REDMOND, WASH.-- MICROSOFT'S vice president of Research, Dan Ling, detailed an intiative Wednesday that will emerge as part of the company's .NET Web services strategy.

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Key functions that the Microsoft Research division is working on to enhance .NET are communications and notifications. As part of that effort, Ling showed an initiative called Sideshow.

"Human attention is a scarce resource," Ling said. Looking to harness that, Microsoft is enabling users to tailor how, where, and when they prefer to receive notifications.

He added that Microsoft is taking a two-part approach to notification delivery. The first aspect is to make the delivery mechanisms, be it e-mail, instant messaging, or other means, intelligent enough to know where the user is, and how best to reach that individual. An early form of this shipped in Outlook Mobile Manager.

The second prong, which is where Sideshow comes in, is a notion Ling called "peripheral awareness."

"Rather than demanding users' attention, you do something at the edge of the screen," he said, and when a user is ready for that information, the person can access it.

Sideshow will be a part of the Windows desktop that is always visible, much like the start menu across the bottom of the screen, and contains icons that prevent a view of the users world, including calendar and calendar sharing with others, a buddy list with pictures, and various third-party content, such as traffic, weather, and news.

Under the Sideshow model, users can mouse over an icon, which pulls up a bit more information, and they can automatically go to the origin of the information if they so choose. In other words, if they mouse over the traffic icon and see a map of their route home, but want to see the actual route, clicking on the icon will bring up a live camera shot of any of the roads.

Another area that Microsoft is looking at is electronic communities. "One of the things we're doing in Research is to have sociologists look at online communities and try to understand them in the way we understand [other] communities," he said.

Looking toward the future, Microsoft Research is working on MEMS (Micro Electromechanical Systems), which essentially enables the integration of sensors and actuators into computers.

"The advent of MEMS is going to allow computers to have more of an affect on the world," he said. Ling pointed to a healthcare scenario as an example in which sensors detect insulin levels in a person with diabetes and recommend dosage levels.

Furthermore, Microsoft is looking to understand the relationship between physics and computer science, Ling added.

But the road to .NET is not without obstacles, and Microsoft's productivity group within the research unit also is at work on Web services, according to Amitabh Srivastava, a distinguished engineer and director of the programmer productivity research center.

".NET is providing new challenges for us. Our focus is on prevention, early detection, and rapid research and development," Srivastava said.