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>> Gur Kimchi: I'm not going to do a song and dance. I'll just say hi. I'm Gur Kimchi, architect of Virtual
Earth. My only part in this event is only to write the check. I know it's a big part but it's not really that
important. I'll minimize what I have to say because the next day or two, the longer you stay the happier I'll
be. It's about listening to you guys and having a dialogue with everyone in the room. We have a lot of
people from the Porter Group. I'd like this to be an open discussion.
If you find out there's something specific in the product or in Microsoft Research, Virtual Earth-focused,
MSR-focused, don't assume these relationships are going away. The whole purpose is you get to meet the
people and you can talk to them directly in the future.
This is about developing a lengthy dialogue. If we continue doing this for the next century I'll be very, very
happy. That would be good for us, would be good for you and for students and so on. Welcome for
coming. The weather was much better last week. I promise I hope it's not going to snow again.
I won't say anything about global warming. In fact, it's going to snow in spring in Seattle. But that's a
separate discussion. We can have it over coffee later. And I'll have Kentaro say hello to you. And, again,
this day is about you. Thank you.
>> Kentaro Toyama: Thanks, Gur. My name is Kentaro Toyama. I'm the Assistant Director of Microsoft
Research India, where we have a research group called Digital Geographics. And I also helped Gur do this
RFP last year before 2007 when Evelyne took over.
I just wanted to say welcome to Redmond for those of you who for which this is the first trip here, and then
for everybody else, it's great to see you again. And let me also reemphasize what Gur mentioned, which is
that we fundamentally believe this area is so rich with possibility that it takes as many intelligent brains
working on the different problems as possible. And one thing I've learned at Microsoft Research is that in
addition to the technology and the ideas, it really helps to have people talk to each other to generate more
ideas as well as to get projects to ultimately have wider impact.
So I encourage you to spend as much time as possible speaking to other people, understanding what it is
they do and so forth. And with that I will turn to Evelyne.
>> Evelyne Viegas: Give the mic to Jennifer over there.
So it's a great pleasure to have everybody here. We're going to go through a little bit of logistics here
during the event. So, again, welcome to the Virtual Earth and Location Summit 2008.
So why and who is here, right? We will know a bit more in a few seconds when we go through the
one-minute introductions. But mainly we have the gathering of the RFP winners from the RFP we ran in
2007, which was sponsored by Virtual Earth.
We received 80 proposals from 17 countries, and we had 10 winners. And nine of the projects are
represented during this event. One of the things we provided as part of the award are grant images.
We've heard from academia a lot in different disciplines when we ask what would be useful to you, to your
graduate students to work on, when you look for relationships with industry. And money, of course, is
always useful. Everybody talks about that but mainly we hear about data, please give us data.
So in this case Virtual Earth provided some grant images. The course of the workshop here are three-fold.
First is about you, about the winners, like you'll hear about the great research you've been doing during this
year.
Also I'm very interested in learning how the assets contributed to enrich the research or not, right, how you
use the assets, the grant images, and we also really want as Gur and Kentaro mentioned, to engage in a
two-way conversation. It's not monologue, it's about dialogue. That's why we have people from Microsoft
Research and product teams who were also invited to this event.
Concretely, how are we going to do that? So we'll have presentations from nine projects, from the RFP.
We'll have also presentations from product teams at Microsoft Research like short presentations as actually
10-minute presentations. We'll also have this morning a talk from Microsoft Live Labs on photo synth, and
we'll also have tomorrow some demos and poster session which is really where we want to engage in this
dialogue.
This will happen in other rooms. We'll tell you more tomorrow about it. As part of the demo process, we'll
actually have an opening session on the Microsoft Research on the worldwide telescope. And we'll have
16 demos. I'm really looking forward to that.
Just last logistics here, everybody here who is not a Microsoft employee should have sent a release form
and have signed it. If you have not, please go contact Mary or Jennifer who are at the entrance. And any
question, voucher, to go back to the airport, any type of discussion Jennifer can help.
