Microsoft Research’s annual Techfest is the one of the busiest times of the year for my friends in MSR, who spend months building some the most amazing demos you can imagine.  Some of our speech friends there, like Ivan Tashev and Mike Seltzer were featured in a Seattle P.I. newspaper article this week (check it out here).

Ivan knows more about microphones (esp. array microphones) than anybody on earth, and he came over this afternoon to present more to our team.  Since 25% of new laptops these days come with array microphone support, he thinks there are lots of nice things we can do in communications and ASR to take advantage of that.

MSR people like Ivan are very approachable, and unlike some companies they are specifically encouraged to publish their results publicly.  you can read a lot more from him on his web site or from the many whitepapers Microsoft publishes on How to Build and Use Microphone Arrays in Vista.