Kevin Schofield
GM Microsoft Research

Microsoft Research is trying to advance state of the art. Yep. Sounds like a good plan.

XBox live true skill - monitor players to allow for matching players of like skill
This idea I like. Depending on how well they match up players. It would be interesting if they were to make sure that you had a comparable style and also mixed things up. I am a pretty good player of StarCraft, but I am a sucker for a well executed Zerg rush. If it just watched how I played from an overall execution perspective, I don't know if it would understand the rush strategy causes me issues. Also, I would want to play games with similar people sometimes, and much harder people other times. Nothing raises your game more than competing against a top person.

He wants to bring computers up to what humans are doing now. Things we are manually doing using computers will hopefully be replaced by the computer taking care of it.

They have invested a lot of money in automating IE. They drive IE all around the web using Strider Black Box Crawler. It is actually driving IE, so it looks like IE to the websites that it is scanning. Since some sites change their responses based on the client that is walking them. Since this is a controlled environment, any modifications on the local system are an exploit. They have heavily instrumented the system to make sure that they can track where an exploit came from and how it worked. This allows them to catch exploits as soon as possible. They are also crawling the web with all patch leves for OS and IE.

Another analysis that he presented is the value in typo squatting for URLs. $7/year registration = 0.38 unique hits at a $.05 valuation per user to pay for a domain.

He had some very nice toys that he demonstrated. Two gigapixel images that you can pan around and zoom in on in real time. Imaging seeing all of San Francisco, and then relatively quickly going all the way in to see a baseball player on base. Very nice technology.

He had a great demo of some very early technology that can be trained to recognize objects on a static background. This was a pretty cool system that was recognizing things like phones, keys, rulers, cups, ... when they were placed in the field of view. It was still really early, but it was made of off the shelf parts and worked pretty quickly and well.

Fun fact: On the curve of power density, the Pentium CPU is greater than that of a nuclear reactor. It is getting close to the exhaust of a rocket. At some point, we need really big heat sinks, or we need to spread out to farms of cooler CPUs. Infinite power density is not a good option.

He also mentioned that Vista had 100 Million lines of code. Anybody sleeping better?