Thank you. Thank you again all for coming here. Great to see you all had a safe trip. And thank you for
your flexibility. I've been sending e-mails left and right. One more slide and presentation, and you've all
been great. So who is here today, let's find out.
So what we're going to do, actually, we're going to go in order, alphabetical order. So those of you who
sent a slide, we'll start with those. Those of you who have one minute. Those who did not send a slide, so
if I just forgot to ask you, you have 80 minutes -- sorry, 80 seconds to talk because it's my fault.
Those of you who just did not want to send a slide you just have 59 seconds instead of 60, to talk at the
end. Just some logistic. When we start introducing the slides, please raise your hand and Jennifer will run
to you because you'll be speaking in the mic.
So we'll start and we have two mics. The first person, Horst Bishoff (phonetic).
>> Horst Bishoff: I'm here. My name is Horst Bishoff. As stated here, I come from Grad University of
Technology. I'm glad to be here. I hope this will be an exciting event. So what you see here is my CV or
some dates of my CV. I have been graduated in Vienna University of technology. Maybe some of you
have been to Grad ECBV 2006. I was one of the program co-chairs there. Yeah, we have been working a
lot, so a lot of publications came out. And also recently we got some nice prizes like this year GM main
prize for determined association for pattern recognition and also last year the (inaudible) science paper
prize.
Here I will present work we did on recognition on Virtual Earth data and I'm happy to be here.
>> Evelyne Viegas: Welcome. Yo Yee Chung (phonetic). And please just pronounce your name just in
case I get it wrong.
>> Yo Yee Chung: Hi. Everyone my name is Yo Ye Chung. I'm a Ph.D. student in University of Southern
California, working on integrating geo spatial data sets. We will have a demo tomorrow and my advisor is
Craig Neblock (phonetic). Thank you.
>> Evelyne Viegas: I think this is Kristy. All right. That was a short one. Daniel Corinor (phonetic).
>> Daniel Corinor: I'm Daniel Corinor from Telviv University. This year I'm on sabbatical on QBC. The
most relevant thing is the last point here that '92, more or less, I developed kind of a flight simulator which
was photo realistic and it's run in realtime. And it was a long time ago. It runs on 33 processors of IBM,
can now be run very efficiently on the PC. And that's it.
>> Evelyne Viegas: Thank you. Brian.
>> Brian Curlis: I'm Brian Curlis. So I'm faculty at the University of Washington, been there about ten
years. Also long time collaborator with people in Microsoft Research, especially Rick and Michael Cohen.
Over the years I've worked on a number of different research areas, including 3-D scanning and
reconstruction, which helped culminate in the digital Michael Angelo project, a body of work on human body
and shape modeling. And recently have been most active in computational photography, combining stills
and videos to create better stills and videos, some visualization work and most recently some work on
multi-view stereo in collaboration with Steve Seitz and that work will be presented tomorrow and is directly
relevant to reconstructing the world's geometry from photographs.
>> Evelyne Viegas: I think this is Kathy Dai (phonetic).
>> Kathy Dai: My name is Kathy Dai. And I'm a applied researcher from Microsoft Audience Intelligence
Group. I'm currently leading the effort of location platform. And this platform provides algorithms to
understand audience from local and location perspective and to serve for intelligence as searcher and
engines. I just read that.
And we have a few key deliverables that we'll have location detection and profiling user locations and local
intent, interest modeling and also profiling users local interests. Location best key word suggestion, local
interest, radius detection, and finally we also enrich location knowledge base. So these are our work.
Thank you.
>> Thank you. Frank.
>> Frank Dellaert: Frank Dellaert. I'm at Georgia Tech. My research interests are in robotics and
computer vision. That's me controlling a robot there. And I'm here with my student Grant Schindler. Esan
was supposed to be here but he cancelled because of family reasons. So I'm interested in large scale 3-D
construction and 4-D construction, project 4-D cities funded earlier by an RFP here. And I'll be talking
about things that we've been doing with giga pixel panoramas and time.
