Microsoft Research and Photography
One of the talks we had here at Tech-Ready on Wednesday was from Kevin Schofield. Kevin's General manager for Microsoft Research, and he blogged about the experience of talking to us. I'm always pleased to be allowed to keep company with the people in Microsoft because we've got really, really smart people here. But when ordinary MS employees look over to MS-R we're always slightly in awe. Just about any talk from them is worth being at, and Kevin had more cool stuff to talk about than there was time for: he made up for this by speaking at the speed of racehorse commentator ... Which just adds to the feeling that he's excited by this stuff. Excitement has been a theme this week.
Kevin talked about Honey Monkey which we use pro-actively to hunt down websites with browser exploits - we also make sure that our search engines don't link to those sites, it's great to know we're doing stuff like that in the background.
Then he moved on to some photography stuff, starting with sense cam, which he was wearing on stage. I don’t know what it recorded, but Kevin, you should have put the pictures on your blog :-) .Researchers have had some great results working with people with memory loss using sense cam, and I can see everything from art projects to seeing what pre-school children have done at nursery being other niches where this will fit if it comes to market. Some hardware they do sees the light of day (the Roundtable device for example) some doesn't.
There is some software you get access to today. You know how when you to take a photo of a group of people somone's looking the wrong way, or got their eyes shut, or pulling a funny face ? In fact, above a certain size group you're sure to get someone ... Group shot lets you take a group of pictures and montage the best bits of them altogether. Just put your camera in multishot mode, take 3 or 4 and turn them into the perfect one - don't shoot many family groups ? I had 3 shots of the Arc De Triomphe in Paris, with group shot I could take the cars out - I'm having a little trouble saving results from Group shot in Vista but I'll post when I have them. The other thing Kevin showed was photosynth. Really, really cool way of taking pictures and location information and merging them together. Go take a look.