Hello Friends today I would like to introduce you with an another grate application from Microsoft “Microsoft Research AutoCollage” the word research is added to it’s name because it’s invented by Microsoft Research Team

So What is AutoCollage ?
Microsoft AutoCollage is an application which makes a collage from your images if you do the same thing on Adobe Photoshop it will take your 1 to 2 hours but this application makes it in less than a minute even my current header image of blog is created using the AutoCollage.

How to Use the Application ?

When you start the application will will be presented with the following screen

By default the application shows images from your “My Pictures” folder you can choose different folder by clicking on the “…” present on the top of bottom right window
You have to select the folder with Minimum 7 Images the Application supports Maximum 50 Images

After this the application will show the images from your selected folder then all you need to do is to just click on the create button and it will create your collage in few seconds

After that just click on Save and you’re done with the image

I am using the demo version of the application that’s why it’s showing a watermark at bottom

Other useful options provided by the application

1. You directly attach the image to mail and send it to your buddies
2. You can set the collage directly as your desktop background with just a click
3. You can set the number of images in folder using this bar Minimum – 7, Maximum – 50
4. You can see more options of application look at following image

1. Here you can set the size for images
2. This advanced option allows you to customize which images will occupy what size in collage

On input tab you will find the options for Manual Face Detection and Manual Image Ranking

Download or Purchase information
You can download 30 days trial of this application from Microsoft using this link
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/cambridge/projects/autocollage/Download.aspx

or you can purchase it from Microsoft Store here
http://store.microsoft.com/microsoft/AutoCollage-2008/product/8D6DDFB5?WT.mc_id=autocollage

It costs only $19.95 (921 Indian Rupees Approx) which is not big amount for such a gr8 application
So why are you waiting for download the application and start creating the collage from your images

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXCp88wHvs4

This is my demo for our augmented reality engine. This is actually a year old now – the engine is improving all the time.

As most of you may know, Microsoft – and in particular the folks at Microsoft (External) Research – have started to make major inroads into developing tools for scientists, be that in the area of scholarly communication with a repository offering as well as an ontology plugin for Word or in chemistry with Chem4Word, which is currently being developed by Joe Townsend, Jim Downing and Peter Murray-Rust here at Cambridge and the team at Microsoft External Research.

Now they have also announced a first version of the Microsoft Biology Foundation. From the announcement:

“The Microsoft Biology Foundation (MBF) is a language-neutral bioinformatics toolkit built as an extension to the Microsoft .NET Framework. Currently it implements a range of parsers for common bioinformatics file formats; a range of algorithms for manipulating DNA, RNA, and protein sequences; and a set of connectors to biological Web services such as NCBI BLAST. MBF is available under an open source license, and executables, source code, demo applications, and documentation are freely downloadable [...]“

Now every time Microsoft gets involved in something like this, it is bound to generate discussion and debate, such as happened around Chem4Word (see here and links contained in this). I, for one, am happy about every constructive and open contribution to the canon of scientific tools available to the community and welcome the news.

Guitar Hero is awesome (and Rockband-don’t worry!) and Microsoft Research are pretty great too. So what happens when you put the two together? I’ll tell you…playing Guitar Hero without a controller!

This would definitely reduce the amount of space that all the guitars take up, and make it easier to carry them around (should you wish). They also show the technology being used to control an MP3 player whilst out jogging…just move a finger to skip, pause, play etc…something that would definitely take off

Again, more great work from Microsoft Research

This is a great piece on the work going on inside Microsoft Research called MyLifeBits. Gordon Bell and his colleague Jim Gemmell have been working to digitally record nearly everything that goes in in Gordon’s life…and make it a useful data repository. As Graham said:

“I was saving everything, but it became clear that the problem was a search problem. You could save everything…but the big problem was organizing and then searching…”

They created a database to store all this data and then wrote software to collect, scan and label all the things captured, which include emails, pictures, phone calls, web pages visited, documents, scanned receipts and more!

A real life example:

“If I’ve ever seen a Web page, I’ve got a copy of it, and I can find it again quickly because I only have to search my own corpus, not the entire Web.”

That sounds pretty great to me The number of times that I know I’ve seen something on a site and I either can’t remember which one, or I get the right site but just can’t find the page is crazy…and this’d be a good way to sort that out. Not sure about storing EVERY web page though you know

This work is a great example not just of what Microsoft Research get up to, but also a great example of what IT in general can do for the world. 10-15 years down the line when MyLifeBits is commonplace-finding information will be so much easier!

Check out the full article over at MS Research here.

Microsoft da becas a latinos

La empresa Microsoft está ofreciendo la posibilidad de realizar pasantías y recibir financiamiento a estudiantes graduados de universidades latinoamericanas a través de una práctica profesional de 12 semanas.

La pasantía, que contará con sueldo, se realizará en el laboratorio de Microsoft Research en Redmond, EU, y además financiará por un total de dos años a los estudiantes destacados de doctorado que queden seleccionados.

Uno de los requisitos fundamentales para optar a esta beca es un buen manejo del inglés, pues las aplicaciones solo se reciben en ese idioma. La vía de postulaciones es a través de internet hasta el 31 de octubre 2009 y los resultados se anunciarán a más tardar el 8 de febrero 2010.

El financiamiento ofrecido por Microsoft cubrirá el 100% de los costos de la matrícula, además de una asignación mensual de hasta US$15,000  al año. Se entregará incluso un monto aparte en el caso que el becario tenga que asistir a un seminario o conferencia fuera de la ciudad por un monto de hasta US$5,000 mil al año. Ninguno de los financiamientos entregados serán habilitados por un periodo más largo que dos años académicos.

Según Microsoft, se les dará prioridad a los estudiantes que estén nominados por sus universidades y que estén cumpliendo segundo o tercer año de su doctorado en alguna casa de estudios latinoamericana. Puede haber un máximo de 9 postulantes por institución.