>> Thank you. Oliver.
>> Oliver Deussen: Oliver Deussen. I'm from Kontanz University in Germany. Graduated at in
Codsworth, also in Germany. And I have these three topics I'm working mostly on, modeling of very
complex scenes. The latter part of my work was on nonphoto realistic rendering and utilization information
virtualization. I'm here with Johannes Kopf, my Ph.D. student, and we worked on a project to combine
photographs with Virtual Earth data. And you will see it later.
>> Evelyne Viegas: Thank you. Sorry Frank could not make it. Dan.
>> Dan Fay: Hi, I'm Dan Fay. I work in a group inside Microsoft research called Technical Computing.
We work with a lot of scientists and engineers in the academic to look at how we can incorporate
technologies. I'm interested in how we can incorporate Virtual Earth and location-based information for
climate, for weather as well as remote sensing information and time series data.
>> Thank you. (Inaudible).
>> I'm Indog Hirsch (phonetic) from NYU School of Business. My background is actually not in computer
science. I'm an economist, probably the only one in this crowd.
But my major research interest is in online commerce, electronic commerce and online communities and a
lot of the Web 2.0 applications you've seen in the last few years. A number of examples include projects
on user generated content, looking at the impact of reviews and rapidation processes on products and
pricing power, so on. Other examples include online search advertising.
We've been looking at how does keyword content drive consumer demand and pricing policies of
advertisers. The interplay with sponsored researchers. I'm also interested in geography, which is part of
reason why I'm here. Our student will be presenting a paper that looks at how different location attributes
in different cities drive the pricing power of hotels. Hotel room tariffs and so on. So that's basically it.
>> Evelyne Viegas: Thank you. Kristen.
>> Kristen Grauman: I'm Kristen Grauman. I'm an assistant professor at UT Austin, and I do research in
computer vision, specifically object recognition and content-based image retrieval. Today I'll give a talk
about some of our work with fast indexing methods and the work in part with Trevor Darrell who is here and
will be introduced later.
>> Evelyne Viegas: Thank you. I don't think everybody is here. So look for somebody with sunglasses
when she comes. Craig.
>> Craig Nowblock (phonetic): My name is Craig Nowblock. I'm, as you can see, I've moved to a font that
uses the satellite imagery now for all my characters. I'm a research professor at the University of Southern
California. And my research interests are largely in information integration, but in particular I've been
looking at information integration applied to geo spatial data. We have a number of topics related to
automatically finding, extracting lining maps with imagery which I'll talk about tomorrow. We've been
looking at exploiting open source data to help you identify objects and imagery. Using the phone books to
find things in imagery. Linking text documents to imagery.
And automatically aligning different kinds of geo spatial layers, like taking parts of data or road vector data
and automatically linking it with imagery.
>> Evelyne Viegas: Thank you. John.
>> John Krum (phonetic): Hi, I'm John Krum. I've worked here at Microsoft Research for about the past
10 years. One of our umbrella projects we've been working on is we've been getting GPS data from
volunteer drivers for the past three years. They put a GPS receiver on their dashboard. They drive
around. We record everywhere they go. We've done some projects on top of that like predicting where
they're going, how they're going to get there, looked at privacy issues with that data as well.
And then I'll talk about data mining project we've been doing based on collections that people have been
putting into Virtual Earth and have also done some work on Wi-Fi and cell tower trangulation both indoors
and outdoors.
>> Evelyne Viegas: Thank you. So we will go now to Diane Feicheng (phonetic).
>> Diane Feicheng: Hello everyone. I'm Feicheng Diane. I'm from (inaudible) University Australia.
Lecturer in Sweden. My research interests is in software testing. And my current research project includes
architecture testing and also we have done some work in embedded systems software testing and also my
Ph.D. thesis is related to random testing.
