A Peek Behind the Microsoft Research Curtain

C2, one of Microsoft’s newest social networking projects, lets users access data from a variety of different sources, including e-mails and Facebook and MySpace profiles. C2 also lets users pull photographs from public sources and from files where permission has been given to view them.

Lili Cheng and Steve Ickman of the social computing group at Microsoft Research demonstrate the ability of C2 to pull photos from public sources.

Researcher Shane Williams shows how Salsa-

Salsa is an add-on that is integrated into the user’s Outlook client. It is designed to provide contextual awareness by bridging existing social networks and aggregating and displaying information from a variety of sources, including SharePoint, Facebook, Twitter and Windows Live Messenger.

Researcher Tom Laird-McConnell talks about Micropedia, which he describes as Wikipedia for the enterprise. Micropedia is an internal wiki designed to catalog every person and project within Microsoft. Laird-McConnell populated the site by mining the company’s directory and creating a page for every employee, as well as for each project that has been–or is being–worked on.

Researcher Christian Koing explains how the project he is working on, Blews, lets readers know which news stories are being featured prominently in the political discourse.

Blews visualizes information about which stories get linked to by conservative and liberal blogs, and indicates the level of emotional charge in both political camps. It also lets readers compare different views on the same story.

SearchTogether, a plug-in for Internet Explorer, adds a sidebar into the browser for collaboration on multiple computers. It also lets users invite any of their IM buddies to join them in joint research and to access each other’s search queries.

Researcher Yu Zheng explains how GeoLife-

Xian-Sheng Hua from Microsoft Research Asia explains how Video Collage uses an automatically synthesized image to summarize the content of a video. It selects the most representative frames from a video, extracts “salient regions of interest” from the frames and then arranges them on a given canvas.

The World-Wide Telescope is a Web 2.0 visualization environment that functions as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from ground- and space-based telescopes to provide a guided exploration of the universe.