Back in January, I blogged about Project Hawaii, a research and academic outreach program sponsored by Microsoft Research in cooperation with 20 universities worldwide. Approximately 300 students at those universities are developing applications for Windows Phone 7 this semester as part of the program. These students have already come up with new and innovative scenarios by using our previously released Relay and Rendezvous services. Beginning today, they will have another cloud service in their development arsenal: a Speech to Text Service.

This new cloud service will enable Project Hawaii participants to expand their applications with options such as diction, transcription, and voice commands. Students will also be able to use the new service to integrate other complex applications, such as Microsoft Translator, into their development projects. There is one limitation: Speech to Text currently supports English only. There are no plans to expand into other languages at this time.

In addition to making this service available to our Project Hawaii students, we are also releasing sample code from an application for Windows Phone 7 as part of the software development kit (SDK). This sample will allow users to speak into a phone and get transcribed text of their words in return. Plus, we'll be releasing an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) service for our Hawaii participants to use in the near future.

—Arjmand Samuel, Research Project Manager with the Microsoft Research Connections division of Microsoft Research

Learn More

• Project Hawaii website
• Project Hawaii Facebook page
• Contact the Project Hawaii team

There is a significant dearth of women working in—or even entering—the computer science field. According to the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT), only 18 percent of computer science degrees in 2008 were awarded to women. That was a dramatic drop from 37 percent in 1985. With those totals, it's not surprising that only 16 percent of Fortune 500 technology companies have female executives. Of greater concern is the small number of women who are applying for technology jobs, even during the economic downturn when jobs are scarce. NCWIT is working to reverse that trend.

Winners at the event held at the Microsoft New England Research & Development Center in Cambridge, MA

We are proud to be the primary financial supporter of the NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing, which honors young women at the high-school level for their computer-related achievements and interests. NCWIT offers both national and local "affiliate" competitions to generate support and visibility for women's participation in communities nationwide.

National Award winners receive a US$500 cash prize; a laptop computer provided by Bank of America; a trip to attend the Bank of America Technology Showcase and Awards Ceremony in Charlotte, North Carolina; and an engraved award for both the student and the student's school. Affiliate Award winners receive an engraved award for their home and school, plus additional prizes from local sponsors.

I'm pleased to announce that the academic community stepped up this year to offer scholarships to this year's NCWIT winners as well. There will be 19 Affiliate Award programs serving 20 states and U.S. territories in the 2010/2011 round. Schools expected to connect with our winners include:

• University of California Berkeley
• University of California Santa Cruz
• University of Colorado at Boulder
• Colorado School of Mines
• Harrison College
• University of Houston Downtown
• Indiana University Bloomington
• IUPUI: Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis
• University of Massachusetts - Amherst
• University of Massachusetts - Boston
• University of Massachusetts - Lowell
• University of Notre Dame
• Purdue University
• Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
• Rutgers University
• University of Texas at Austin
• Virginia Tech

The NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing is a promising avenue for reaching out to and encouraging young women with a budding interest in computer science. By nurturing this interest early, we are increasing the likelihood that these young women will pursue computer science degrees and one day join us as the next generation of world-class computer scientists.

Learn More

• NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing award site
• NCWIT Award Facebook page
• NCWIT on Twitter
• Microsoft Research Connections

—Jane Prey, Senior Research Program Manager, Microsoft Research Connections division of Microsoft Research

On March 17, Microsoft Research Connections and the São Paulo Research Foundation (better known by its Portuguese acronym: FAPESP) held a workshop to mark the ongoing collaborative efforts of the Microsoft Research-FAPESP Institute. The theme of the workshop—revisiting the past and planning for the future—provided the scientific community with a historical perspective on the Institute's completed projects, its ongoing initiatives, and the prospects for future investments.

Harold Javid, Director of Microsoft Research Connections, Carlos Henrique de Brito Cruz, Scientific Director of FAPESP and Michel Levy, President of Microsoft Brazil during the meeting MSR-FAPESP Institute Workshop: revisiting the past and planning the future. 

The presentation of newly funded research projects broke with tradition this year: previously restricted to researchers and teams who are directly involved with the selected projects, the event was opened to all professionals and researchers interested in learning more about the opportunities created by the program. By so doing, the Institute reached out to researchers and scientists from other areas of knowledge, while simultaneously stressing the role of information technology in accelerating scientific research on priority themes.

The event was attended by Carlos Henrique de Brito Cruz, scientific director of FAPESP, and Michel Levy, president of Microsoft Brazil. Leonardo de Moura, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research in the United States who specializes in theorems and the optimization and verification of software, presented the first lecture, "Symbolic Reasoning @ Microsoft: Tackling Impossible Tasks." Harold Javid, the director of Microsoft Research Connections (a division of Microsoft Research) explored the theme of e-science, addressing such fertile areas for collaboration as medical imaging research, a new approach to creating digital narratives, and compelling possibilities for sharing "big time" views of history.

Announced at the workshop were the four projects that were selected in the latest call for proposals. The researchers who were responsible for the approved proposals then made brief presentations of their studies.

• Eleanor Patricia Cerdeira Morellato, Bioscience Institute of Universidade Estadual Paulista (Unesp), presented the e-Phenology project, which implements new technologies to monitor ecology and climate change in the tropics. This multidisciplinary project combines research in computer science and phenology, a branch of ecology that studies the development cycle of living organisms and its relation to such environmental conditions as temperature, light, and humidity.
• Junia Coutinho Anacleto, Center of Exact Sciences and Technologies at Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCar), presented a project that will use natural user interface (NUI) technology to help patients develop their social skills. Developed in partnership with the Center for Intensive Attention to Health (CAIS) and Clemente Ferreira, a hospital that serves people with neurological and psychiatric disorders, the project also seeks to improve the interaction between health professionals.
• Ronaldo Fumio Hashimoto, Institute of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of São Paulo (USP), presented a project that will use math and computational modeling to examine the biological processes that underlie molecular organization and the regulatory relationships of molecules and genes. The research will use new computational and statistical techniques to understand how biological processes occur and how to prevent those that cause disease from taking place.
• Regina Célia de Matos Pires, Instituto Agronômico (IAC), presented a project that will use environmental monitoring and genetic modeling to calculate the potential of sugarcane cultivars based on the availability of groundwater. This research is important in light of forecasts that predict expanded cultivation of sugarcane in arid regions of Brazil. Pires intends to use sensors that monitor the interactions of climate, soil, and water with the development of plants, in order to understand the dynamics that are involved in the transfer of water among the soil, plant, and atmosphere, and to illuminate its interactions in the production system.

All of these endeavors align perfectly with the mission of the Microsoft Research-FAPESP Institute for IT Research, which is to support bold, innovative projects that apply technology to enable or accelerate research that will help humanity.

Learn More

• MSR-FAPESP Institute Workshop: Revisiting the Past and Planning the Future
• Microsoft Research Connections Latin America

—Juliana Salles, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Research Connections