Microsoft Research was also present at the PDC
Online Astronomy collection
Microsoft engineer Jim Gray showed an online astronomy collection he's developing with researchers at the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a project compiling a complete map of skies visible from the Northern Hemisphere.
The survey's catalog contains information on about 100 million objects, and Gray and the project's astronomers have built a new database and a Web site for the public with the information, at skyserver.sdss.org.
Wallop
Microsoft researcher Lili Cheng demonstrated how software can group a person's friends, family and co-workers based on e-mail behavior.
Right now, Cheng said, most people haven't sorted their e-mail contacts into groups. Instead, they're lumped together alphabetically. Microsoft is developing software that sorts contacts based on how frequently a person e-mails them.
Cheng also demonstrated a program called Wallop that combines a contact list with e-mail, Web logs and other ways of communicating.
Sketching from maths equations
John SanGiovanni, a technical evangelist at Microsoft, showed software in development that allows people to sketch and animate stick-figure drawings based on math equations. A user could draw a quick sketch on the Tablet PC and tell the software to animate the sketch according to a particular mathematical formula.
He drew a baseball player at a ballpark and showed how the software could animate a home run to demonstrate a formula. If a user plugged in different numbers for gravity or distance, for example, the animation would change.
He also drew circles on a blank page and showed how they could be animated to roll down a hill and land in a collection bin.
"Microsoft Research believes that the student notebook of tomorrow is a really highly sophisticated digital mobile device," he said.
Rashid said Microsoft is eyeing an opportunity to change the way computers are used in education and science.
"We're not done yet," he said. "There's a tremendous amount of new technology in the pipe."
Source: Seattle Times