Microsoft executive gives PU students a future tech vision

By Lauren Otis, Staff Writer
   One of the senior executives who has succeeded Bill Gates at the helm of Microsoft Corp. visited Princeton University on Monday and offered students a tantalizing vision of advanced computing for the future.
   ”Pretend we are students at Princeton in the not so distant future,” said Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, as he demonstrated advanced computing techniques and wireless interfacing with a series of Microsoft prototype electronic devices during a presentation at Dodd’s Auditorium at Robertson Hall on the Princeton campus.
   With just a touch or two on a tablet computer prototype developed by the computing giant, Mr. Mundie created three-dimensional animated images and multi-sourced data files on human physiognomy, projected on a large screen for the students to see.
   The goal is “to harness all of the world’s knowledge and bring it forward and utilize it in a way that is useful to you,” Mr. Mundie said.
   Microsoft is developing software and hardware that will take “social computing concepts” such as those incorporated in Facebook and other sites and “use them directly in the educational process,” enabling students to find others who are engaged in the same research and projects through computer networking, Mr. Mundie said.
   ”Another big thing that is going to happen is what I call speculative computing,” he said. Rather than computers doing what they are instructed to — reactive computing — in the future they will have the capacity to anticipate the next step in what their user may need based on their usage, according to Mr. Mundie.
   Mr. Mundie said Microsoft has for years been developing the software for what he termed a “universal notebook,” that could store data, text, pictures, audio, video and create a personalized computing device containing everything it’s owner wanted or needed. “Because it doesn’t run out of pages you could just sweep back to the eighth grade,” he said.
   Mr. Mundie said data ports, even wireless communication as we know it, would become a thing of the past, with cell phones and any other electronic devices being able to interface effortlessly. Showing a computer mounted within a small table and setting the tablet prototype and other devices on its surface screen, he said, “you will basically be able to have the machines interact with each other just by placing them on the surface.”
   ”We are entering a time when all computers will be parallel computers,” he said.
   Although such systems would be of the type that educated and wealthier people might use, Microsoft intended to “extend the benefits of these machines to a broader group of the world’s population,” Mr. Mundie said. Much of the world’s less-advantaged population does not have access to personal computers, he said, but do have and use cell phones. These people “coming into computing first via their phone,” can gain access to sophisticated technology through their cell phones as computing devices come to interact in the way Microsoft envisions, he said.
   Cell phones could be used as computer terminals in their own right, but if their screens were too small for a given application, users could pull out a paper-thin computer screen to use, Mr. Mundie said, demonstrating a thin-film screen that looked like a plastic place-mat.
   Processing and storage capacity will continue to accelerate at astonishing speeds in the next five years, creating “a world of computing that is hard for any of us to imagine,” Mr. Mundie said. “We are likely to see a factor of 10 and probably a 100 in terms of the capability of these computers,” he said, adding that in 10 to 20 years there will be the “ability to compute things that today are literally not computable.”
   In the future, current wireless technology will be superceded by ultra-fast wireless technologies and universal networks perhaps built on radio-wave platforms, Mr. Mundie said. At Microsoft a team is “looking for a place in the spectrum where we could create a super Wi-Fi capability,” he said.
   The tablet and table top computer prototypes Mr. Mundie demonstrated were guided by his fingers, and he said the technology was set to “move beyond the flat two-dimensional point and click model,” into three-dimensional technologies incorporating “machine vision and machine hearing and speech recognition.”
   On top of other advances, Microsoft was looking to make new computer applications easy to learn and use, and develop new programming tools that would allow people to create applications they wanted or needed without knowing how to write computer code, Mr. Mundie said. Using icons, and drag and drop capabilities within a software building “robot,” he said “people who would know absolutely nothing about writing a line of traditional code can actually build very complex systems.”
   Mr. Mundie said the technologies he was demonstrating are still expensive, but the computer contained within the table with the touch-driven table-top screen was already being embraced by the gaming and hospitality industries. He said Hilton Hotels wanted to put the computers in restaurants, with the interactive menu being the table top, enabling diners to order and obtain detailed information on preparation, nutrition and any number of other subjects related to their meal.
   ”You are taking out the entire process where someone has to come over and give you a menu and take your order and take it to the kitchen,” he said.
   In response to a question about Microsoft’s interest in supporting broader computing initiatives that might not necessarily bring in business for the company, Mr. Mundie responded that “our business is to try to invent things people want and to sell them.” The computer giant was interested in collaboration with outside people, however, and wanted to fund broader computing initiatives through the sale of Microsoft products, he said.
   Princeton was one stop in a series of campus visits by Mr. Mundie, who is following the lead of Mr. Gates who made regular campus visits when he was at the helm of Microsoft.