Para obtener más información acerca de esta iniciativa, se puede visitar la página Web de Microsoft Research o de Microsoft Fellowship, o mandar un mail a latamint@microsoft.com.

Artículo original: Microsoft da becas a latinos

Fuente: www.altonivel.com.mx

http://guiadeposgrados.wordpress.com/

Notas relacionadas:

Becas de posgrado para estudiar en Colombia

México ofrece becas para posgrados

INEHRM ofrece becas a mexicanos

The new background removal tool in Office 2010 is fantastic!

I hadn’t played around with it before but I just saw a tweet about some of the technology inside it, and my interest was piqued! This new ability is inside Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Outlook and helps bring out the part of the picture that you actually want to use in your document. It’s pretty clever, methinks a demo is needed:

Original Picture:

Insert the picture into Word (in this example) and hit the “Background Removal” button:

Which brings up the “marquee”:

The rectangle can be moved, stretched and extended to cover the exact area you need and then it cuts away all the background to give you:

That is pretty amazing how it’s taken out the sea etc in the background but there are a few issues…there’s that patch under it’s flipper that’s still there and you might notice that he’s now missing his tail!

That isn’t the end of it though, there are a couple of extra tools that enable you to correct the above:

With these you can mark specific areas to be included/removed despite what the algorithm might suggest

You can see the markers on it’s flipper and the tail and now the picture looks like this:

Perfectly formed turtle with none of the background…nice

I did however discover that simply tightening up the rectangle in the original picture caused the missing/extra bits of picture to correct themselves!

This is a great addition and some really clever work from Microsoft Research-well done guys!!!

You can see the original MS post here.

If that title seems a bit LSD-fueled, the subject matter warrants it. Here comes some Chemistry gone wild!

First, have a look at this bizarre video. It stars a soft robot, or chemical robot – “ChemBot.” Even the experienced geeks at IEEE Spectrum are calling it “by far one of the coolest and weirdest robot prototypes we have ever seen.”

This particular prototype by iRobot and University of Chicago researchers was just unveiled, at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems this past week. (More on the conference here.) It was built in response to DARPA’s interest in chemical robots, a program run by Dr. Mitchell Zakin.

The DARPA “ChemBots” page describes the program as creating “a convergence between materials chemistry and robotics through the application of any one of a number of approaches, including gel-solid phase transitions, electro- and magneto-rheological materials, geometric transitions, and reversible chemical and/or particle association and dissociation.”

What’s the anticipated DoD mission use? In DARPA’s words, “With ChemBots, our warfighters can gain access to denied spaces and perform tasks safely, covertly, and efficiently.”  Or, as CNet’s “Crave” gadget blog puts it, “the weird little blob inflates and deflates parts of its body, changing size and shape–and scaring the living daylights out of us. We don’t know exactly when ChemBot will join the Armed Forces, but we can only beg: please, oh please, keep it away from us.”

 Does Mitch Zakin Dream of Electric Sheep?

With that kind of geeky appeal, this video has been gathering some Internet buzz over the weekend, appearing on several tech blogs. But the better story is the scientist behind the science. Several of us have been following Mitch Zakin’s work for a while, primarily because he is also the PM for the Programmable Matter Program — the “novel physics” of “a new functional form of matter, based on mesoscale particles, which can reversibly assemble into complex 3D objects upon external command.”

There is revolutionary promise for such composability in multiple fields, not just defense. Zakin described it several years ago in a speech as “a concept so simple, yet so revolutionary that it pushes even the DARPA envelope. A vision that has profound implications for how we think about chemistry and materials. A vision that could provide our warfighters with meaningful technological surprise.”

Zakin is a demonstrably brilliant scientist, of the sort you expect to find at DARPA. Indeed, in that same speech (“The Next Revolution in Materials“) which he gave at DARPA’s 25th Systems and Technology Symposium a couple of years ago, Dr. Zakin said: “I joined DARPA because it is unfettered by conventional wisdom.” 

One area where he has been exploring beyond traditional boundaries is in developing “the infochemistry project,” which combines the powers of chemistry and information technology. In an exotic illustration, Dr. Zakin is directing a research program on “Chemical Communications,” which I’m not sure I fully understand but which sounds like some sort of holographic persistent Twitter:

The Chemical Communications Program is exploring innovative methods to develop self-powered chemical systems that can encode an input string of alphanumeric characters (i.e., a message), convert the message to a modulated optical signal, and transmit it repetitively to a receiver. 

The ultimate goal of this program is to develop a small replicator device, with the form factor of a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) or cell phone that―

• Permits the user to input an arbitrary 60-character alphanumeric message.
• Translates the message into an appropriate set of modulated chemistries.
• Embeds these chemistries into a disposable substrate (the transmitter).
• Ejects the substrate for deployment.

The replicator device will enable warfighters to generate disposable optical transmitters in real time, each with a user-specified message.  It will be compact, lightweight, and powered by batteries or solar cells.                        – DARPA website, Chemical Communications Program

With projects like these under his belt, Zakin is credited with reviving the chemistry discipline at DARPA, which had fallen away over the years. But now he’s scheduled to leave the agency in 2010. He is uncertain where he’s heading, but perhaps he can be persuaded to spend some time with like-minded souls in Microsoft Research; I suspect many there would find his infochemistry approach very appealing.  

An interesting profile of Dr. Zakin in the journal Analytical Chemistry notes that “Academia is one option. Venture capitalism is another. Zakin has launched so many basic science research projects that have the potential of becoming commercial products that he says, ‘it’s almost a sin not to look at all that from the other side.’ ”

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Twitter intends to launch a Twitter Labs soon. Labs are new way to galvanize its intern programmers, to test new applications for free and in real conditions and to benefit to useful users comments. Find out more about Twitter news in those articles: The speed of share, Twitter value and Twitter’s users follow ads.

L’avez-vous peut être déjà remarqué ? Mais de plus en plus de sites web développent des « labs ». Les pionniers ont été Google et son Gmail Labs ou encore Digg et son Digg Labs. D’autres sont apparus par la suite comme le Facebook Prototypes, Microsoft Research, le Wikio labs, le Netvibes labs ou encore le Yellow Pages Labs. Récemment, c’est Twitter qui a annoncé vouloir lancer le sien très prochainement.

