Microsoft will show off some of its Windows Live search projects at the annual Microsoft Research Faculty Summit next week.
On July 17 and 18, Microsoft researchers, product group engineers and architects and invited academic researchers from around the world will convene in Redmond, Wash., to discuss everything from bioinformatics and e-science, to nomadic computing and mesh networking.
Among the specific projects Microsoft researchers will highlight is Windows Live Image Search. The Live Image Search engine for the Live.com platform went to beta in March.
Microsoft researchers plan to “explain our research into how users interact with image search engines, some of our findings, and the motivations behind our dramatically different user interface model. We also overview our architecture and discuss the work that is yet to be done, including improvements to relevance, adult filtering, result filtering, and increasing collection size,” according to the session abstract on Microsoft’s Web site .
The team also will highlight ongoing research in the Windows Live mobile and local arenas, specifically around the “Wild Thing” mini-keyboard and shorthand texting application.
Microsoft Live Labs head Gary Flake is set to give what sounds like a very Web 2.0ish, theoretical talk, entitled “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Imminent Internet Singularity.”
“In this talk, Flake will introduce a kinder and gentler version of the idea, which he calls the Internet Singularity. Like the original, the Internet Singularity suggests continued acceleration of progress, but makes greater emphasis on our ability to improve science, analytic methods, and engineering on data as opposed to on the physical world,” according to a synopsis of Flake’s talk.
Microsoft Visiting Researcher Liz Lawley is expected to present her work on a fledgling research project called PULP, which stands for Personal Ubiquitous Library Project.
On her personal blog, Lawley explained PULP as the result of mashing up features from social bookmarking tools like del.icio.us and CiteULike and LibraryThing, personal library tools like Delicious Library and MediaMan, and mobile scanning and annotation tools like (Microsoft Research’s) Aura.”
“Why does the world need another social bookmarking/library tool? I’m not sure it does. But this one is intended to address some problems I’ve had with the tools listed above,” Lawley continued.
Lawley said her goal is to release a first version of PULP this fall that will be deployed internally at Microsoft Research and the Rochester Institute of Technology this fall. The second version of PULP, in Lawley’s perfect world, will be a rich desktop client for data that will incorporate P2P sharing, the way that iTunes does for music.