TechVista 2014

TechVista is Microsoft Research India's annual research symposium. It brings together the best minds from the scientific and academic worlds onto a common platform. TechVista provides an opportunity for the research community, government, and students to interact and exchange ideas on research and its future directions.

Speaker --- Talk title and
abstract

Jeannette Wing ---
The Impact of Computer Science Research on Science, Technology, and Society
The field of computing is driven by scientific questions, technological innovation and societal demands. There is wonderful interplay—push and pull—among these three drivers. For example, accelerating technological advances and monumental societal demands force us to revisit the most basic scientific questions of computing. These drivers are also measures of the impact of computing research. In my talk I will give examples from Microsoft Research of our impact on science, technology, and society. I will close with pointers to new directions for computing research.

Hsiao-Wuen Hon --- Datafication of the World: People and Physical Space
While Big Data has become a popular phrase in recent years, in this talk, I will discuss how using data to better model, interpret, and represent the world has been a continual process throughout the ages. Data allows us to build models to understand how the world functions, so that we can make better predictions and decisions and view the world from new perspectives. I will use research projects from Microsoft Research, Beijing in the areas of graphics, human computer interaction, and urban informatics to illustrate how data provide novel and richer ways to engage with people and the physical space.

Curtis Wong---
From the Edge of the Universe and back again
This talk will cover how the creation of the WorldWide Telescope to visualize the Universe served as the foundation to explore more complex dynamic data sets and its guided tours will help democratize access and understanding of spatial temporal data for people back here on Earth.
Curtis Wong is a Principal Researcher in Microsoft Research eScience and co-creator of the WorldWide Telescope which has over ten million users around the world. Curtis leveraged the ideas behind WorldWide Telescope to drive the development of high performance interactive spatial temporal data visualization called Power Map in Office Excel that will be released later this year.

Chris Bishop ---
Probabilistic Models and Machine Learning
The last forty years of the digital revolution has been driven by one simple fact: the number of transistors on a silicon chip doubles every couple of years. Today we are witnessing a second form of exponential growth: in the quantity of data being collected and stored. It is driving a transformation in information technology, from solutions that are explicitly hand-crafted to those which are learned from data. Real-world data, however, is full of complexity, ambiguity and uncertainty and so the data revolution is driving a corresponding transformation from computing with logic to computing with probabilities. This talk will introduce the key ideas of computing with uncertainty, and will be illustrated with tutorial examples and real-world case studies.

Bill Thies ---
Real time audience polling using computer vision
How can teachers, executives, and other public speakers make an interactive presentation to a large audience? Up until now, techniques for polling the audience relied on personal electronic devices, such as smart phones or special purpose "clickers". To enable real-time polling of any audience, we introduce a new technique using computer vision. Each member of the audience is given a qCard: an ordinary sheet of paper with a printed barcode. The speaker asks a multiple-choice question, and audience members respond by holding their qCard in different ways. Using a laptop and digital camera, our software automatically recognizes and aggregates the responses. In this talk, we will describe our experience piloting this technology in Bangalore schools. We will also conduct a live demonstration!

Jeannette Wing
Hsiao-Wuen Hon
Curtis Wong
Chris Bishop
Bill Thies

As Soon As Possible

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