Dom

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Microsoft brought its brainiacs to Silicon Valley for a road show highlighting the latest cool stuff.

Scientists from Microsoft Research labs in San Francisco and Redmond joined their colleagues at the company's Mountain View, Calif. campus to showcase speculative projects that could someday find their way into products.

Researchers are working on everything from a Web services-based model of the universe to sneaky ways to foil spammers.

Dan Ling, vice president of Microsoft Research, told an audience of academics, entrepreneurs and business folk that while Research has only a small part of Microsoft's hefty $7 billion R&D budget, most of the company's products are influenced by what it does.

For example, the San Francisco lab's statistical analysis of the Web could find its way into the new search technology Microsoft is readying to go up against Google. Jim Gray, a Microsoft Research Distinguished Engineer, said that a yearlong project to produce a statistical characterization of the Web turned up some interesting and useful trends. Microsoft Research tracked 1 billion Web pages for a year, analyzing what had changed and looking for anomalies.

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Source: iNews