Microsoft Live Labs

Live Labs' own Blaise Agüera y Arcas has been recognized by Technology Review magazine as one of the world’s top innovators under the age of 35 for his work developing Seadragon and co-creating Photosynth. The TR35 is an elite group of accomplished young innovators. We at Live Labs would like to congratulate all of the winners on their accomplishments.

Blaise and the other TR35 winners for 2008 will be featured in the September issue of Technology Review and honored at the EmTech08 Conference to be held at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., Sept. 23–25, 2008.  

Photosynth made the jump from the lab to the small screen as detectives on the CBS crime drama CSI:NY called upon Microsoft Live Labs™ Photosynth™ to help solve a grisly murder at a high school dance. The TV detectives needed to reconstruct events from hundreds of images taken by student cameras and mobile phones. They turned to Photosynth to help them build and explore the scene which ultimately led police to their suspect.

Producers from CSI were introduced to Photosynth during a visit to Microsoft last summer and were so impressed they asked to use the technology in the show. Members of the Live Labs team were on the set and worked with the show’s crew to fully leverage the technology’s abilities. Producers were so happy with the experience that they decided to allow Photosynth to “do its own stunts” for this episode and have the actors interact with it live, as cameras rolled. Needless to say – there was much cheering as a very stoked Photosynth team watched the episode together. If you missed the show, you can catch it online on the CBS website or by exploring the current technology preview by going

Congratulations to our own Jeff Weir for winning the South by Southwest (SXSW) Web award in the art category. He was recognized for his Viscosity application, which he describes as a modern art generator. He created it because, as his Web site explains, “it’s beautiful, relaxing, and turns anyone into an abstract artist”. Viscosity was one of just five art projects recognized as part of the 11th Annual Web Awards. A complete list of award finalists is here.

Jeff is just one of the talented and passionate user experience designers who help shape the vision of Live Labs. If you are as passionate about UX as Jeff, we're looking for a few great designers.

Live Labs is always on the lookout for great engineers and researchers who are passionate about the same things we are. If you can't find the perfect job in our current open positions, but still still believe this is exactly the place for you, then send us your resume/CV.

As we continue to collaborate with the academic community, we are always amazed by the depth of talent. At this time Microsoft Live Labs, in conjunction with Microsoft Research, would like to announce the four winners of this year's Live Labs Fellowship awards.  

The 2008 Live Labs Fellows are:

Fellow	University
John Froehlich	University of Washington
Dave Levin	University of Maryland
John Wright	University of Illinois
Yisong Yue	Cornell University

Each fellowship includes a $20,000 stipend, payment of tuition and fees, and conference travel for two years. In addition, we offer each Fellow a brand new Tablet-PC preloaded with Microsoft software and the opportunity to be a 12-week, salaried intern.

Congratulations to an outstanding set of graduate students who we feel will reinvent the Internet as we know it.

If you would like more information about our program, please check out http://research.microsoft.com/aboutmsr/jobs/fellowships/ or e-mail msfellow@microsoft.com

Earlier this week, Microsoft announced new features in Silverlight 2, our cross platform rich internet application runtime.  One of the most exciting new features is Deep Zoom.  This capability allows users to explore collections of super high resolution imagery, from a 2 or 3 megapixel shot from a digital camera to gigapixel scans of museum pieces, all without waiting for huge file downloads.  The simple zooming interface allows users to explore entire collections down to specific details in extreme close-up, all with fantastic performance and smooth transitions.

Don’t just take our word for it:.  Hard Rock Café is using the Deep Zoom technology to power the site showcasing their huge collection of memorabilia.

Deep Zoom is based on the same Seadragon technology that you have seen in our demos and in the Photosynth preview.  For the first time, we are enabling individual developers to harness the 2D capabilities of Seadragon to support smooth zooming interfaces on super high resolution images and collections.  You’ve been asking for the ability to use Seadragon yourself, now here’s your chance.

We have added a host of new features and improved designs to Listas today.  A fresh home page design and updated community page make finding relevant information even easier.  New community lists like popular tags, recently created lists, and top users are all now available both in Listas and through RSS.  For fellow GTD fans, there are now task lists.  Improvements to printing support, history and version management, and many other additions and refinements round out the update.  You can check out the newly updated Listas technology preview as always at http://listas.labs.live.com.

Today, we are announcing the Volta technology preview, a developer toolset for building multi-tier web applications using existing and familiar tools, techniques and patterns. Volta’s declarative tier-splitting enables developers to postpone architectural decisions about distribution until the last possible responsible moment. Also, thanks to a shared programming model across multiple-tiers, Volta enables new end-to-end profiling and testing for higher levels of application performance, robustness, and reliability. Using the declarative tier-splitting, developers can refine architectural decisions based on this profiling data. This saves time and costs associated with manual refactoring. In effect, Volta extends the .NET platform to further enable the development of software+services applications, using existing and familiar tools and techniques.

