakhsh)

1:15–2:30

Break-out Sessions

Cascade

Nomadic Computing
Bert Keely, Microsoft; Simon Poile, Microsoft

Ever-shrinking notebook computers and Tablet PCs have brought Windows to users on-the-go. Meanwhile, the once-limited functionality of smaller PDAs, media playback devices, and Smartphones continues to expand into general-purpose computing. This session will feature two of Microsoft’s System Architects for Mobility/Tablet PC to discuss current technology trends and overview future dimensions of hybrid general-purposes computing devices, such as ultra-mobile PCs. How will your computing resources and data follow you around, and what academic research problems exist in these scenarios?

Webcast: Nomadic Computing

Presentations:
Ultra-Mobile Computing Trends (Otto Berkes, Simon Poile)
Nomadic Computing with PCs (Bert Keely)

Rainier

Web Services: Using Microsoft Indigo Services as Building Blocks to Build Robust Distributed Systems
Furrukh Khan, Ohio State University; Steve Swartz, Microsoft

Web services are becoming the foundation for building distributed applications. Indigo is Microsoft’s unified framework for building service-oriented applications. It enables developers to build secure, reliable, transacted solutions that integrate across platforms and interoperate with existing investments. Indigo combines and extends the capabilities of existing distributed systems technologies to deliver a unified development experience spanning distance, topologies, hosting models, protocols, and security models.

This session will discuss the details of Indigo and how the Ohio State University Medical Center is using Microsoft Indigo framework and open specifications, such as WS-Security, WS-Trust, WS-RM (Reliable Messaging), and WS-AtomicTransaction, to build interoperable, secure, scalable, reliable, and maintainable healthcare systems based on a service-oriented architecture and SOAP services. Two systems will be discussed: one for remotely monitoring, recording, and replaying the vital signs data being generated in the operating rooms of the medical center, and another for patient/resource tracking based on the existing WiFi infrastructure at the center. Technical details, lessons learned, best practices, and benefits of using these technologies will be discussed.

Webcast: Web Services: Using Microsoft Indigo Services as Building Blocks to Build Robust Distributed Systems

Presentation: Using Microsoft Indigo Services: Building Blocks to Build Robust Distributed Systems Based on Service- Oriented Architecture (Furrukh Khan)

St. Helens

Phoenix: Experience with an Analysis and Optimization Framework
Bradley Calder, University of California at San Diego; Rajiv Gupta, University of Arizona; Chandra Krintz, University of California at Santa Barbara; Matt Mitchell, Microsoft; Vladimir Safonov, University of St. Petersburg; Michael Smith, Harvard University

Although the Phoenix project is still under development at Microsoft, it offers a set of analysis and program transformation tools that can be used in many software engineering projects. Several faculty who have been using Phoenix as part of their research will discuss their research goals and offer some insight into how Phoenix has helped them advance their research agenda.

Webcast: Phoenix: Experience with an Analysis and Optimization Framework

Presentations:
Selecting Software Phase Markers with Code Structure Analysis (Brad Calder)
Using Phoenix for Exploring Whole Execution Traces (Rajiv Gupta)
Phase-Based Program Sampling Using Phoenix (Chandra Krintz)
Aspect.NET—An Aspect-Oriented Programming Tool for Microsoft .NET Using Phoenix and Whidbey (Vladimir O. Safonov)
Building on Phoenix (Michael D. Smith)
Phoenix: Experience with an Analysis and Optimization Framework (John Lefor)

Baker

Accomplishing Successful Software Engineering Research in Universities
William Griswold, University of California at San Diego; Jim Larus, Microsoft; Jon Pincus, Microsoft Research; John Spencer, Microsoft Research; Laurie Williams, North Carolina State University

The panel will provide a forum for discussion on the challenges researchers encounter in accomplishing research in the area of software engineering. Successful techniques internally within the university environment and in conjunction with industrial partners will be open for discussion.

Webcast: Accomplishing Successful Software Engineering Research in Universities

Presentations:
How to Accomplish Successful Software Engineering Research in Universities (William Griswold)
Using “Industry-as-Laboratory” Case-Studies to Impact Industrial Practice (Laurie Williams)

Hood

Computing Research in India: A Sampling
Uday Desai, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay; Arobinda Gupta, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur; Y. N. Srikant, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore

Dr. Uday Desai, Dr. Y. N. Srikant, and Dr. Arobinda Gupta will each cover various topics in the Indian academic research community, such as mobile computing, wireless networks, and compilers. This session will give a flavor of research being conducted in India on these research topics.

