Cambridge is shaping tomorrow's technology

What is the connection between Malta and Bing, Microsoft's search engine? No, it's not that Bing which carried a photo of the Grand Harbour a few days ago, to the delight of many a Maltese internet user.

It's that Bing which is a product of Microsoft's research centre in Cambridge, UK, and its director, Andrew Herbert was in Malta a couple of weeks ago to share his expertise with Malta Enterprise on the set-up of a life sciences centre in Malta.

I-Tech took the opportunity to interview Mr Herbert about the latest research endeavours in Cambridge, the future of computers, and his first impressions of Malta.

"You have interesting opportunities here," he told i-Tech. "You have a strong University and extremely good hospitals. The challenges you face are those of a small island. We are looking at scientific proposals and business opportunities."

The new life sciences centre has been mentioned in the Budget speeches for 2009 and 2010. Different government laboratories will be integrated into this national Biotechnology Park in San Gwann with an investment of €20 million.

Though this was Mr Herbert's first visit to Malta, his work and that of his colleagues has a bearing on thousands of Maltese computer and internet users every day. Microsoft Research in Cambridge, established in 1997, has contributed significantly to Bing, Microsoft's search engine previously known as Live or MSN search, which has been tasked to tackle head-on the dominance of rival search engine Google.

Maltese Xbox users should also be aware that some of the most innovative features of their games console such as the TrueSkill Ranking System and Drivatar were developed in Cambridge. And project "Natal" promises a controller-free gaming environment. It uses a camera to track a user's movements via full skeletal mapping. It also recognises voices and vocal commands.

So how does Mr Herbert see the latest trends in computing right now? He explained that three forces are coming together at this point in time: multi-core processing, online computing or the "cloud" and bringing these together and making machines really understand what the user needs.

"The single processor has reached a limit. The days of a single computer just getting faster and faster is not happening. We have reached a limit at what a central processor can do. But the good news is that Moore's Law is still giving us more transistors so we now have of central processors on chip. That means we can dedicate different processors of the machine to do different tasks and we can build a much richer client experience because we have all those parallel processors," he said.

Mentioning the Xbox as an example, which has a three-core processor, and the Hotmail and Bing servers which have a 100,000 cores, Mr Herbert explained that "Multi-core processing actually gives us more computing power in the sense of being able to do a lot of parallel things. That's a big improvement over the single processor when we had to keep some computing power in reserve in case someone clicked on the mouse button. This will give us a richer interaction with the machine and much more performance".

The second piece of the puzzle is what is happening on the internet, with software-as-a-service, online computing, and the so-called "cloud".

"Suddenly we are not limited by the data bits on our computer or our phone or whatever device we have. We have that wider richness of data we can access. Through the network we can collaborate with others, social networking is extremely important.

"From a computer scientist point of view the most exciting thing about everything being connected to the cloud and people keeping their data in the cloud and accessing applications that way, is that we can understand what people are doing with their computers. We can start to bring those things together. We have the culture of mash-ups where we can come up with such things as Microsoft's Virtual Earth connect it to local information such as traffic situation, restaurants or pollution. Suddenly people can build new applications, new services, exploiting the richness of data out there."

The director of Microsoft Research at Cambridge is aware of the challenges these opportunities present in terms of personal privacy and reassured that Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and other large companies are engaged in discussions with the EU about what are the acceptable limits on how long you retain personal information.

"As with all technologies we balance the benefits against the risks. When you put multi-core processing together and the sharing of data you have the opportunity for the systems to be much more personalised.

"We see our search technology moving from the early idea of keywords to actually the machine understanding what you are trying to do. So for example if you type a flight number into Bing it understands you have a query about travel. If Bing deduces you are trying to compare products it will take you to our comparison shopping sites."

Microsoft is aware of machine learning and inference to understand data and Mr Herbert is convinced this is a robust approach to the tagging of data. The challenge with this approach is that you need good algorithms.

So how does he imagine the computer of the near future?

"One day computers will be doing many things my assistant Angela is doing today, being able to anticipate what is going on. We are on a threshold of a new generation of computers where we interact with in a different way."

Now that Windows 7 has just been launched, how does he imagine Windows 15 to be?

"Windows will still be known with the same name. People's computing is spreading over multiple devices: PC, laptop, smartphone, TV, game console etc - so we expect them to share seamlessly. Windows 15 will be less an OS for one device and more a way of how all our resources in the cloud interact."

For those who are a bit sceptical about the promises of technology, the director of Microsoft Research in Cambridge is convinced that "the paperless office was a myth but the filing cabinet has disappeared".