Chinese President at Microsoft

Several police cars followed me up highway 520 on the way to work this morning, but they weren't looking for speeders.  Chinese President Hu Jintao is visiting today, so security on campus is very tight. We're fairly used to this, especially here in Building 17, where the speech & natural language teams work. Our office is across the street from the Executive Briefing Center, which hosts most of the outside dignataries, so we see helicopters and security police here from time to time.  I remember being in Tal Saraf's office a few months ago when we saw a woman with a machine gun on the roof.  Thinking it might be some overworked Vista engineer gone postal, we called security and were told it was just security.

Too bad Kai-Fu's no longer here. He would have been at Bill's house tonight with the rest of the Microsoft VPs, talking about all the things we do with China. The speech group has particularly tight ties, partly thanks to the Kai-Fu legacy, but also just because there are a lot of Chinese SR people. There are all those speech people at MSR-Asia, of course, and also our partnerships with Chinasoft and other vendors who do lots of work for us there.