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Rick Rashid has been the head of Microsoft Research since he founded the group 15 years ago in 1991. Apparently, he always takes all of the people who work for him to the premier of every new Star Trek movie.
Some notes from Rick's speech:
Microsoft Research currently has 750 researchers (it will be 800 by the end of June) working in research labs spread over 4 countries. The group has published over 3,700 peer-reviewed papers based on its research.
MSR's mission statement: Move the state of the art forward, and rapidly transfer innovative technologies into products.
Rick showed off a couple of projects in his slideshow. One is the SenseCam, a wearable device developed at the lab in Cambridge, U.K. It's a black box for humans – a device that can record video and audio as you walk around. They've been using the device to help people who suffer from memory loss remember recent events. Another is BubbleBoard, a Windows desktop app that creates a visual interface for your voicemail, giving you a faster way to manage your incoming messages.
Rick's team also has an idea for a better CAPTCHA called Asirra. It uses cute kittens instead of mangled text. Show a human 12 photographs of cats and dogs and ask, "which of these are cats?" It's easy for most humans to solve, but extremely difficult for machines. In a nice twist, the images of the animals used in the visual CAPTCHAs can be adopted from local shelters.
One of Rick's researchers walked us through a demo of the Space Telescope World Wide Telescope, often called the Virtual Observatory, a new software app they created. It's a zoomable map of the night sky, like Google Earth flipped around. Users can browse the sky, zoom in on galaxies and explore different objects in space. Very slick.