You architect and build your application as a .NET client application, assigning the portions of the application that run on the server tier and client tier late in the development process. You can target either web browsers or the CLR as clients and Volta handles the complexities of tier-splitting. The compiler creates cross-browser JavaScript for the client tier, web services for the server tier, and all communication, serialization, synchronization, security, and other boilerplate code to tie the tiers together. In effect, Volta offers a best-effort experience in multiple environments without requiring tailoring of the application.

Learn more about Volta and download it to try building applications yourself >

As part of our ongoing collaborations with product groups around Microsoft, Live Labs continues to help other teams improve features and add new capabilities to Microsoft's online services.  Recently, with the fall release of Live Search, our work with the Maps team paid off for users.  We worked closely with the team in developing two key improvements:

Single Box Search

Using Live Labs' entity extraction technology, a machine learning algorithm for classifying data, the Local Search team was able to combine the two boxes used for separately entering a business name and a location into a single search box. 

A much anticipated feature, it enables maps.live.com users to enter single queries without having to negotiate multiple input boxes such as:

• Philadelphia, to just jump to a map of the city;
• Chowder in Boston, MA, to search for some comfort food by the bay; or
• Chinese Food to search the current map area (or our estimate for your location if it is a new session) for some lo mein.

Bird's Eye in 3D

Both the 3D and Bird's Eye views in maps.live.com provide unique and valuable ways to look at the world, providing far more detail and more useful information than straight down aerial views alone can.  Until now, you had to switch back and forth between the 3D client and the Ajax version to see Bird's Eye Imagery.  Now, with a user experience reminiscent of Photosynth, the Virtual Earth 3D experience let's you see bird's eye images right in context, including a preview of the perspective of surrounding images with that familiar white outline:

Check out the newest version of Live Search Maps for these and many more great enhancements.  This type of ongoing collaboration with groups around Microsoft is what Live Labs is all about; stay tuned for many more improvements like this. 

At Live Labs, we are always experimenting with new ideas that we think will be useful.  Today we are releasing our latest technology preview:

Listas (http://listas.labs.live.com)

Listas is a tool for the creation, management and sharing of lists, notes, favorites, and more. It allows you to quickly and easily edit lists, share them with others for reading or wiki-style editing, and discover the public lists of other users.  We encourage you to try using it for meeting notes, bookmarks, shopping lists, to plan a night out, or whatever other creative ways you can think of.

In the Listas Community Section, you will find a number of highlights of the most popular and random items from around the community of public lists such as the most used tags, the hottest lists, and prolific contributors.   You can even add others’ lists (or any RSS feed) to your own Listas so you are always up to date.

You can even create lists from all the things you find on the web, like search results, wish lists, videos, or all or part of virtually any page with the Listas Toolbar for Internet Explorer:

So, give Listas a try.  And, as always, let us know what you think.

 

In this week's series premiere of Wired Science on PBS, Microsoft Live Labs Architect, Blaise Aguera y Arcas gave a demonstration of Seadragon and Photosynth, sharing some of our vision for what is coming from Photosynth in the months and years ahead. Check out the video above to see how Photosynth is changing the way we think about our digital memories, and try the Photosynth technology preview today to see for yourself what's possible.

With the popularity of the recent collections from the space shuttle Endeavor, we continued to receive feedback that a few people with specific configurations were unable to install the Photosynth viewer.  We’ve made a few tweaks to the installer that should resolve the majority of those issues, including support for 64-bit systems.  If you were one of the unlucky few who couldn’t try Photosynth before, give the new installer try.

There’s no new functionality, just a better install experience, so you don’t need to do anything if you already have Photosynth installed.

Lead Software Development Engineer in Test

Do you have the passion to contribute and strongly impact the quality of innovation? Do innovative ideas like Photosynth (http://labs.live.com/phtotsynth) and Deepfish (http://labs.live.com/deepfish) excite you? Are you inspired by the smart engineering peers who are working on projects like these? If so, then Live Labs has an opportunity waiting for you!

Microsoft Live Labs aspires to blend research with world class engineering to invent and improve the technologies powering the Internet. We're investing in developing an Applied Research staff and capability that executes experimental research at production quality and scale, provides infrastructure and platform engineering for our engineering initiatives, and incubates longer term technical efforts. Live Labs is an intensely collaborative organization. We simultaneously execute our business plans while collaborating broadly with our partner network and larger partner community.

Live Labs Engineering is looking for an SDET Lead who will manage and grow a high performing team of SDETs and be responsible for ensuring that our innovations are delivered with high quality. This includes but isn’t limited to demonstrating exceptional technical aptitude, being an effective leader in mentoring and providing guidance & feedback to your team, ensuring thorough test coverage of owned components, having influence on product direction and balancing test resource allocation and scheduling across multiple project. >

If you are hired, you will be part of a team that is driving the quality of innovative applications for production scale, while championing user experience, design and advocating customer feedback. You will work closely with other engineers and scientists in Live labs as well as stakeholders in individual product teams on incubations to drive them to completion.

