Innovations from Microsoft Research Asia
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------We should not be afraid of failure. If everything we did was successful, we wouldn’t be taking as many
risks as we should and without taking risks, we would not innovate.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1．Digital Ink
Owner：Jian Wang
Contributor：Yu Zou, Zhile Wei, Dongmei Zhang, Shi Han and Ming Chang
Digital Ink gives a tablet connected to a PC the ability to mimic the characteristics
of ink on paper in a digital setting. It has all the advantages of using a real pen and
paper with none of the drawbacks; users can write normal text, create a bullet
point list, draw a diagram or build a table and the software will be able to discern
the difference between each of them. It then becomes much easier to search
through digital notes than those drafted on real paper, allowing the user to retrieve information much
more quickly.
2. Speech Recognition and Synthesis (Speech Group)
Owners: Frank Soong, Eric Chang
Contributors: Yao Qian, Yi-Ning Chen, Lijuan Wang, Jianlai
Zhou, Chao Huang, Terry Wang, Zheng Chen and Yu Shi.
Our speech recognition engine, used for simplified and
traditional Chinese, telephone or desktop speech
recognition applications in MS products like Windows clients for accessibility, Chinese dictation in Office,
Speech Servers, etc. is a giant leap in speech recognition. The basic acoustic units are custom designed to
capture the unique, initial and final structure of tonal syllables in Mandarin. A highly accurate pitch
tracking algorithm was developed to deal with the lexical tone nature of Mandarin speech. Both acoustic
models and language models are trained to capture the intrinsic properties of Mandarin Chinese both in
acoustic and language domains.
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Our HMM-based Text-to-Speech (TTS) is developed for synthesizing highly intelligible and natural speech
in different languages. HMM models of spectrum, pitch and voiced/unvoiced decision duration are first
trained from collected speech databases. Then, based upon any given text, both segmental and prosodic
parametric trajectories of speech parameters are synthesized in the maximum likelihood sense by the
trained HMMs. Finally, high quality speech samples are generated by passing mixed excitations through
time-varying, LPC filters. The HMM-based TTS has been tested successfully in more than two dozen
languages, including non-tonal languages like English or French or tonal languages like Mandarin. It will be
part of MS Exchange servers.
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Chinese and Japanese IME (Input Method Editors)
Chang-Ning Huang- Principle Consultant - (Natural Language Computing)
Ming Zhou- Lead Researcher (Natural Language Computing)
Owners: Ming Zhou, Chang Ning Huang
Contributors: Jianfeng Gao, Kai-Fu Lee, Zheng Chen, Yijin Wang, Hong-Jiang
Yue Zhang
Zhang, Mu Li, Hua Wu,
For years, language barriers prevented Asian users from fully enjoying the computer and the Internet. The
Natural Language Computing Group at Microsoft Research Asia achieved significant breakthroughs and
greatly improved users’ computer experience with the Chinese and Japanese input editor systems (IME).
4.
Compound TCP (Transmission Control Protocol)
Kun Tan- Researcher (Wireless and Networking )
Owner: Kun Tan
Contributors: Jingmin Song
Compound TCP (CTCP) is a congestion control algorithm for TCP to boost
performance in such environments. CTCP increases the amount of data sent
at a time by monitoring various parameters during transfer. Unlike many
other high-speed TCP variances, CTCP ensures that its behavior does not
have negative impacts on other applications. CTCP is now shipped in Windows Vista and Windows Server
2008. It is also available for earlier Windows OSes (XP and Server 2003) through hotfixes.
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5.
Halo Graphics
Kun Zhou- Lead Researcher (Internet Graphics )
Owner: Kun Zhou
Contributors: Xin Huang, Zhipeng Hu, Yaohua Hu, Xi Wang, Xinguo Liu, Minmin
Gong
Our highly rated graphics research has given gamers the chance to really enjoy
the world of Halo III, having developed some core technologies for the highly
acclaimed Xbox game that makes the virtual world appear more real. You can
now better appreciate a constantly changing, realistic looking battle ground with
UVAtlas, which gives the game the ability to texture map a 3D scene. Shield your eyes from a solar flare,
created from our technology for realistic global illumination (Lightmap Compression). Watch the
unbelievably realistic ripples and splashes cascade around you as you dive head first into the water,
developed using the amazing system for modeling and rendering realistic water (River). Instantly feel the
tickle of the grass on your face while hiding from an enemy with our technique for fast rendering realistic
surface materials.
6.
Entity Extraction (Web Data Management )
Ji-Rong Wen - Lead Researcher (Web Data Management)
“In the next decade, I hope people can get all information they need through search technology.”
