What research areas are keeping MSRA busy right now?
Hon: We are working on five main focus areas: first, on making a natural user interface, to incorporate gestures and handwriting into interaction with the computer–it’s the holy grail of user interfaces. Second, we’re working on multimedia technology, like compression technology. MSRA has made its name in this area over the last 10 years. Third, we’re working on data-intensive computing, which is the fundamental backend for what’s popularly known as cloud computing. There is so much data to mine for research and functions like business intelligence. Fourth is the current “killer app”–search advertising. We all use search engines daily. The competition is fierce now with other players like Google and Yahoo. Microsoft wants to perfect this technology. Fifth is what I classify into fundamentals: computing, networking, and so on. You need a sturdy foundation in this to support any R&D in the lab. Which of these areas is MSRA dedicating the most resources to? Let me say first that the imp
