Distinguished Lecture

Working in the Sweet Spot: Creating Research that Works for Industry 7

July 31, 2007

What determines a researcher's agenda? For many of the best and the brightest, the agenda comes from their academic community. What is it going to take to get a paper into that great conference? Academic conferences play a vital role, insuring that research is novel, exciting, and well thought out. What determines a product roadmap? For great products, the agenda comes from users needs both now and in the future. The intersection is the sweet spot. Companies need to hire, and reward, researchers that work on both agendas at the same time. Defining and solving problems that not only yield great papers, but are also responsive to your user's needs. The sweet spot is not an easy place to play, since the intersection is harder to hit than either target alone. I will illustrate with examples of sweet spot research from my own work and perhaps a few others. By the end of the talk I hope to leave you with the tools to evaluate corporate research, and researchers, and the means to guide research toward success in a corporate environment.

Presenter Bio

Paul Viola, Microsoft Live Labs

As a Principal Scientist, Paul Viola heads two teams: one working on technology for document processing and information extraction, and a second team working on image understanding algorithms. The information extraction folks work with Live Search to improve query processing and search results. In collaboration with the Live Toolbar team we built the technology behind "smart menus". The Tablet PC team uses our technology to extract the structure in handwritten ink notes. The image understanding folks have worked with the RoundTable team to detect people in teleconferencing video. MSN uses our technology to find and flag inappropriate image uploads. We are working with Live Image Search and a number of other teams in MSN. Paul has served on the program committees of conferences such as Neural Information Process Systems (NIPS), Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), and the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV). He has received the Marr Prize for the best paper in computer vision (at ICCV 2003) and an honorable mention for the Marr prize in 1995. He received an honorable mention for best paper at AAAI 2004. While at MIT he received the NSF Career award as one of the top junior faculty members in Computer Science.

Close