Un labs ça sert à quoi ?

• Tester et faire tester des nouveautés aux utilisateurs sans risques puisque l’entreprise n’a pas à garantir la longévité et la fiabilité de la nouvelle fonction ou application.
• Stimuler la créativité des développeurs de l’entreprise qui peuvent faire tester leurs innovations en conditions réelles auprès des utilisateurs. Les commentaires des utilisateurs sont une mine d’or pour la société qui peut ensuite améliorer les fonctions et applications proposées.
• Le lab donne aussi une bonne image à l’entreprise, elle montre qu’elle est innovante et à l’écoute des utilisateurs. L’aspect « laboratoire » donne également un côté sérieux.
• Du coté utilisateur, il a y le pouvoir d’expérimenter les nouveautés avant les autres mais surtout l’accès à de nombreuses fonctionnalités innovantes et la possibilité de donner son avis qui sera très certainement considéré avec intérêt.

Le site de microblogging a donc toutes les raisons de vouloir créer son Twitter Labs. Attendons de voir ce que nous réservent les développeurs de Twitter.

D’autres informations sympas sur Twitter :

• Twitter vaudrait 1 milliard US$: En effet, d’après The Wall Street Journal, les  nouveaux investisseurs estiment à 1 milliard US$ la valeur du site de microblogging. Le nouvelle ronde d’investisseur injecteraient 100 millions US$ dans la société, ce qui lui permet de prendre son temps pour mettre au point un système de monétisation. Cependant, à la mi-septembre, Biz Stone, CEO de Twitter a déjà modifié les conditions d’utilisations du site afin d’y permettre l’affichage publicitaire. Cependant, la publicité sur Twitter n’apparaitra pas avant l’an prochain.

• Twitter plus rapide que Facebook : Nous savons tous que l’objectif de Facebook est de devenir la plus importante plateforme web en matière d’échange de contenu. Entre nous, il est plutôt sur la bonne voie avec ses 300 millions d’utilisateurs qui échangent quotidiennement  photos, vidéos, liens, messages…etc. Cependant, comme le démontre un article paru surTechcrunch.com, Twitter reste le meilleur outil pour partager des informations à une vitesse incomparable. En effet, partager une information sur Facebook demande un délai de plus de 30sec (en raison de ses paramètres par défaut assez contraignants) alors que seulement 2 secondes sont nécessaires pour tweeter une info. Même si 30 sec n’est pas une durée importante, les internautes qui réaliseront cette différence privilégierons les échanges sur Twitter.

• Etude insolite : D’après un sondage mené par la société Interpret auprès de 9200 internautes en août 2009, démontre que les utilisateurs de Twitter sont plus susceptibles de cliquer sur les annonces publicitaires et les liens commandités (20% contre 9% pour les utilisateurs de Facebook et autres réseaux sociaux).

Ajoutons à cela une croissance toujours explosive (54,7 millions de visiteurs uniques en août 2009 soit 13 fois plus que l’an dernier. Chiffres ComScore) et l’on a tous les moyens de penser que la saga Twitter a encore des beaux jours devant elle.

Sources : presse-citron.net ; benefice-net.branchez-vous.com ; techcrunch.com , t3.com, spectrosciences.com

How do intelligence analysts handle the long-discussed problem of information overload? (The same question goes for information workers and government data of any kind.)

I should put the word “problem” in quotation marks because there is now the persuasive counter-argument that there’s no such thing; Clay Shirky says that people may in fact suffer from what he calls filter failure, but that more information in an info-centric environment is still by definition a good thing.

Information overload started in Alexandria, in the library of Alexandria, right? That was the first example where we have concrete archaeological evidence that there was more information in one place than one human being could deal with in one lifetime, which is almost the definition of information overload. And the first deep attempt to categorize knowledge so that you could subset; the first take on the information filtering problem appears in the library of Alexandria.

By the time that the publishing industries spun up in Venice in the early- to mid-1500s, the ability to have access to more reading material than you could finish in a lifetime is now starting to become a general problem of the educated classes. And by the 1800s, it’s a general problem of the middle class. So there is no such thing as information overload, there’s only filter failure, right? Which is to say the normal case of modern life is information overload for all educated members of society…

So, the real question is, how do we design filters that let us find our way through this particular abundance of information?”   – “Overload! Interview with Clay Shirky,” Columbia Journalism Review December 19 2008

So let’s assume that filters are working for an analyst, yet she or he still sits atop an ever-replenished mountain of new and now presumably relevant data: images, field reports, news accounts, cryptic tweets, classic message traffic, and the like.  Even if filters whittle down the data to usable information – “good dots” – it still takes the human brain to investigate, explore, analyze, and connect those dots into accurate patterns, or to discern the true absence of connection, or to uncover a misleading connection.

I’ve heard often that intelligence work would be easier if we could be like Tom Cruise in Minority Report, manipulating large amounts of data by hand with 3D touch gestures. Can’t do that yet, but we’re approaching the capability in a variety of ways. One new way is inherent in the Windows 7 operating system I’ve been using in our internal Microsoft deployment for several months, because Win 7 has built-in support for multi-touch and gesture-based interaction techniques.

But most people won’t have a touch-screen laptop or monitor for their Win 7 use, at least not for a while. So there are possibilities we’re exploring internally and with partners for cheap and easy ways to take advantage of the multitouch capability in the OS. For example, why not just plug in a USB mouse-like device that actually enables full gesture-based computing?

Here’s a video showing several prototypes of exactly that, from our Applied Sciences Group and several Microsoft Research labs; check out especially the cool “Side Mouse” which appears at about 6:30 into the video:

Just thinking of national-security work, I think several of these approaches would be useful for imagery analysts, say, or defense planners, or intelligence professionals collaborating on large amounts of information. But there’s broader applicability too. I’ve been perplexed at my new Google Wave beta, in large part because the array of incoming information seems chaotic and non-intuitive; perhaps multitouch would add something there as well just among textual items.

