On 7th November 2008, my collegues from our lab (gameLab) and me had a rare privilege to attend the conference Computing in the 21st Century held by Microsoft Research Asia(MSRA) in Suntec City Convention Centre. The conference was actually annual conference and most of the previous conferences were held in China. However, for this year we are fortunate enough to have the conference in Singapore such that the students in Singapore such as from NTU and NUS could have the chance to attend the conference.

The conference started at noon, however before it was officially started, Ms. Pratibha Kumar (Academic Developer Evangelist of Microsoft Singapore) gave us a brief overview of current status of Microsoft which now is focussing on rich user experience by combining server and client side of the applications. She also gave us brief demonstration of lates Microsoft products, DeepZoom and  Microsoft PopFly. DeepZoom basically is a cousin of Google Earth in which we can zoom deeply to the image and see the detail in the small regions of the image. It can be achieved by having images in multi-resolutions and the application will seamlessly from from one resolution to another resolution as the user zooms in or out. One example is the memorabilia page of Hard Rock in : http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/ as demonstrated by Ms. Pratibha Kumar in the conference. Another interesting demonstration is Microsoft Popfly in which we can build applications just by dragging and connecting the mashups or the building blocks without the need to do the programming.

The conference was then opened with speeches delivered by Dr. Baining Guo (Assistant Managing Director of Microsoft Research Asia), Real Admiral Ronnie Tay (Chief Executive Officer of Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore), Dr. Su Guaning (President of NTU), and Professor Tan Eng Chye (Deputy President and Provost of NUS). The most interesting part of the speech is that our project Cacani and the head of our project, Prof. Seah Hock Soon were mentioned in Dr. Su Guaning’s speech. Another interesting point is that how the cooperation between Microsoft and NTU was started from a single direct e-mail to Bill Gates from NTU. Thus, if the reader is from an institution and wants to have cooperation with Microsoft, one should not be hesitate to open communication with Microsoft. After all, how can we expect others to know about ourselves without us going out and telling others ?

In the heart of the conference is the speeches from Keynote Speakers who are renowned and influential people in computing community, with three of them are Turing Award Recipients. The speakers are Dr. Rick Rashid, Dr. Raj Reddy, Dr. Tony Hoare (the creator of the infamous quicksort), Dr. Hsiao-Wuen hon, and Dr. Butler Lampson. The introduction to the speakers as well as the abstract of the speeches can be read in : http://research.microsoft.com/asia/21stcomputing/2008/ENindex3.html.

The first speaker, Dr. Rick Rashid explained how the research division was established back in 90’s with the focus was on basic research, over the time the research division (aka. Microsoft Research) grows and several branches of Microsoft Research in over the world was established. He also gave some demonstration of recent researches in Microsoft:

• World Wide Telescope : A tool similar to Google Sky which can show the celestial bodies. The data used in this program are from NASA (and possibly also from other sources) and are used by every scientist in the world. This is part one of Microsoft programme, which is providing collaborative data to everyone in the world especially the scientists.

• Boku : A simple visual programming tool for creating games easily with the targeted audience is the children. Dr. Rick Rashid also mentioned that his 9 year old child could do programming in C#. This is an amazing feat, as I was able to do programming (by reading high school programming book) after about few years older than his child, and that was only BASIC language.

• Microsoft Surface : A cool touchscreen screen which can accept multiple touches simultaneously.

The next speaker, Dr. Raj Reddy who is the mentor of some of the Microsoft Research Asia leaders, talked how the technology can be used to aid the life of the people especially the poor ones. He gave some video examples, such as automatic car driving system (similar to KITT from Knight Rider), online database of works (books, music, videos, etc.), computer usage in school, and emergency response system to reduce the mortality (especially in India). He deviated a little by mentioning education system in India, how the SAT is unfair as not all students in India get proper education especially those poor ones in villages. To help poor students from villages, the university might take for example 10 students from each school in the village no without considering greatly the capability of the students.

The programme continued to the third speaker, the legendary Dr. Tony Hoare who is the inventor of the quicksort algorithm. His speech was about the his vision for the programming “Zero error programming”. What he’s explaining is more or less as the abstract of his speech covered in the conference introduction page.

The conference speech then revert back to the discussion about Microsoft Research, specifically Microsoft Research Asia, by Dr. Hsiao-Wuen hon. Apparently, every year Microsoft Research manages to submit huge amount of papers to the conference (eg. SIGGRAPH for computer graphics) and it becomes one of the biggest institution in computing field as MSRA is a pool of talents. Over the years, there are also more and more PhD students become intern at Microsoft Research. Some works from MSRA are presented in the speech, such as image deblurring from a blurred images (ie. taken from a camera with shaky hand), multimedia annotation of large image (eg. specific sound is played when the user zooms to a specific part of the image), engkool (chinese-english translation tool which considers the context of the sentence. Will be available in MSRA website), and travel map planner or note which coupled with images taken from a camera as well as data from GPS.

The last speaker, Dr. Butler Lampson, the development of the computer from past until the future. As in Moore’s law, the development of the computer is rapid and enable people to create many new innovative applications which can assist the life.

After all the speeches, there was an Q&A section. However, because we were too hungry at that time, we had to leave early and in the end we missed out some (possibly) interesting discussions in the Q&A as I noticed that there were many students queued up for the microphone.

During the conference, there were two awards awared to intern students, one is from NTU and another one is from NUS. Since both students were in China, their supervisors received the award on their behalf. The supervisor for the awardee from NTU turned out to be my lecturer for the course I’m taking this semester,(Digital Image Processing), Dr. Cham Tat Jen. Well, congratulation, Dr. Cham !

One side note, actually I expected the conference to had shown the demo of Windows 7. But unfortunately, they didn’t.