In Virtual Earth project, we are using the metamorphic testing technique to solve the Oracle problem. So
thank you.
>> Evelyne Viegas: Thank you. Dan Cohn. Nobody wants to be Dan Cohn. Okay. Beibei.
>> Beibei Li: Hello everyone. My name is Beibei Li and I'm from Stern School of Business NYU. I'm a
Ph.D. student from this year, and I'm working with professor Goshan and Professor Epurdis (phonetic).
And by the way I think you missed I.
>> Evelyne Viegas: I missed?
>> Beibei Li: Yeah.
>> Evelyne Viegas: Okay.
>> Beibei Li: My research interests focus on economics-based data mining and before I moved to New
York I spent two years in University of Kentucky and got my Master's degree in computer science, and I'm
very happy to be here today and actually I have known Microsoft since I was in middle school. So I'm very
excited today. And I have been using Windows systems since then and I am still using Windows XP. I
didn't do upgrade because I think it's better than Vista.
>> Evelyne Viegas: We'll fix that, too, during the summit.
>> Beibei Li: Thank you. [Laughter].
>> I love that code.
>> Thank you. (Inaudible).
>> David Mark: Hello. My name is David Mark. I'm at the State University of New York in Buffalo. I've
been involved in GIS since 1969 when I took a computer cartography course from Tom Boiker (phonetic)
up the road at Simon Fraser. For the last 20 years I've been interested in whether there are English
language biases in GIS software and data, and if whether there are important cultural and linguistic
differences in geo spatial concepts. For the last six years I've been doing ethno graphic field work and
extraction to develop multi-lingual-ontologies for land forms and this should be able to support multi-lingual
information retrieval, because the bottom line is the concepts of rivers and gullies and valleys and so on do
not line up across languages.
But we think we can express the meanings of everyday words, they can be expressed in terms of a
common multi-lingual ontology. So that's what my research is on. Thank you.
>> Evelyne Viegas: Thank you. Jean.
>> Jean Olphing (phonetic): And Jean Olphing. I'm a research lead at Virtual Earth Research Lab here in
Redmond. I got my Ph.D. from Haber University. And one thing is that the first work that I did for, got paid
for, was modeling cities from real view, so it's sort of closing a loop for me.
What we tried to do in the lab is to develop technologies and prototype new surfaces for users of Virtual
Earth. And we're very much open for collaboration so I hope to talk to many of you.
From our lab we have here Jori Wesxter (phonetic) and Boris Epstein and Bill chen. So please feel free to
talk to them, too.
>> Evelyne Viegas: Thank you. Hanan.
>> Hanan Samet: I'm Hanan Samet, University of MARYLAND, College Park. And I've worked a lot on
spatial databases, image databases, GIS. Actually, most of my work originally was in programming
languages and on improving correctness of compilers, but this was a long time ago. And actually
somebody got an award just recently for the same paper with the same title as my thesis. 30 years later.
Had no clue what I had done. So maybe I'll do something else in this realm.
Anyway, we've been working on -- let me just say one thing else. I want to thank Microsoft and the Virtual
Earth group, specifically. We had a conference on ACM GIS was called and really it was really due to the
work of Kentaro who really pushed it along and Gur as well. And what happened was we had, instead of
35 people, the conference really was hatched at this last meeting and we had 185 people and it was so
successful that we now have a new ACM SIG, called SIG Spatial, which will handle all these things and
really a lot of the topics in the Virtual Earth summit here and we have a call for papers that we've put out
here. I'm starting to take a few more minutes to say this, I hope you don't mind, but it's related to this.
So the deadline, it will be, for papers, around June 11th. And Cyrus is the general chair. I'm sort of helping
him out. So Cyrus is here also. And if you have questions you should ask us. So the other thing I mention
about my work, you can see my new book there, if you're interested I have a copy. If you want to look at it
$55 for a thousand pages, you can't beat it.
