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Buying Guide: Rick Rashid: Senior Vice President, Microsoft Research
Q: What trends are happening today that will really have an impact on computing in the future?
A: One of the things dramatically impacting what we can do is to store and manage just enormous amounts of information. The reason we're doing so much better in areas like speech recognition and computer vision is because we have better data. We've gone from approaches that were largely based on intuition to approaches that use disciplined analysis of real-world data and statistical techniques. That ability to mine millions and millions and millions of events—billions or trillions of events—and to store, analyze, and use that information to inform an algorithm lets us do a better job.
Q: What areas are you further along on than expected?
A: In the last five or six years, we've made just huge progress in speech recognition, computer vision, natural language processing, and program analysis. What we're able to do today with computer vision techniques is just stunning. You can take photos, draw a box around a person, and the system will automatically snap to the boundaries of the object. Then you could put that person into another scene. There's a lot of sophisticated mathematics that allows it to look like it belongs there.
Q: Do you think that the user interface will have to change radically at some point?
A: It's really fortunate that we got into the Tablet PC when we did, because it's not been just a way for us to learn about how to do pen-based input to notebook-like machines. It's really the beginning of a world where you have a broader notion of input. It's no longer just keyboard and mouse—it's vision and gestures and voice and making any surface a potential display and input surface. I think it makes the interface more environmental, more at peace with the world you're working in.
Q: How will application development change?
A: With the combination of multicore systems and swarms of distributed network sensors, you start thinking about building systems and software in a different way. You already see a lot of support for parallelism in Windows today, but you're going to see that as being the standard way of developing applications. I believe you could build systems that are dramatically more reliable, even in the face of individual failures.
Q: Where do you see network sensors going?
A: The large-scale distributed sensor network is clearly going to be an area of change over the next five to ten years, as more sensors keep track of more things that happen in the environment in order to more carefully manage things like energy consumption, inventories, and business activities, and to keep track of the things in your homes, keep track of small children. But it also means we'll be collecting enough data that we can do microscale simulations of weather. We'll be able to start collecting huge amounts of health information on individuals and process that locally, so before you ever go to a doctor, almost all the information the doctor could conceivably want will have already been analyzed for you. I think there's an opportunity to improve health care in a significant way.