CAMBRIDGE, England – Where do you want to go tomorrow? Try peer-to-peer computing, self-organizing networks, 3-D holograms that tilt and roll on handheld devices, and picture-editing tools based on probability theory.
That's the map of the future provided by Microsoft researchers based at the company's British laboratory, tucked away in the centuries-old surroundings of Cambridge University.
The laboratory is preparing to celebrate a relatively youthful fifth anniversary, based at a university with science and technology credentials that include heavyweights such as Sir Isaac Newton, "father of computing" Sir Charles Babbage, DNA pioneers Crick and Watson, mathematician and cryptographer Alan Turing and professor Stephen Hawking.
"We're not working on this year's products. We're not working on next year's products. We're working on the technology that might help improve the technologies of the future," said professor Roger Needham, one-time Cambridge student, now professor and vice chancellor, who heads the lab.
Needham, an expert in computer security and encryption, has a job resume that includes top American research labs such as Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center and Digital's Palo Alto laboratory.
And despite a reputation for speaking his mind – which people say keeps the folks at Microsoft's Redmond, Washington, headquarters slightly nervous – he's managed the lab without the controversy and conflict many predicted at its launch.
Needham originally cringed at the expectations that might come out of the deal, heavily hyped in 1997. Prime Minister Tony Blair gushed, and Bill Gates helicoptered in to Cambridge. But as Needham noted, the initial funding deal was for a relatively modest £50 million ($72.5 million). Microsoft had spent $8 million just for the rights to use the Rolling Stones song Start Me Up, to promote Windows 95.
Since then, the Cambridge lab has grown from 13 researchers squashed in temporary quarters, using computers bought with assistant director Chris Bishop's personal credit card, to 65 researchers in a specially built facility in West Cambridge.
And while its researchers tend to spend a lot of time emphasizing to visitors how much they enjoy working for Microsoft – and to be fair, they get asked regularly whether they do – the atmosphere is distinctly different from Redmond.
Partly, that's due to the distance from the Microsoft mother ship, thousands of miles and an eight-hour time difference from England. Several researchers will admit on the sly that they like having several time zones between themselves and HQ.
And partly, the difference is due to the overwhelmingly European feel of the lab. Needham said that Microsoft head of research Rick Rashid told him not to forget that the lab was "a European enterprise, not a British one." Now, a large Gallic contingent means French is as likely to be spoken as English, along with dollops of Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and other European tongues.
The research focus at Cambridge has not developed around a deliberate agenda, Needham said, but incorporates whatever interests its incoming researchers have. At the moment, those include machine learning, distributed computing, computer vision, mobile computing and computer languages.
And according to Bishop, "Probability theory influences as much as half of all research here."
That translates into projects such as one called Pastry (researcher Andrew Herbert declined to explain the origin of the name), an algorithm that Herbert believes will help improve the way in which peer-to-peer networks manage and distribute content.
Rather than a P2P network having to ask all computers on its network if they have a given piece of information, Pastry relies on clusters of computers being able to route a query only to the most relevant machines, improving traffic efficiency by 60 percent.
"It's a very efficient algorithm – a funnel that comes in very, very quickly," Herbert said. He thinks Pastry could help very large networks to be self-managing, taking the tedium out of system administration. And, he adds, "It's something on the trajectory of where we see the .NET strategy going." However, Pastry will adhere to open standards and not be a proprietary technology, he said.
Another project incorporating probability theory teaches computers how to "see" a given object against a background. At the moment, such abilities could help a computer to accurately outline an object in a photo, cut and paste it and refill the gap with a correctly synthesized background, in seconds – a boon to users of photo-editing software.
But in the future, researcher Andrew Blake said, such innovations could help teach computers to really see, recognizing individuals against complex background environments.
Researcher Lyndsay Williams' Holosim project looks at ways of placing 3-D objects on handheld devices that are also equipped with tilt sensors. "By tilting, you can look around any part of a 3-D image," she said.
Tilting removes the need for a mouse, a button or a pen for scrolling, and is a more natural way to examine an object in the hand, she said. The same concept would also allow someone to view a flat image, such as a document – tilting would replace scrolling.
SmartView is another handheld innovation – a way of segmenting large Web pages into smaller, logical units so that they can be viewed on a device. SmartView, the project of researcher Ralph Sommerer, analyzes Web pages by their tables and cells, not by text, and clusters related elements together into smaller, easily viewed chunks, he said.
SmartView is one of the Cambridge lab projects that has a fairly obvious product application – it uses Internet Explorer 5 and may well go into future versions of handheld operating system Windows CE.
Other projects remain stubbornly obtuse. Still, the lab has applied for close to 50 patents, and researchers have published 93 papers and parts of five books. But even at Microsoft, not everything needs to end in a product.
"Some things we do just because it's good science to investigate," said Blake. "We don't really know how it's going to be used (in the future)."