The other work I should mention my student Jagon (inaudible). Is he listed on the thing? Okay. And so
we're working on -- we'll show a demo tomorrow and today to talk on a new way of looking at news, which
is sort of search engine, and the other work we've done which is sponsored by Microsoft as well which
we're not going to talk about but give a demo, it's called scalable shortest path finding, and there's a really
good result. And when I say that, we just got awarded best paper at SIGMOD. It's not listed in the paper
but it's from the Microsoft Virtual Earth sponsorship that we got, so we had won the year before and won
this year.
So I just wanted to mention that.
>> Evelyne Viegas: Thank you.
>> Hello everyone. I'm (inaudible) I'm from the University of Maryland at College Park. I work with Hanat
Samet at the university. I recently got my Ph.D. a week back. And my work is on spatial databases GAS,
spatial networks and computer graphics. As Hanan mentioned I work on spatial networks, our paper got
awarded the best paper awarded at SIGMOD. We have a nice demo on new generation of news ratings,
so that will be the next generation of how news is presented, read by people. So if you are interested you
should come to the talk today evening and we also have a demo tomorrow. Thank you.
>> Evelyne Viegas: Thank you.
>> I'm (inaudible). My hair speaks for itself. So didn't need much on the slide. I'm here. And it grows
during the course of the day. It actually gets larger. I'm here with Brian Curlis and Noah Slavely from the
University of Washington. And Noah, Rick Siliski and I did some work a couple of years ago called photo
tourism which is part of the basis of photosynth which will be demoed later this session. And then later, I
guess tomorrow morning, we'll talk about some more recent work we've been doing in this area. We do a
lot of work from 3-D modeling from photographs.
>> Evelyne Viegas: Thank you.
>> Hi I'm Steve. I can probably talk without a microphone.
>> I'm not sure. You could but we're videotaping. Just a second.
>> Steve Shaffer: Hi. I'm Steve Shaffer, Microsoft Research. I've been working in ubiquitous computing
for, I don't know, the last 12 years or so. And I work with indoor models, building models and campus
models, private maps, which introduce many complexities beyond what you deal with in outdoor maps and
GIS. And some simplifications and I'll be talking about some of my work tomorrow.
>> Evelyne Viegas: Thank you. Here we have some animation.
>> (Inaudible) in school.
>> Evelyne Viegas: Just a second, please. Thank you.
>> So I guess I can relate to Beibei's experience in middle school about Microsoft software. This
animation scheme was done by my 11-year-old. [Laughter].
So my main interest has been spatial database and spatial data mining. Spatial database, we worked on a
number of problems, including routing, like shortest path. Indexing road maps and most recently
evacuation mapping shown on the left-hand side. This work was presented in U.S. Congress at a
breakfast and also used in Minneapolis for the metro planning. There's a Fox TV coverage hopefully
another session we can share that. On the right-hand side shows the other focused spatial data mining,
last 10 years our group has been really trying to define and promote that subject. And, particularly, what
you're seeing is NASA project, 15 years worth of time cities data on every location of the earth looking for
time cities correlation to find patterns like El Nino. Right you can see El Nino effects, Pacific Rim largely.
But the question are there other areas of ocean that have high time series correlation in other areas of land
and many other projects like that in spatial data mining our group has been active in.
Bottom right we're showing a couple of other activities more of service and education. The spatial
database book has been out there now for five years. This Encyclopedia of GIS just came out. I brought a
copy and hopefully if there's a library here we can leave it behind. I'll pass this around.
If not for reading you can use it for exercise. It's over six pounds. [Laughter].
>> Mine's five pounds. [Laughter].
>> And then bottom right is geo infomatical journal, we just completed 10 years, and coincidentally I think
had very high downloads last year. So looks like this topic is taking off. I'm not on the program this year,
but during other times, if you're interested in these topics, welcome to talk.
>> Evelyne Viegas: And I think you had some more, these are yours, too.