This past week was a big exposition party for several new UI approaches from Microsoft Research, as researchers from our Cambridge and Redmond labs presented 13 separate papers and demo’s at the annual Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 2009),  in Victoria, British Columbia. UIST is a premier forum for innovation in the software and technology of human-computer interfaces, sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery’s special interest groups on computer-human interaction and computer graphics.

Among the papers MSR presented were the following:

Ripples: Utilizing Per-Contact Visualizations to Improve User Interaction with Touch Displays 

Contact Area Interaction with Sliding Widgets

Collabio: A Game for Annotating People within Social Networks 

Augmenting Interactive Tables with Mice & Keyboards

Enabling Always-Available Input with Muscle-Computer Interfaces

Optically Sensing Tongue Gestures for Computer Input

Integrated Videos and Maps for Driving Directions

You can find a full list here of the papers we presented at UIST 2009, with links to some additional cool videos as well. 

Let me know if you think there’s an interesting application of any of these approaches for government use in your arena.

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Social media expert danah boyd

One of the leading thinkers in social media is coming to the School of Information this week for the John Seely Brown Symposium on Technology and Society. danah boyd, a social media researcher at Microsoft Research New England and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, will speak on “Youth-Generated Culture: Growing Up in an Era of Social Media” at 2 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 13. The presentation — open to the public — will be in the Blau Auditorium, R1100 Ross School of Business (Tappan and Monroe Streets).

This provocative, free talk is sponsored by the School of Information with a generous gift from John Seely Brown. Anyone interested in understanding social media is encouraged to attend. In describing her planned talk, boyd says that whether on social networking sites, texting, or blogging, youth leverage the power of social media to create, communicate, share, and learn.

The centerpiece of the symposium is the John Seely Brown Lecture, which is supported by a gift from Brown, who is widely recognized simply as “JSB.” He is an alumnus of U-M, having earned an MS in mathematics in 1964 and a Ph.D. in computer and communication sciences in 1972. He has been a strong supporter of SI for a number of years.

The speaker will focus primarily on how American teenagers navigate the world of social media as a part of everyday life, with an eye toward privacy, sociality, and learning. She will also discuss the costs and challenges of unequal access and the complications that occur when social stratification is reproduced in digital environments.

A panel discussion will follow the talk. Panelists will be:

• danah boyd

• John Seely Brown, a visiting scholar at the University of Southern California and independent co-chairman of the Deloitte Center for Edge Innovation. Previously, he was chief scientist of Xerox Corp. and director of its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), positions he held for nearly two decades.

At Xerox PARC, Brown expanded the role of corporate research to include such topics as organizational learning, knowledge management, complex adaptive systems, ethnographic studies of the workscape, and nano technology. He also cofounded the Institute for Research on Learning. His personal research interests include the impact of globalization on business, the management of radical innovation, digital culture, ubiquitous computing, and organizational and individual learning.

JSB is a member of the National Academy of Education and a fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a trustee of Brown University and of the MacArthur Foundation. In 2004 he was inducted into the Industry Hall of Fame.

JSB has published more than 100 papers in scientific journals and was awarded the Harvard Business Review’s 1991 McKinsey Award for his article, “Research that Reinvents the Corporation,” and again in 2002 for his article “Your Next IT Strategy.”
With Paul Duguid he coauthored the acclaimed book, The Social Life of Information (HBS Press, 2000), which has been translated into nine languages.

His most recent book, with John Hagel, The Only Sustainable Edge, is about new forms of collaborative innovation. It also provides a novel framework for understanding what is really happening in off-shoring in India and China and how each is inventing powerful new ways to innovate, learn, and accelerate capability building.

JSB received a Bachelor of Arts from Brown University and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. He holds honorary doctoral degrees from Brown University, London Business School, Claremont Graduate School, and the University of Michigan. He also serves on the External Advisory Board of the School of Information.

• Cliff Lampe, an assistant professor in the Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies and Media at Michigan State University. Lampe studies large-scale online interactions and how socio-technical tools can be used as architecture in online systems. He has studied such sites as Facebook, Slashdot, NewsTrust, and Everything2 as part of this research agenda. Topics he studies include the use of recommender systems to socialize new members of online communities, the role Facebook interaction has on the generation of social capital, and how users participate in sites over longer periods of time. He received his Ph.D. in Information in 2006 from the School of Information.

• Libby Hemphill, a visiting scholar in the School of Public Affairs at Arizona State University. She studies distributed science and engineering project teams and is especially interested in how such teams leverage social media in service of their work. In her previous positions at the School of Information and Microsoft Research, she has explored the use of wikis, video conferencing, and E-mail lists in supporting newcomers to academic and industrial communities. She also heads Research at Work, a company that uses academic research findings to inform design of new social media tools and services. At the School of Information, she earned her Master of Science in Information in 2004 and will receive her Ph.D. in Information in December 2009.

• Edward Vielmetti, blogging leader at AnnArbor.com. He writes the “FOIA Friday” column where he explores archives and public records through the use of the Freedom of Information Act to document and explore the workings of government and its impact on people’s daily lives. Vielmetti is a graduate of the University of Michigan and a former program manager for the School of Information’s Community Information Corps. A native of the Upper Peninsula, he says he believes that Ann Arbor is overrated, and points to the prevalence of deep puddles of slush in the gutters of city streets in February as evidence.

• Paul Resnick, professor in the School of Information (moderator).

At the symposium, the recipient of the John Seely Brown Social Media Scholarship will be recognized. Emily Rosengren, a junior concentrating in informatics with an emphasis on social computing and minoring in Japanese language, was selected for the scholarship, which was made possible by a gift from JSB and danah boyd. During her time at the University of Michigan, Rosengren has been a part of the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts Honors Program and the Michigan Community Scholars Program (MCSP), a living-learning community focused on community service and social justice.

