What demos were you most excited about at TechFest today and why?
Gates:There’s this incredible theme of making photos and video easier to work with. I saw over a dozen things that relate to that. Taking a set of photos and creating a 3D environment. Taking and recognizing things in photos or making a transcript automatically from a TV show. People are going to be surprised at how natural we can make these things and the places we can help them out. They’re not used to getting help organizing their photos. Or finding the new show about a particular topic that they would never run into. [One of the Microsoft Researchers] Curtis Wong was showing me this program on AIDS that PBS is doing, and how if you view that with software, you can interact with the information and find other related things and see the progression over time. So that you get the best of both worlds: watching the video, which you can do passively, but then at any point you want something explained or you want more info, it gives you a way of doing that.