>> I think we can skip that this one. There are projects in both areas that we have.
>> Evelyne Viegas: Okay. Thank you.
>> Kentaro Toyama: Hi. I'm Kentaro Toyama. Co-founder of Microsoft Research India, where I really
strongly pushed for a group that's called Digital Geographics, because at that time, anyway, there was
much less ongoing research within Microsoft Research around geography-related areas. I've been
involved with a number of projects that have to do with geography, but recently my main focus has actually
been on technology for economic development of very poor communities and in that respect one thing that
I'm really interested in is how you apply GIS to things like agriculture, water supply and so forth.
>> Evelyne Viegas: Thank you. Do we have (inaudible) here? No..
>> Hello. I'm Ching Zhe (phonetic) from Microsoft Research Asia. I'm maybe the only person from Beijing
today. Actually, this is a very simple slide I made yesterday. More information can be found on the home
page. Basically I'm a researcher in the web search data mining group from Microsoft Research Asia. I'm
more interested in technologies related to geographical information mining and indexing and also
location-based search, multi-media applications. And recently actually we're very interested in mining laws,
user generated information such as blogs and photos, for example, live spaces and also the GPS
trajectories generated by users in daily life. And we tried to mine user interest from this kind of data.
So actually I work at come to (inaudible).
>> Thank you.
>>: Good morning, everyone. My name is Ze Quan George (phonetic). Also sitting here are our
colleagues, Diane Core and Kitty Son (phonetic). We're from Australia. I'm a lecturer in software
engineering at University of Walengrand. Our team is working on software testing and quality assurance.
We will be presenting our research result tomorrow. Thank you.
>> Evelyn Viegas: Thank you. What we'll do before I talk, my hair speaks for itself, too, actually. I have
the same phenomenon, the hair growing up during the day. Before we do that I wanted to go around the
table and let's have the people who didn't have a slide here speak. So you cannot go twice. Right?
If you already spoke, you're not allowed to speak another time. So let's just start one way or the other.
Let's start here. Just give your name and your affiliation and a few other words or just that.
>>: Hello. I'm from China. I'm software development engineer and I work with (inaudible) so I could attend
this meeting. Thank you very much.
>> Evelyne Viegas: Thank you.
>> Happy birthday.
>> Evelyne Viegas: Oh happy birthday, then.
>> Thank you.
>> Jason Szabo: Hello. I'm Jason Szabo. Visiting from our Boulder facility that takes -- hello. I'm
supposed to talk out. Okay.
My name is Jason Szabo, visiting from our facility in Boulder which takes the aerial imagery that we collect
from our special sensors and creates the 3-D or, more precisely, the two-and-a-half D world that you've
been seeing inside Virtual Earth.
Look forward to hearing all the topics that are coming up over the next few days. Thank you.
>> Marcus Jensen: Hello. My name is Marcus Jensen. I'm an architect on Virtual Earth. And I'm working
mostly on imagery, publication and delivery to the Web and also recently started to look at local search.
>> Pafra Pachinski: I'm Pafra Pachinski (phonetic) working on the Virtual Earth team here in Redmond.
Recently worked on geo coding, now also working on query parsing. Thank you.
>> Hi, I'm (inaudible) I'm dev lead at Microsoft Virtual Earth in Austria. My team is working on the
automatic creation of 3-D CD models. You've probably seen the cities already on Virtual Earth.
>> Jeff Koliski:Jeff Koliski (phonetic). I'm general manager of Multimap recently acquired by Microsoft.
Obviously very keen to get the best of both now, which is why I've got a team here to figure it all out.
>> John Atan: Hi. I'm John Atan (phonetic). I'm working at Microsoft Ireland, MSE on the international
team. And we are working on a product that we hope to ship in June about location-based services.
Thank you.
>>: Hi, my name is (inaudible). I work with John in the Dublin team on MSN Mobile International. And
we're just interested to learn more about the location-based services (inaudible) I think.