Rosengren is actively involved with the MCSP, serving as a peer advisor to community service and helping to coordinate the University-Community film series, which is a partnership with the Ann Arbor District Library. She has worked as a research assistant in the Science of Networks in Communities lab under Noshir Contractor at Northwestern University and is currently working under Paul Resnick in the University of Michigan School of Information.

During her sophomore year, Rosengren was first introduced to the field of social media by taking SI 110: “Introduction to Information Studies.” She was struck by how the issues of social media prompted her to look at things she uses every day in a new light and was fascinated by the way the field was both novel and extremely relevant.

Following the program, a reception will be held in the Business School atrium.

Additional details about the current and past JSB symposia are available.

Microsoft FUSE Labs, Τι ετοιμάζεται; | Techblog
H Microsoft δημιούργησε το FUSE Labs (Future Social Experiences), ένα group 82 ατόμων με επικεφαλής τον Ray Ozzie (δημιουργό του Lotus Notes). Η πληροφορία διέρρευσε από το εσωτερικό σημείωμα που έστειλε ο ίδιος ο Ozzie σε συναδέλφους του εχθές το πρωί. Δεν υπάρχει επίσημη ανακοίνωση ούτε το γίνεται αναφορά για το ακριβές αντικείμενο του group. Ο Ozzie στο σημείωμά του αναφέρει μεταξύ άλλων ότι το γρήγορο ίντερνετ και ο ολοένα και αυξανόμενος αριθμός ηλεκτρονικών συσκευών που συνδέεται σε αυτό μεγαλώνει αλλάζοντας τους τρόπους που χρησιμοποιούμε ακόμα και το λειτουργικό μας σύστημα[next]

Microsoft Research a prezentat cateva concepte interesante de mouse-uri multitouch. Fiecare dispune de e metode diferite pentru detectarea atingerii. Aveti o galerie foto mai jos:

I was randomly googling the word ‘Cibai‘ and guess what I found?

Check this out this link: http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=78035

The word ‘Cibai‘ is a local (Malaysia & Singapore) slang term for the vagina in the Chinese dialect which is equivalent to ‘Cunt‘ in US English.

Coincidently, in the article from the link above…CIBAI is a project by Microsoft’s researchers.

Well, it’s not such a big deal (and I don’t blame Microsoft for using such a funny name for their project) but to everybody who understands the term ‘Cibai‘ will find it funny if not offended.

However you view it, I’m looking forward to what Microsoft’s researchers will name their projects in the future.

Project Tuva é um aplicativo de vídeo desenvolvido pela Microsoft Research. Nele são reunidos história, vídeo interativo educação, ciência e aplicações ricas para internet. Projeto de Tuva é uma experiência de vídeo interativo que torna a aprendizagem sobre a ciência relevante e emocionante através de anotações de autores, pesquisadores e especialistas no assunto. Foi lançado com uma série de palestras do famoso físico Richard Feynman na Cornell University em 1964. Nos vídeos são inseridas camadas de informação contextual como transcrições pesquisáveis e legendas, informações extras sincronizadas com o vídeo, relacionamentos com recursos da internet e a possibilidade de fazer anotações enquanto assiste. Bastante diferente dos clips do YouTube. Para entender melhor o projeto.

Artigos relacionados

• Seven hours of Feynman lectures online (kottke.org)
• Bill Gates Puts Classic Feynman Lectures Online (science.slashdot.org)
• Project Tuva or Bust: How Microsoft’s Spin on Feynman Could Change the Way We Learn (xconomy.com)
• Bill Gates offers the world a physics lesson (news.cnet.com)
• Bill Gates talks Physics, Chrome OS, and Project Natal (blogs.msdn.com)
• Bill Gates puts videos of famous physicist online (seattlepi.com)

What is the “user interface of tomorrow”? In the past I have chronicled some cool Microsoft Research prototypes of flexible touchscreen interfaces - and even touchless interfaces!  And now this month one of my friends in MSR, Mary Czerwinski, has written in Venture Beat that “those types of interfaces could be the tip of the iceberg”:

A whole new set of interfaces are in the works at various stages of research and development… I have colleagues working on tongue-based interaction, bionic contacts lenses, a muscle-computer interface, and brain-computer interaction.” – Mary Czerwinski

Not bad! But working devices along those lines are several years away, so for now we’re stuck with the tablet form-factor as the primary basis for natural input. I’ve used a tablet PC on and off for the past five years, happily. My wife now uses an HP tablet.

So I’ve been eagerly following the blogosphere’s hyperventilation about the much-rumored, still-unseen Apple tablet computer, which has been variously described as being close to launch, far from launch, and non-existent.

In a similar vein, now comes Courier, which tech-blog Gizmodo describes as “Microsoft’s astonishing take on the tablet.”  Although rival site Engadget quickly followed with a riposte that Courier “isn’t near production,” Gizmodo’s post last night titled “Microsoft’s Secret Tablet” reports that “we’ve heard that it’s in the ‘late prototype’ stage of development. It’s not a tablet, it’s a booklet.”

The dual 7-inch (or so) screens are multitouch, and designed for writing, flicking and drawing with a stylus, in addition to fingers… On the back cover is a camera, and it might charge through an inductive pad, like the Palm Touchstone charging dock for Pre. Until recently, it was a skunkworks project deep inside Microsoft, only known to the few engineers and executives working on it—Microsoft’s brightest.” – Gizmodo

I’m not vouching for that. Even if all that were true, I couldn’t comment. But now that the concept/demo video has made its way to certain corners of the web – it even hit youTube within the past hour - I can certainly repost it here legitimately as merely an interesting take on how multitouch and gesture-interfaces can make the use of advanced computing as natural as opening a book. Take a look…

Note: For more information on Mary Czerwinski’s work visit the Visualization and Interaction (VIBE) Research Group site, which includes her own research focus on novel information visualization, interaction techniques, and user interface design.