Owner: Ji-Rong Wen
Contributors: Zaiqing Nie, Ruihua Song, Yanfeng Sun
Structured information about real-world products gets embedded in web
pages and online databases. We developed a key technology to automatically
classify, extract and integrate this information from the Web. With this, we can build powerful entity-level
search engines, which enable people to get more accurate and clearer information for products in one visit,
instead of browsing through a long list of pages. This technology was transferred to build Live Product
Search and with this we believe we can make Live Product Search the largest product catalog in the world.
7.
Relevance Verification
Zheng Chen - Lead Researcher (Machine Learning)
“If you are driven to innovate, want to work in an environment that allows you to leverage resources to
influence tomorrow’s reality, and have fun at the same time; Microsoft Research Asia is the place for you
to start on your path to success.”
Owner: Zheng Chen
Contributors: Tarek Najm, Ying Li, Li Li, Mingyu Wang, Benyu Zhang
Editors of web sites bid for keywords that help direct users to their sites
when search engines are used to search for products etc. Relevance
verification looks at the keywords that editors want to bid for and checks them against the content of their
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site, returning a yes/no result, letting the editor know whether the keyword they wish to bid for is relevant
to their site and thus whether it is worth bidding for.
8.
Cartoon.SDK (Internet Graphics )
Ying-Qing Xu - Lead Researcher
“Insight is necessary at Microsoft Research Asia. Be it on an individual level or a team one, selfexamination and self-awareness are practiced regularly here to help improve the company as a whole.”
Owner: Ying-Qing Xu
Contributors: Lin Liang, Fang Wen, Jonathan Tien, Xin Zou, Yusheng Li,
Qiufeng Yin, Harry Shum
Cartoon.SDK is a fun technology that allows people to automatically generate
vivid personalized facial cartoons from a photo of themselves. Giving users
the ability to, say, create avatars for social networking web sites, this cool development has been
successfully transferred into several Microsoft products, such as the Japanese version of MS Office, of
which there were more than 17.4 million users in 2004. Microsoft has globally licensed this cartoon
technology to several companies, and has been awarded the Microsoft Research Asia Best IP License Prize.
9.
Interactive Computer Vision
Jian Sun- Lead Researcher (Visual Computing )
Owner: Jian Sun
Contributors: Yi Li, Lu Yuan, Chi-Kang Tang, Harry Shum
Many computer vision applications still require a high-level of visual
knowledge and an expertise that can currently be provided only by human
input. With two products developed in this lab, we hope to change that.
Using “Lazy Snapping”, even the average user can easily cut out an object of interest (e.g., portrait) in a
photo and create a new scene with a different background; “Image Completion” is a tool for filling
missing pixels or removing unwanted objects in a photo. With this, the user is able to effortlessly remove
annoying objects or people in the photo in a visually plausible way, by simply drawing a few curves in the
photo. What could be simpler?
10. Smart Thumbnail
Xian-Sheng Hua- Lead Researcher (Internet Media)
Owner: Xian-Sheng Hua
Contributors: Fei Wang, Yong Wan, Hao Wei, Zhi-Jun Shi, Shipeng Li
When your digital library gets a little too cluttered for its own good, Smart
Video Thumbnail can help appease your anxiety and find what you are
looking for without you ever breaking a sweat. The impressive video
presentation technology helps users efficiently browse the video data in their digital library. Motion
thumbnail provides a short synopsis of the original video, made up of a set of short high-quality and highly
representative segments enabling users to glean more information about the video in a shorter period of
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time. Static thumbnail, on the other hand, only takes one visually representative frame from a video, thus
providing viewers with a rough idea of the content of the corresponding video in one image. Smart Video
Thumbnail has been applied to many products, such as Live Search Video, Windows XP Media Center
Edition, Windows Vista and MSN Video.
11. AutoMovie (Internet Media)
Owner: Xian-Sheng Hua
Contributors: Lie Lu, Yijin Wang, Yan-Feng Sun, Hong-Jiang Zhang
AutoMovie is a five-star killer feature of Windows Movie Maker; it’s a one-click solution to home video
editing! With home movie making becoming ever more popular, AutoMovie can help people take their
own video footage and turn them into high quality films, with a soundtrack, without any hassle.
AutoMovie automatically extracts highlights from your raw home videos and aligns them with music from
your digital library, based on the content of the video and music.
We developed an approach for examining the structure of your home video and chosen soundtrack,
allowing the most relevant highlights and a matching rhythm of the music to be selected and aligned. In
order to create more professional-looking results, the movie highlights can be satisfied by a set of editing
rules and then matched to the content of the music, so that your footage is perfectly aligned with your
tunes!
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