Innovation is global, says Microsoft executive

Innovation has always been a global enterprise, and even within the U.S. about half of all PhDs are given to people that were not born in the U.S., according to Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research, the research and development (R&D) arm of Microsoft.

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Rashid was in Bangalore last week for a research conference hosted by Microsoft Research’s Indian lab. Rashid spoke to IDG News Service on the sidelines of the conference about the globalization of R&D, some of the technologies Microsoft Research is working on such as on-the-fly translation in instant messaging, and other issues. Below an edited version of the interview.

IDG News Service: In your address, you referred to your research on surface computing. Could you give some more details on that?

Rashid: In the not too distant future, we believe that it will be possible to turn almost any surface into a computing surface. So what we are doing now is research investigation both on the technology to support that, and also on the user interface technology, the way people will use it, and the kinds of applications that might exist. I showed (at the conference) a specific one of those which is the PlayAnywhere work, where we are also looking at wall sized displays, we are looking at new kinds of gesture-based interfaces, and we are also looking at technology that has a semi-transparent surface where you can put physical objects against it, and it will be able to see them and interact with them.

IDGNS: What would be the likely applications for these technologies?

Rashid: The applications could be all sorts of things. It could be used in medical applications, for visualization by doctors, where they need people to use their hands to manipulate the images. It could be used in cartography or digital mapping where you've got to be able to physically see and turn and manipulate the interface. It could be used by teachers to show things, and it could also be used by corporations for the visualization of information. So there is lots of potential usage.

IDGNS: Do you expect products based on this technology any time soon?

Rashid: We never know when something is going to change into a product. I can never predict that. Right now it is research that we are publishing.

IDGNS: The head of the Indian, lab, P. Anandan, said that his team had developed a framework that would enable instant messages to be translated from one language to another on the fly. Do you see this technology getting into a product from Microsoft?

Rashid: One of the things we are trying to explore with the MSN group is how we can get that technology available. I think that probably sometime over the next year to 18 months or so, you will start to see those kinds of features both in our products, and probably in products from our competitors. The specific goal we have with this work is to really make it multilingual, and not just something into English or English into something.

IDGNS: What are the other focus areas for Microsoft Research globally?

Rashid: We do research in more than 55 different areas. We do work in computer vision, in image editing, graphics, and 3-D imagery. We also do work in software engineering technologies which are of course critical to Microsoft. We also do work for example in AIDS research. Some of our researchers have been using computer science techniques to tackle the problem of identifying and creating vaccine candidates for the AIDS virus. We are not just doing core computer science but also work on the fringes whether that maybe biology, maybe physics and other areas.