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A sneak preview of the September SIGACT News Distributed Computing Column is now available here (Technion) and here (MIT).  Before I get into the newest column, I would just like to give a shout out to Idit Keidar, who I think has done an exceptional job of maintaining and advertising the SIGACT Distributed Computing column over the past few years.  Archived copies of past columns are on the above web sites – check them out.

The column for September, by Lidong Zhou lead researcher at Microsoft Research Asia , is about the tension between theoretical and practical research in distributed systems.  In fact, a major focus of the article (and a timely one for this blog) is practical ways to solve consensus in order to ensure reliability in large-scale distributed systems.  There are several interesting things I learned (or relearned) from this column including:

• The replicated machine approach based on consensus is considered by industry (well one good researcher at Microsoft at least) to be directly applicable to the problem of cloud computing.
• Algorithmic simplicity and graceful degradation of security guarantees are two properties desired by practitioners that currently seem to be ignored by theoreticians.
• One of the reasons for the popularity of the Paxos algorithm for solving consensus is its flexibility: it captures critical parts of the consensus problem but leaves “non-essential” details such as the exact protocol for choosing a leader unspecified.
• Lidong mentions that much of the inspiration for the column came from his “responsibility for the distributed systems behind various on-line services, such as Hotmail and the Bing search engine.”  I’m curious if this means that algorithms for consensus, such as Paxos, are at the heart of the robustness mechanisms for such systems.  If so, then the consensus problem is even more pervasive than I thought.

I was recently looking at Microsoft Research site where I stumbled upon the “Project Tuva”.  I was impressed about the project though the concept was quite simple.  What impressed me more was the content featured in “Project Tuva”.

Tuva is a web video player with options to show related data at related intervals of playing the video.  It has also options to bookmark the video and divide it into chapters. And then there is an option to add notes to the video, search the video, expert comments etc.  That’s good right alright.  But what impressed me was not the application but the featured video of “Dr.Richard Feynman”.

Dr.Richard Feynman was a professor of physics.  He delivered a series of lectures at Cornell university in US in 1964.  These lectures were called the “Messenger Series” and were about the fundamental laws of physics.  Dr.Feynman is an exemplary teacher and that  is seen in these lectures.  His way of putting things of physics is simply amazing.  Bill Gates was really impressed by these lectures and procured the right for these videos and published them here in project Tuva. When I watched one of these videos  I was able to clearly understand some very basic physical laws and believe me it was fun.  There are totally 7 of these lectures from Dr.Feynman in project Tuva.  You can check out the application “Tuva” and the lectures from the following URL: http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/

I’ll call the moment: the cyber security field is now past its giddy buzzword peak.

Gartner is well known for preparing “hype cycle” analysis of technology sectors, as in their recent publication of the 2009 “Hype Cycle for Social Software.” That report got a lot of attention on Twitter and in blogs, naturally; social medians are nothing if not self-reflective regarding their community. I thought an interesting take was by an IBM developer, who compared the 2008 version against the new one, measuring the changes in predicted “time to maturity” for individual technologies, and thereby coming up with something like a measure of acceleration. By that measure, individual blogging and social search made the most rapid gains.

But I notice something missing on the full list of 79 Gartner hype cycle reports: there’s not one about “cyber security.”

To the left you can see their uber-cycle, the latest chart of all “Emerging Technologies.” Among the dozens of “technology, topic and industry areas” across all their charts, the closest thing to covering the “cyber” world is the Data and Application Security Hype Cycle, which lists no fewer than 21 contributing analysts but still can’t see fit to reflect the broadest reaches of internet security. Its abstract alludes to Internet security, but makes clear that its focus is on several specific (not to say narrow) technical approaches:

Enterprise boundaries continue to blur as data is shared across the Internet between partner organizations and unmanaged endpoints, increasing concerns about data leakage and manipulation. This is encouraging greater use of application layer and data layer security controls.

Now, those topics are of course related to information security and assurance, and yet they don’t approach the overall breadth of the tangled spaghetti of technical, policy, and political issues that make up the messy cyber-security realm.

This week I expected to get a snapshot of where that messy realm stands, by attending the “National Cyber Leap Year Summit” in Arlington, Virginia. It was a joint DoD-White House production, by invitation only, and sponsored by the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), and the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Networks and Information Integration (NII).

They wisely used as an organizational umbrella the Federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program, the quiet but important organizing construct for federal R&D. NITRD describes itself as

the primary mechanism by which the Government coordinates its unclassified networking and information technology (IT) research and development (R&D) investments. Thirteen Federal agencies, including all of the large science and technology agencies, are formal members of the NITRD Program, whose combined 2007 IT R&D budgets totaled more than $3 billion.”

Member agencies include DARPA, DOE and the National Labs, NASA, NIH, NIST, EPA, NARA, AHRQ, NOAA, NSA, NSF, OSD, and the DOD Research Labs. All of those groups were represented at the Cyber Leap Year Summit this week – along with a panoply of top names from corporate and academic security work and research – you name ‘em, they were represented.

And yet I came away slightly disappointed – not with the effort by the event’s organizers, but with the outcome. The premise of the session was to provide “leap-ahead, game-changing” ideas and proposals. Some were indeed offered in sessions, kicked around, and debated, dismissed, or set aside for further exploration. There were five tracks in the conference:

Each track wound up having valuable brainstorming sessions, with some innovative ideas and approaches generated, all of which are now being captured in a wiki.  (Participants were provided with password access to the wiki; if it is opened to broader access I will update this post with a link.)

I mostly attended the Cyber Economics sessions, which had the closest relevance to government policies as far as I could tell.  Our ideas ranged from innovative ways to raise the economic costs to bad guys on the Internet, to establishing something like a “cyber NTSB,” which would mirror its Transportation Safety counterpart in collecting, analyzing, and reporting out data on cyber attacks and information-security incidents. Good ideas, but nothing game-changing on its face.