Webcast: Computing Research in India: A Sampling

Presentations:
EE-CS—R and D in India (Uday Desai)
A Glimpse of Research at Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur (Arobinda Gupta)
Compiler Research at the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore, India (Y. N. Srikant)

Sonora

The Power of Freehand Interaction
Randall Davis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Kimberle Koile, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Paul Oka, Microsoft Research

This talk will describe two iCampus research projects focused on leveraging freehand input on Tablet PCs. We want people to be able to sketch, gesture, and talk about their ideas with a computer in the way that they do when interacting with each other. The first project gives people a kind of “magic paper” that understands the messy freehand sketches, casual gestures, and fragmentary utterances that are part and parcel of such interaction. Magic Paper will let computer tools capture and understand the kinds of ideas that are today captured in pencil on scraps of paper, introducing design capture into the earliest stages of the design process and radically shortening the design cycle. The second project, the Classroom Learning Partner (CLP), is focused on improving student experience and learning in large classes. CLP uses as its framework Classroom Presenter, a Tablet PC–based presentation system that supports student wireless submission of digital ink answers to in-class exercises. CLP will allow this system to work in large classes by using AI techniques to interpret and aggregate student ink answers into a small number of equivalence classes, presenting summary information to the instructor and students.

Webcast: The Power of Freehand Interaction

Presentations:
Enabling Natural Interaction (Randall Davis)
The Classroom Learning Partner (Kimberle Koile)

2:30–2:45

Break

2:45–4:00

Break-out Sessions

Cascade

Mobile Device User Interface Research
Patrick Baudich, Microsoft Research; Daniel Robbins, Microsoft Research; John SanGiovanni, Microsoft Research

As new classes of applications find their way to mobile phone and PDA devices, new UI models are needed. In this session, three Microsoft researchers and designers will show new projects that explore novel new interaction techniques for mobile devices. These systems use zooming, scaling, and gestures to provide rich new ways to interact with information on a handheld computing device.

Webcast: Mobile Device User Interface Research

Presentation: Zone-Based User Interfaces (Daniel Robbins)

Rainier

Datamining in Science: Mining Patterns in Protein Structures—Algorithms and Applications
Jamie MacLennan, Microsoft; Zhaohui Tang, Microsoft; Wei Wang, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

With the data explosion occurring in sciences, utilizing tools to help analyze the data efficiently is becoming increasingly important. This session will describe tools included with SQL Server (Yukon), and Wei Wang will describe the MotifSpace project—a comprehensive database of candidate spatial protein motifs based on recently developed data mining algorithms.

One of the next great frontiers in molecular biology is to understand and predict protein function. Proteins are simple linear chains of polymerized amino acids (residues) whose biological functions are determined by the three-dimensional shapes that they fold into. A popular approach to understanding proteins is to break them down into structural sub-components called motifs. Motifs are recurring structural and spatial units that are frequently correlated with specific protein functions. Traditionally, the discovery of motifs has been a laborious task of scientific exploration. In this talk, I will discuss recent datamining algorithms that we have developed for automatically identifying potential spatial motifs. Our methods automatically find frequently occurring substructures within graph-based representations of proteins. The complexity of protein structures and corresponding graphs poses significant computational challenges. The kernel of our approach is an efficient subgraph-mining algorithm that detects all (maximal) frequent subgraphs from a graph database with a user-specified minimal frequency.

Webcast: Datamining in Science: Mining Patterns in Protein Structures—Algorithms and Applications

Presentation: Mining Patterns in Protein Structures—Algorithms and Applications (Wei Wang)

St. Helens

Shield & Friends Troubleshooting Network
Helen Wang, Microsoft Research

In this talk, I’d like to share two of my research projects in the area of security and privacy: the Shield project and the Friends Troubleshooting Network (FTN) project.

Shield—Software patching has not been an effective first-line defense preventing large-scale worm attacks, even when patches had long been available for their corresponding vulnerabilities. Generally, people have been reluctant to patch their systems immediately, because patches are perceived to be unreliable and disruptive to apply. To address this problem, we propose a first-line worm defense in the network stack, using “shields”—vulnerability-specific, exploit-generic network filters installed in end systems once a vulnerability is discovered and before the patch is applied. These filters examine the incoming or outgoing traffic of vulnerable applications, and drop traffic that exploits vulnerabilities. Shields are less disruptive to install and uninstall, easier to test for bad side effects, and hence more reliable than traditional software patches. Further, shields are resilient to polymorphic or metamorphic variations of exploits.

FTN—Content sharing is a popular use of peer-to-peer systems because of their inherent scalability and low cost of maintenance. In this work, we leverage this nature of peer-to-peer systems to tackle a new problem: automatic misconfiguration troubleshooting. In this setting, machine configurations from peers are shared to diagnose misconfigurations on a sick machine. The key challenges are preserving privacy of individual configuration data and ensuring the integrity of peer contributions. To this end, we construct the Friends Troubleshooting Network (FTN), a peer-to-peer overlay network, where the links between peer machines reflect the friendship of their owners. Our FTN manifests recursive trust rather than transitive trust. To achieve privacy, we use the general scheme of a historyless and futureless random-walk for routing, during which search is carried out simultaneously with secure parameter aggregation for the purpose of troubleshooting. Our design has been guided by the characteristics of a real-world friends network, the MSN Instant Messenger (IM) network. We have prototyped our FTN system and analyzed the tradeoff between privacy and protocol efficiency.

