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We are entering the robotic age. All over the world, we see research projects and companies working on realistic, market driven robots, with impressive realizations ranging from intelligent vacuum cleaners to humanoid robots.   This is a very exciting time and some people see in the current situation many common points with the early days of the computer industry. However, like PCs in the early 80's, today's robots are still incompatible in term of software. There is yet no standard way to reuse one component from one robot to the other, which is needed to have a real software industry bootstraping. And most attempts have been failing to provide tools genuinely adapted to the complex need of robot programming.   Here at Gostai, we believe that the industry needs a powerful robotics software platform, ready to face the challenges of Artificial Intelligence and autonomous robots programming.

Power and energy are key design considerations across a spectrum of computing solutions, from supercomputers and data centers to handheld phones and other mobile computers. A large body of work focuses on managing power and improving energy efficiency. While prior work is easily summarized in two words—"Avoid waste!"—the challenge is figuring out where and why waste happens and determining how to avoid it. In this article, I discuss how, at a general level, many inefficiencies, or waste, stem from the inherent way system architects address the complex trade-offs in the system-design process. I discuss common design practices that lead to power inefficiencies in typical systems and provide an intuitive categorization of high-level approaches to addressing them. The goal is to provide practitioners—whether in systems, packaging, algorithms, user interfaces, or databases—a set of tools, or "recipes," to systematically reason about and optimize power in their respective domains.

Margus Veanes, a Researcher from the RiSE group at Microsoft Research, gives an overview of Rex, a tool that generates matching string from .NET regular expressions. Rex turns regular expressions into symbolic automatons, then gives them to a constraint solver to find matching strings.

This 75-second video provides a quick introduction to the Concurrency Visualizer, a new profiling tool available in Visual Studio 2010. The Concurrency Visualizer enables you to look under the hood of your parallel applications and quickly discover performance bottlenecks. If you’re hungry to learn more, visit http://blogs.msdn.com/visualizeparallel.

Tigal announced the VoiceGP family of products under its VeeaR brand of voice and speech recognition products. The product family consists of the VoiceGP module and two development kits with bundled development software. It combines all the hardware and software required for easy and cost effective development and implementation of speech synthesis and multi-language speaker independent and speaker dependent speech recognition capabilities to virtually any application, says the manufacturer. The VoiceGP Module is based on Sensory's RSC-4128 mixed signal processor. Its 42x72mm footprint and two 28-pin connectors with 2.54mm pin spacing make the module breadboard friendly and suitable for prototype boards.

One challenge designers face is the need to translate their algorithms into code for use in embedded targets. The task has proven to be long and prone to error. This article examines how the use of high-level design tools and C code generation capabilities improves the design flow by exploring different use cases and how to reduce the amount of embedded technology expertise required to program embedded targets.

CHESS is a tool for disciplined testing of concurrent programs. CHESS requires users to develop concise concurrent tests for that explore one concurrency scenario—or a few scenarios—in their programs. Given such a test, CHESS systematically enumerates all behaviors of the program being tested to find concurrency errors, data races, deadlocks, and livelocks.

In this demo we showcase efforts in MSR to collaborate with external researchers to explore the application of new technologies, specifically Dryad and DryadLINQ, to big data research problems in science. We also highlight our efforts to provide software and services to academics across the world, through the release of Dryad and DryadLINQ free of charge to the research community, along with associated programming guides, user documentation, and code libraries. Dryad is a general-purpose distributed computing engine, more flexible than MapReduce or Hadoop!, that was designed to simplify the task of implementing distributed applications on clusters of Windows computers. DryadLINQ is an abstraction layer which simplifies the process of implementing Dryad-based applications. Microsoft Research is acutely aware of the ubiquity of big data and the challenges this presents. We are offering researchers the tools, resources and collaboration to explore this new area.

F# is ideal for data-rich, concurrent and algorithmic development: "simple code to solve complex problems". F# is a simple and pragmatic programming language combining functional, object-oriented and scripting programming, and supports cross-platform environments including PC, Mac, and Linux. We'll provide the tutorials, resources and tools you’ll need to begin working with F# right away.