>> Andre Bettick: I'm Andre Bettick. I'm from Ireland (inaudible) International, location services.
>> Carol Johnston: My name is Carolyn Johnston. I work with Gur and Al as part of the VE Research
Team and my particular interest is statistical modeling and machine learning, and I'm very interested in the
intersection of location-based services and machine learning.
So please come and talk to me about anything related to that while the Location Summit is going on.
Thank you.
>> Mike Gillam: Hi. I'm Mike Gillam (phonetic). I'm an emergency physician. I was trained and practiced
in Chicago. For the last 18 years I've been doing medical infomatics work. But two years ago our company
was acquired by Microsoft, our software and our team, part of the Microsoft Amalga team. So in
Washington D.C. and part of the Microsoft Health Solutions Group. And I direct the Microsoft Medical
Media Lab. And we're particularly interested in technology transfer and also prototyping of next generation
healthcare technology.
And in location-based areas we're particularly interested in tracking all the way from the site of disasters
where patients are first picked up by ambulances straight all the way into the hospitals right into the
operating rooms or wherever they ultimately end up.
So as part of that we have some great Ph.D. internship opportunities in Washington D.C.
So feel free to contact me about that. Thanks.
>>: I'm (inaudible). I work with Dr. Gillam in M2L. And I'm working, have been working with robotic data
gathering and visualization and RFID localization, everything applied to healthcare.
>> Manuel Reyes: Hi. My name is Manuel Reyes. I'm a researcher at the Local Search Machine
Learning Group. We are basically trying to apply machine learning techniques on statistical modeling for
our local search division. Thanks.
>> I'm (inaudible) Wechsler Research with Yau's (phonetic) team. I'm doing modeling of the buildings and
texturing them at the moment and a few other things like text detection with Boris (inaudible) data.
>> Cyrus Johavy: Hi. I'm Cyrus Johavy (phonetic), associate professor at the computer science
department at USC, University of Southern California. My area is databases and I collaborated with Craig
on some of the projects that he's going to talk about today and demo tomorrow. Also did some work on
road indexing. And recently I'm interested in location privacy issues and how to protect the privacy of your
location when you use location-based services.
>>: My name is Ben (inaudible). I'm coming from Gratz. I'm definitely there. We're developing the ultra
cam which is the aerial camera for Virtual Earth. My team is specifically working on the product using
Seadragon technology and bringing it to the photogramatic market. I have a demo tomorrow actually.
>>: My name is Michael (inaudible). And I recently finished my Ph.D. in the area of computer vision. I was
mainly working on detection and tracking, mainly focusing on shape and how to match shapes. And we
have the demo and poster tomorrow. And currently I'm doing research from Professor Bishop in Gratz in
Austria.
>> Mike Lieberman: I'm Mike Lieberman. I'm a second year Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland.
My research is focused on extracting, recognizing and disambiguating geographic contents and
documents. I'll be demoing a system tomorrow that has an application of this in the news domain. That
we'll extract articles from the newspaper. I'm also working with the (inaudible). Thanks.
>> Kiere: Hello, my name is Kiere (phonetic). I just graduated from the University of (inaudible). I'm
preparing for my Ph.D. studies, and I was working on the (inaudible) search engine testing, research, and
glad to be here today. Thank you.
>> Johannes Kopf: My name is Johannes Kopf. And I'm a Ph.D. student at the University of Konstans.
Oliver is my advisor. I've been working on computer graphics and computational photography stuff. And I'll
be presenting our work the incubation of Virtual Earth here this afternoon and we also have a demo
tomorrow. Thanks.
>> Noah Snavely: I'm Noah Snavely, Ph.D. student at the University of Washington. You heard from my
advisor, Steve Seitz. I'm also advised by Rich Soliski (phonetic) at Microsoft Research. I'm interested in
what you can do with large photo collections like all of flicker. I've done a lot of work in 3-D reconstruction
and photo collection with photo tourism project and scene visualization. I'll be demoing some of our newer
work tomorrow. Thanks a lot.
