Peter Lee introduces us to the Microsoft Research strategy
Microsoft’s new head of research Peter Lee will lead Microsoft to the future with new research strategies after the company absorbed Nokia. He believes that the future of hardware devices lies in phones and it is high time Microsoft reversed their failure to dent the smartphone market. Peter Lee presumes that the users need more natural interaction with a device that is aware of their activities and Microsoft Research will be closely involved.
Microsoft has committed to input a high level learning technology into a phone with a new generation soft keyboard technology considered much better than the one that goes with iPhone. The biggest bet that Microsoft Research is focused on is a machine learning that is also number one investment. In order for machine learning to be useful, it has to be able to process the input and send an output within fractions of a second so that a human can use it. This will solve speech recognition, making a big dent in translation to such level that will almost approach the capability of human senses. Imagine if a camera could recognize what are you really looking at and understands what you’re saying. Using multiple microphones to focus on one speaker in a noisy room would certainly be a great achievement. How about a phone looking at your plate, recognizing the food by components and generating the perfect diet for you while monitoring your health? According to Peter Lee, this is not only possible but also the sphere of quantum computing is so dramatically developing at a great speed that in five years there might be even a Nobel Prize for the basic science and physics of the ability to encode and encode using quantum effects.
These technologies are yet to come and will taking the new age to a whole new level where problems with security and privacy won’t even exist.
Source: TechnologyReview