A qualified candidate should have QA experience with all stages of the product cycle and people management experience (FTE & CSG). Experience with C#, .Net Framework and development tools are a strong plus, as are solid communication/ interpersonal skills. >

Requirements:

·         At least 5 years of test engineering experience developing code, unit and systems test cases.

·         At least 2 years of experience leading a team as a test manager/ lead.

·         Proficiency in software development and test architecture, design and implementation.

·         Working knowledge of all types of testing and various test methodologies.

·         Experience with agile software development methodologies.

·         Proficiency in building and growing a diverse team.

·         Demonstrated ability to ship high-quality software on time.

·         Experience managing full project schedules

·         Excellent project management skills and ability to juggle multiple projects at once.

·         Strong verbal and written communication skills.

·         Energy and desire to work in a fast pace environment and deliver high-quality software on tight schedules.

·         A BS CS degree or equivalent preferred.

 

Apply Now >

 

Operations Engineer

Microsoft Live Labs is looking for an Windows Server 2003/HPC Edition system administrator to manage and help us aggressively expand our computing infrastructure consisting of commodity server hardware and storage systems.

In this position, you will be responsible for the configuration management and monitoring of all server systems within Microsoft Live Labs, user account management, system resource allocation and access control and shared software services used in software development in close coordination with Microsoft Operations teams, procedures and standards.

Skills/Qualifications

·         MSCA/MSCE or equivalent, or a minimum of 3 years experience managing Microsoft Windows systems in an enterprise or large-scale research environment.

·         A thorough understanding of Microsoft Windows systems architecture at all levels, including kernel configuration, patch management, system software services, IIS and SQL Server database configuration and management.

·         Thorough understanding and practice in the use, configuration, and management of SQL Server, IIS, DNS, MPI and job scheduling on Windows Server platforms, and automated systems monitoring and management tools.

·         Experience installing and managing systems using Microsoft Systems Center Operations Manager.

·         Excellent communication and influencing abilities.

·         Working knowledge of Force10 Networks and/or Cisco Systems high-speed networking configuration and management.

·         Proficiency in a least one (preferably two) of C#, C++, Javascript, Java and Python required.

 

Apply Now

 

 

Technical Support

Acts as a primary response for technical support within Live Labs. Provides support for research workstation hardware and software, as well as lab and production servers. Capable of working independently

with limited supervision. May act as substantial technical resource in certain product areas.

 

Participates as a team member in the implementation and support of systems in a lab environment. Works independently to solve moderate to highly complex support problems. May develop and maintain information for knowledge base. May also analyze and evaluate computer systems and execute performance analysis.

 

4-5 years related experience required. Solid understanding of standard computer hardware and software concepts required. Knowledge of personal computers, relevant operating systems, applications, and/or languages required. Knowledge of personal computer architecture and networking required. Solid understanding of technical support issues required. Must have sufficient technical depth to communicate with development and other internal organizations at a peer level. Strong communication, problem solving, and technical writing skills; excellent customer service and support skills required. Programming and debugging skills preferred. Associates degree in a technical field preferred, or an equivalent combination of education and experience required.

 

Apply Now

As the seven-member crew of the Space Shuttle Endeavour prepare for their return to Kennedy Space Center tomorrow morning. We are pleased to announce an update to our collaboration with NASA.

 

Prior to docking at the international space station the Space Shuttle Endeavour did a complete somersault enabling astronauts in the International Space Station to photograph the shuttle's bottom-side. The photos were then sent back to NASA for analysis.  The Space Administration has been kind enough to share those images with Microsoft Live Labs. We have taken the photos and created a “synth” so people around the world can take part in the NASA experience.

 

So here it is, your chance to take first-hand look at what you might see on a space-walk .

 

 Click here to install the Photosynth viewer and experience for yourself.

 

Adam Sheppard
Group Product Manager

Live Labs | Microsoft

Today, we’re announcing an exciting collaboration with NASA using Photosynth technology, to create three-dimensional environments of preparations for the launch of space shuttle Endeavour.  For the first time ever, viewers can experience unprecedented views of shuttle Endeavour on the launch pad, interior and surrounding area of the Vehicle Assembly Building, and the return of previous flight Shuttle Atlantis atop a 747. Photosynth is able to capture the depth and complexity of the shuttle’s structure, providing exclusive images to viewers around the world enabling the unique ability to explore this NASA mission.

 

Click here to install the Photosynth viewer or visit our video section to see the technology in action.

In addition, Live Labs has collaborated with MSNBC to create a special multimedia tour of the Kennedy Space Center at http://spaceworld.msnbc.com

 

Adam Sheppard
Group Product Manager

Live Labs | Microsoft