Back to work

I went back to work today for the first time since the baby was born. I took two weeks off and then plan on working part-time for the rest of my paternity.

I am currently recruiting for a CSG (that's what MS calls contractors) to work on a project on Natural UI. I have started working on an incubation project with a small team in our division. We are looking at what a "natural UI" might look like out five years or so. It's a pretty cool project.

We are taking a very task-based approach to defining natural UI. The premise being that in order to better map computer functionality to what users are trying to do, you need to have an intermediary, since actually figuring out what they want from natural language turns out to be way too complex. So we are exploring using tasks to sit in between users and computer functionality.

Our definition of a task is any unit of work a computer can perform represented in the language of the user. So "create a letter" would be a medium level task, "create a business plan" would be a very high level task and "print this document" would be a very low level task. Of course many higher level tasks will contain many lower level tasks. In this way tasks can be considered fractal in nature.

The theory being if developers build application by exposing a set of tasks that their program can perform. And these tasks are annotated such that we can map natural language to them, similar to how web-pages are annotated to enable web-search to find them, then the problem of mapping users intent (as specified by typed or spoken natural language) to a task becomes much easier. And computers become much easier and faster to use.

Anyway, that's our theory. There is some interesting work going on at Oregon State that is conceptually similar to what we are working on. You can read more about their work at: TaskTracer Summary.

Ultimate Frisbee @ Microsoft

One of the best things about working at Microsoft is that you get to play ultimate Frisbee three times a week at lunchtime on state of the art artificial turf fields.

Not that I get out three times a week, but I usually try and get out at least two times, especially in spring and summer.

I have attached two sets of pictures from games in early and late January. The weather looks a little more like late summer in Seattle then January, but that's just the type of winter we have been having.

MS Ultimate Pictures

Paternity Starts!

Well I'm home for the next two weeks on paternity, then I will be back to work part-time for most of the summer. We just had out first child, Zoe Macbeth. You can see her at http://aboutmacbeth.com/gallery/firstdays.

For those of you that don't know I work at Microsoft, I'm a Business Manager in the Natural Interactive Services Division (NISD). I work for Kai-Fu Lee, one of the pioneers of speaker independent speech recognition, he was a professor at CMU, worked at Apple and SGI, and then came to Microsoft to start the MS Research facility in China. Currently he runs NISD, we are focused on making interacting with computers more natural. Our division owns speech recognition, speech synthesis, natural language processing and all help & assistance technology for the company.

My job is to work with Kai-Fu's leadership team to develop a long term strategy to achieve our natural computing vision. It's actually a pretty cool job. I can't think of any other company where you could have a critical mass of people working on next generation UI work and have the amount of impact you can have on the current work across the company.

I plan on being more active in blogging in the future. So if you are interested in this area, watch for more info.