I stuck my head into the other groups from time to time as well, and listened closely at the wrap-up “mix ‘n’ match” discussions at yesterday’s final sessions, hoping to hear a breakthrough idea.  I’ll admit, I personally had none to contribute – cyber security is not my native field of expertise though I do my best. But unless I’m mistaken, no one else had a true “game-changing” breakthrough either.  Overall there was a sense of “heard it all before” quietly sitting like a ground-hugging fog in the conference rooms.

Now, that’s not necessarily dire; this is tough stuff and you can’t expect a single conference, even with the biggest brains in attendance, to produce elegantly brilliant policy and technical solutions to enormous challenges of long standing. But it indicates to me that the publicly-discussed field of cyber security is echoing certain stages on the Gartner Hype Cycle.

Down in the Valley

That cycle charts “Expectations” against a Time axis in the life of technologies or industries. Over the past couple of years, I would say that Cyber security has ramped quickly up the “Inflated Expectations” hype curve. I’d argue that it approached its “Peak of Inflated Expectations” the moment that presidential candidate Barack Obama pledged on the campaign trail that “I’ll declare our cyber-infrastructure a strategic asset and appoint a National Cyber Adviser who will report directly to me.”

How’s that promise coming along? Not well.  The inflated expectations crested the moment Melissa Hathaway published the much anticipated, now nearly forgotten, 60-Day Cyberspace Policy Review. You can see my previous pieces on the Cyber Czar debacle, read an adamant op-ed in this week’s Business Week titled “The U.S. Needs a Cybersecurity Czar Now,” or read one of DC’s keenest political observers, The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder, who now believes that the leadership vacuum is increasing “jitters about whether the Obama administration is devoting enough bandwidth to the issue.” Marc’s piece (“On Cyber, Homeland Security Isn’t Waiting“) argues that DHS is picking up the baton in the vacuum, but many of the folks I know up at Ft. Meade scoff at that, and are quietly quietly burrowing away at the bureaucratic-politics game themselves.

There’s a lot of effort going on to secure things all right – things like bureaucratic turf, budget billions, and presidential face-time.

Per Gartner’s paradigm, cyber security as an issue is heading straight down into the “Trough of Disillusionment.”  That’s not an indictment of those working in the field. Indeed, in Gartner’s methodology, to be successful, technologies almost inevitably follow a path ”from overenthusiasm through a period of disillusionment to an eventual understanding of the technology’s relevance and role in a market or domain.”

The Slow Climb to Enlightenment

So what is to be done, down here in the valley? Well, I’d argue that technologists just ignore the politics and the Time-magazine covers and the frenzied Twitter chronicles of who’s in and who’s out.  I’ll try to avoid that stuff as well, as a prime offender (no promises), and do a fair job of tracking the technical progress of promising research.

To that end, I’ll end with a nod to a cool Microsoft Research project being unveiled this week at the SIGCOMM 2009 conference in Spain: “De-Anonymizing the Internet Using Unreliable IDs.”  Researchers Yinglian Xie, Fang Yu, and Martin Abadi have just published a great paper (available in PDF here) detailing their “Host Tracker” work aimed at malicious traffic which cannot typically be “held accountable” in today’s open, anonymous Internet of free traffic from any host.  “HostTracker tracks dynamic bindings between hosts and IP addresses by leveraging application-level data with unreliable IDs.”

As the early coverage in Technology Review  puts it, Internet anonymity can be both a blessing and a curse, because “the same technologies allow cybercriminals to hide their tracks and pass off malicious code and spam for legitimate communications.” TR goes on in their assessment:

[HostTracker represents] a way to remove the shield of anonymity from such shadowy attackers. Using a new software tool, the three computer scientists were able to identify the machines responsible for malicious activity, even when the host’s IP address changed frequently. “What we are really trying to get at is the host responsible for an attack,” said Yinglian Xie, a member of the Microsoft team. “We are not trying to track those identifiers but associate them with a particular host.”

The prototype system, dubbed HostTracker, could result in better defenses against online attacks and spam campaigns. Security firms could, for example, build a better picture of which Internet hosts should be blocked from sending traffic to their clients, and cybercriminals would have a harder time camouflaging their activities as legitimate traffic. - Technology Review

HostTracker is squarely aimed at several of the questions across the five-track sections in the Cyber Leap Year Summit, including the “Digital Provenance” and “Moving-Target Defense” areas.  If it’s successful, it could begin to chip away at the economics of cyber attacks as well – at least until the attackers’ next innovation, which will drive the cycle of good-guy research again.

Hmm – a cycle. Gartner, get to work!

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Here’s a nifty demo of a very small piece of software, that could find daily use for large numbers of people in any large enterprise, or any shopper in a mall – anywhere someone’s wandering in a large building or complex looking for a specific office, conference room, storefront, or location – especially indoors where GPS is of no use.

It’s called GoMap, and I think it could have great applicability for government complexes, which have lots of rabbit-warren hallways, lots of constantly-reassigned workers, and lots of visitors.

I missed GoMap’s first public unveiling today because I’m on the east coast this week, mostly for the Cybersecurity “Leap Ahead” conference in Arlington Virginia which wrapped up today; I will write about the conference separately.

But that meant I had to miss the bar-camp-style WinMoDevCamp today on the Microsoft campus in Redmond. There was a lot of buzz around this DevCamp, and there’ll be others in 6 more cities soon (Austin, London, New York, San Francisco, Singapore, and Toronto) as developers gear up for the upcoming release of the Windows Mobile 6.5 operating system.  You can get registration information about the future events at the main WinMoDevCamp site (props to Todd Bishop on his TechFlash blog for highlighting the series).

The GoMap prototype makes innovative location-aware use of Microsoft Tag and TagReader (the high-capacity color barcodes developed by Microsoft Research), to solve the problem of having no GPS capability indoors  - check out the short video.