Webcast: Shield & Friends Troubleshooting Network

Presentation: Shield & Friends Troubleshooting Networks (Helen Wang)

Baker

Concurrency and Complexity
Michael Isard, Microsoft Research; Madan Musuvathi, Microsoft; John Richardson, Microsoft; Wolfram Schulte, Microsoft; Satnam Singh, Microsoft; John Spencer, Microsoft Research

The panel will provide a forum for discussion on the many challenges developer have in the area of concurrency and complexity. Topics related but not limited to data structures, expressions of concurrency-related design, hard synchronization problems, performance, and scalability will be discussed.

Webcast: Concurrency and Complexity

Presentations:
Concurrency and Complexity (Michael Isard)
Concurrency and Software Transactional Memories (Satnam Singh)

Hood

Embedded Systems and Robotics Research
Steven Bathiche, Microsoft; Hod Lipson, Cornell University; Stewart Tansley, Microsoft Research; Andy Wilson, Microsoft Research

This session will highlight some of the exciting embedded systems research activities that Microsoft and its academic partners have been working on recently. Stewart Tansley, Program Manager for Embedded Systems and Robotics at Microsoft Research, will introduce the session by summarizing the results and follow-ups to the international Embedded Systems RFP that held its wrap-up workshop since the previous Faculty Summit. Professor Hod Lipson from Cornell University, one of the winners of the RFP awards, will highlight some of his research in robotics and place this in the broader context of his bold research agenda in evolvable machines and computational synthesis. Steve Bathiche, R&D Program Manager in Microsoft Hardware, and Andy Wilson, Researcher at Microsoft Research, will then present an example of the robotics-related research going on at Microsoft, focusing on his research platform for exploring human-robot interaction.

Webcast: Embedded Systems and Robotics Research

Presentations:
Embedded Systems & Robotics Research (Stewart Tansley)
Embedded Systems for Evolutionary Robotics (Hod Lipson)
Computers off the Desk: Bugs, Hallway Bots, and Teddy Bears (Steven Bathiche, Andy Wilson)

Sonora

Using Tablet PCs, ConferenceXP, OneNote, and Classroom Presenter to Enhance Student Learning Outcomes
Jane Prey, Microsoft Research; Gino Sorcinelli, University of Massachusetts at Amherst; Joe Tront, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Professor Tront will demonstrate how he used Tablet PCs and Classroom Presenter in his engineering/computer science class to increase student interaction and enhance student learning. Session participants will take an active role in this process by using Tablet PCs to receive a broadcast of lecture material and respond to design exercises by using the Tablet PC’s inking capability. Tront will walk participants through the process of developing a presentation suitable for use with Tablet PCs. Professor Sorcinelli will then show how he used Tablet PCs and ConferenceXP in his large lecture class during the recently completed Spring 2005 semester to increase student interaction and enhance student learning. Session participants will take an active role in this process by using Tablet PCs to receive a broadcast of Sorcinelli’s PowerPoint content and annotate that content by using the Tablet PC’s inking capability. Sorcinelli will step participants through a typical lecture session, including the showing of a “trigger video.” Participants will use OneNote on their Tablet PCs to answer several questions about the video.

Webcast: Using Tablet PCs, ConferenceXP, OneNote, and Classroom Presenter to Enhance Student Learning Outcomes

Presentations:
Tablet PCs & Active Learning (Joseph Tront)
Using Tablet PCs and ConferenceXP to Enhance Student Learning Outcomes (Gino Sorcinelli)

4:00–4:15

Break

4:15–5:15

Kodiak

Some Observations About Broader Societal Issues of Computing Research and Education
Wm. A. Wulf, president of the National Academy of Engineering, vice chair of the National Research Council

Several things distinguish scholarship and education in computing. One is that computing is both a rich intellectual discipline in its own right and an infrastructure that supports scholarship in other fields. A second is that, although all technology is changing increasingly rapidly, none is moving nearly as quickly as computing and communication. These and other properties are more pronounced than in other fields, and they impose both responsibilities and opportunities for academics in Computer Science and Computer Engineering. This talk will try to raise some of these responsibilities and opportunities and suggest what we, as a community, ought to do about them.

Webcast: Some Observations About Broader Societal Issues of Computing Research and Education

Travel to Kirkland

6:30–9:00

Dinner Cruise from Lake Washington to Puget Sound