Boku is a video game which is basically aimed at creating the computer programmers of tomorrow.
 Visual cue card for instructing the robot |
"Its secretly a tool to teach kids what programming is like without getting too bogged down in the detail," he said.
The technology lets users guide or program the behaviour of a virtual robot through the use of visual cue cards in the game to perform simple tasks like eating an apple or following another character.
Mr MacLaurin says Boku's marriage of creativity and education is a clever way to hook children into this world.
He noted that girls took just two hours to become completely conversant with Boku while he fudged on how long the boys took.
Mr MacLaurin says Boku, aimed at nine to 11 year olds, will be on sale from the beginning of next year for the X-Box.
Botnets are computers that have been taken over by someone else and are beyond the user's control. They are often used to send spam and steal passwords, credit card numbers and personal information. Such attacks are regarded as a billion-dollar shadow industry.
Yinglian Xie and Fang Yu decided to do some research into the field after noticing that Microsoft's Hotmail facility was a popular target of large scale botnet attacks.
 View of dynamic IP addresses throughout the world |
Ms Xie says "A normal mail server will want not only to send e-mails but also to receive them so they want a relatively stable IP address. They normally won't use a highly dynamic IP address."
She says: "96% of mail servers on dynamic IP addresses actually send nothing but spam, this knowledge was not much exposed before."
They both hope that eventually their research will be incorporated into Microsoft's Hotmail e-mail service.
The virtual world and the real world mesh with LaserTouch, billed as an inexpensive multi-touch sensing platform.
It's the brainchild of computer vision specialist Andy Wilson, who says "the magic is the software" and that he invented it "for fun".
"I am not making any heavy statements about this," he said.
 Surface computers will be pervasive |
Mr Gates said he wanted to turn nearly everything we touch into a computer and that surface computers "will be absolutely pervasive. In the individual's office, home, the living room."
Mr Wilson's laser touch unit uses a series of lasers, an overhead camera and a 2600 pixel-wide display surface. The mouse is consigned to the dustbin as LaserTouch relies on people using their hands to interact with the computer.
Microsoft's E-Science group works with scientists as a kind of middle-man to "develop tools to help them do their science better and enable progress to happen quicker".
Three projects were on display. One covering water quality, another concerning the Russian River in California and the third on collecting carbon data.
In the carbon project known as Fluxdata, a group of 400 scientists from across the world are looking at how vegetation is being affected by carbon emissions.
In the past they might well have worked in isolation and only exchanged information via email assuming they would know who else was conducting complementary research.
Yogesh Simmhan says: "Now what Microsoft does is take the 400 different sites where the data is being gathered and pull that data into the cloud, the back end."
He added: "The information becomes much more powerful when these scientists from around the world can actually correlate data and not just look at their own work. Proof that it's no longer possible to do science without doing computing."
The mouse is history. Long live the pen, as far as InkSeine is concerned.
This is an interface for tablet computers and works as a digital notebook that users can write on using an electronic pen.
Raman Sarin says "We've thrown away a lot of the standard windows controls and developed controls that work better with a pen."
 The mouse is dead, long live the electronic pen |
When it comes to using the search application, Mr Sarin says the pen makes it easier than using the mouse to drag any image, email or web page into your notes.
He says over 6,000 people have already downloaded Inkseine and that he is overwhelmed by the positive feedback because it is at odds with the "Microsoft bashing" he normally gets.
Other projects on display during the road show included PINQ the company's Privacy Integrated Queries, aimed at enabling queries on data while protecting certain information, such as a person's health history.
DryadLINQ is concerned with making it easier to do large-scale data parallel computing.
 Images from the virtual WorldWide Telescope |
Bilingual Built-ins that Break Language Barriers features applications to get rid of barriers to worldwide communication. This online service is at the incubation stage and can be seen at Translator.live.com
The Berkeley Emulation Engine, or BEE3, is aimed at researching advances in computer architecture.
Automatic Mutual Exclusion was devised to assist programmers programming for multiple CPUs, or central processing units.
The Keyboard Generation and Query Classification research focuses on developing technology to show keywords to advertisers.
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