WinMoDevCamp is an indication that there’s a real explosion of app development going on in the Windows Mobile world, to match the equally exciting iPhone app and Android app activity. There’s been a feeling in Microsoft that our best advantages are the large installed base through third-party WinMo phone manufacturers, plus Microsoft’s long experience nurturing app developers on other platforms (.Net as a good example).  But I personally think that superior innovation is going to be the battleground, and we’re well positioned for that as well, with a lot of exciting things emerging from Microsoft Research and different advanced development labs in product groups. GoMap’s one example.

Not sure of the timeline for GoMap, but you can use TagReader right now, without the GoMap piece. It’s a free download on the Tag webpage, or you can get it on any mobile phone (yes, even the exploding iPhone) at http://gettag.mobi.

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Búsqueda en el cielo: SkyFinder divide una imagen de forma automática en trozos y asigna etiquetas a cada uno, permitiendo a los usuarios buscar imágenes como las de arriba. Fuente: Hamed Saber, CoreBurn, Beyond the Lens, pfly (CC2.0 license

Un grupo de investigadores diseña un sistema que reconoce las características de las fotos del cielo.

La semana pasada en SIGGRAPH, una conferencia internacional sobre gráficos de ordenador, un grupo presentó un sistema innovador diseñado para analizar las imágenes del cielo. La mayoría de los sistemas comerciales de búsqueda de imágenes logran averiguar los contenidos de las imágenes mediante el análisis del texto asociado, tales como las palabras que rodean a una foto en una página web o las etiquetas asociadas a ellas por otras personas. Sin embargo, lo ideal sería que el software analizase el contenido de la imagen por sí mismo. Se ha llevado a cabo una gran cantidad de investigación en este campo, pero ningún sistema ha logrado solucionar el problema. El nuevo sistema, llamado SkyFinder, podría ofrecer pistas importantes sobre cómo crear una herramienta de búsqueda de imágenes que sea escalable, automática e intuitiva.

Jian Sun, que trabajó en SkyFinder y es el investigador principal de Visual Computing Group en Microsoft Research, afirma que el método tradicional que se sigue en la búsqueda de imágenes a veces produce resultados sin sentido cuando el ordenador malinterpreta el texto colindante. Normalmente, los motores que analizan el contenido de las imágenes en sí en vez del texto necesitan una imagen que sirva de guía para la búsqueda—algo que haya enviado el usuario y que se parezca al resultado que se busca. Desafortunadamente, una imagen como tal puede que no resulte fácil de encontrar para el usuario. Sun afirma que SkyFinder, por otro lado, ofrece buenos resultados y al mismo tiempo permite al usuario interactuar de forma intuitiva con el motor de búsqueda.

Para buscar una imagen del cielo específica, el usuario simplemente introduce una petición de búsqueda con un leguaje bastante natural, tal como “cielo cubierto con nubes negras, con el horizonte en la parte de debajo de la foto.” SkyFinder ofrece sugerencias sobre imágenes que se ajusten a la descripción.

Cada imagen se procesa después de ser añadida a la base de datos. Mediante el uso de un popular método llamado “bolsa de palabras,” según explica Sun, la imagen se divide en pequeños parches, se analizan y se les asignan palabras clave que las describen visualmente. Al analizar los patrones de las palabras clave, el sistema clasifica la imagen en categorías tales como “cielo azul” o “atardecer,” y determina la posición del sol y el horizonte. Al hacer todo esto offline, afirma Sun, el sistema puede hacerse más grande de forma fácil para poder hacer búsquedas en bases de datos de imágenes de gran tamaño. (La base de datos de SkyFinder en la actualidad posee medio millón de imágenes.)

También es posible ajustar los términos de búsqueda utilizando una interfaz visual. El sistema ofrece una pantalla, por ejemplo, donde el usuario puede ajustar los iconos para mostrar las posiciones deseadas del sol y el horizonte. Estas coordinadas después se añaden a la búsqueda.

SkyFinder trata las imágenes de forma lógica en la pantalla—por ejemplo, desde un cielo azul hasta un cielo nublado, o desde el día hasta el atardecer. Una vez que el usuario ha encontrado una imagen que le gusta, la puede utilizar para hacer una búsqueda guiada y más localizada de imágenes similares.

El sistema también incluye herramientas para ayudar al usuario a reemplazar el cielo en una imagen con el cielo de otra fotografía.

“Los gráficos por ordenador han tenido mucho éxito durante las décadas pasadas, pero aún sigue siendo imposible para el usuario de ordenador medio poder sintetizar una imagen arbitraria o un video según sus deseos,” afirma James Hays, que no estuvo involucrado con la investigación y que posee un doctorado en ciencias informáticas de la Universidad Carnegie Mellon. Cree que es importante poder desarrollar herramientas más sofisticadas para aquellos usuarios con menos experiencia, que podrían utilizar una herramienta como SkyFinder para encontrar la imagen que deseen y para hacer ajustes en una imagen ya existente. Hays cree que la mayor contribución de SkyFinder es su interfaz de usuario.

Ritendra Datta, ingeniero de Google y estudioso del aprendizaje de máquinas y la búsqueda de imágenes, afirma que el hecho de permitir que los ordenadores comprendan de forma automática lo que se muestra en las imágenes es uno de los mayores problemas actuales en el campo de la búsqueda de imágenes. “SkyFinder parece ser un nuevo método interesante” que funciona para un tipo de imagen. Datta cree que los avances en aplicaciones especializadas podrían finalmente ser aplicados a mayor escala.

También cree, sin embargo, que es realmente necesario llevar a cabo estudios de usabilidad para los sistemas de búsqueda que dependan automáticamente del análisis de imágenes.

Sun tiene planes para mejorar SkyFinder y ajustarlo para que analice más atributos del cielo, además de expandir la base de datos. Por ahora, afirma, los sistemas para el análisis automático de imágenes se tienen que entrenar de formas completamentes distintas dependiendo del tipo de imagen con la que estén trabajando. Sin embargo, afirma, que el ejemplo de SkyFinder podría utilizarse para identificar fotos del cielo entre un banco general de imágenes.

Fuente: TechnologyReview. A la búsqueda del trozo de cielo correcto