>> Bill Chen: My name is Bill Chen. I'm a researcher at Virtual Earth. I did my Ph.D. at Stanford under
Mark Lavoy. Currently I'm interested in image-based modeling for Virtual Earth 3-D and interactive
techniques for visualizing, infusing media inside of Virtual Earth.
>> Boris Epstein: My name is Boris Epstein. I'm a researcher at Virtual Earth in the Ls team. I'm mostly
doing computer revision and object like photo organization of larger geo positioning, collection of images
and texturing of natural objects and object recognition and steady site images.
>> Drew Steebly: Drew Steebly, scientist in Live Labs, been working on the photosynth project for the
past two years. I've also recently been doing some work on interactively building models from photosynth
which I'll be presenting tomorrow afternoon.
>>: I'm (inaudible), assistant professor at the Standard School of Business at University, and we are
working on how to use geographical information and user generated content together with the economic
interpretation of this content for local search for hotels and restaurants.
>> Michael Cohen: Hi. I'm Michael Cohen. I'm a researcher here at Microsoft Research. Been doing
research about a quarter century in computer graphics and computer vision.
>> Eric Brown: I'm Eric Brown from Multi-Map. As Jeff said, newest members of the Virtual Earth family,
heading up the product team at Multi-Map and these are my colleagues, who introduced themselves. But
we'll be focused on getting the great technology and getting out to the users so they can use it.
>> Andy Hume: My name is Andy Hume. I'm a front-end development lead at Multi-Map. I guess as a
Web developer, I'm sort of interested in how we can get all the exciting technologies people in this room
are creating and deliver them through APIs like Virtual Earth and Multi-Map so they can be used by sort of
grassroots developers.
>> Carl Skidmore: Carl Skidmore, chief architect multimap.com, working with Jeff here. I try to focus on
the infrastructure and architecture and make sure it's all scalable.
>> Richard Keen: I'm Richard Keen from Multi-Map, software development engineer working mainly on
our APIs and consumer mapping site.
>> Shawn Sutton: Shawn Sutton, again part of the Multi-Map team. Just over here to listen, learn, meet
all of you. Hopefully have a great conference.
>>: My name is an Tony (inaudible) I'm a program manager at Multi-Map. There's two main sides to our
business. Firstly, it's delivering mapping technology to our business customers. We have over 1,000
business customers. The second side of our business is the consumer focused website where we have
about ten million users on that site there. Those are mainly the two areas I look after.
>> Rick Soliski: Hi. I'm Rick Soliski (phonetic). I lead the interactive visual media research group here at
Microsoft. As Steve and Noah have mentioned we developed the photo tourism work at University of
Washington that led to photosynth. I've heard it's going to be featured on CSI New York tonight if you want
to see it.
>> Trevor Darryl: My name is Trevor Darryl. I made it but my slide did not. I'm interested in object
recognition and multi-modal interaction. I have a group at MIT which is moving to U.C. Berkeley and
CSES, this summer. So thank you very much.
>> Grant Schindler: I'm Grant Schindler. I'm a Ph.D. student at Georgia Tech working with Frank Delleart,
which is the goal to build up the CDs using photographs back to the 1800s and exploring photographs and
3-D models and doing inference with the models about time. We have a demo tomorrow. Thanks.
>> Evelyne Viegas: Okay. Everybody had a chance to introduce herself or himself. I'm Evelyn Viegas.
I'm reaching 10 years at Microsoft pretty soon. My background is in computational linguistics and natural
language processing, I've been working at Microsoft in many technologies. Right now I'm part of the
external research and program team. This is a team where we partner and collaborate with universities
that meant other industries as applicable to advance the state of the art in different disciplines. I myself
here are the topics I am interested in right now and working on.
We're going to take like five-minute break and we will continue with the next talk at 10:50. Thank you.
(Applause)
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