Engineering Realities

Engineering Realities of Building a Working Peer-to-Peer System

The Herald project at Microsoft Research has built working implementations of several scalable peer-to-peer algorithms as part of our work on a scalable, fault-tolerant event notification system. Our goal has been to construct and validate implementations that will work on real networks at scale – not just to simulate such systems and reason about what might be buildable – but to actually build...

Synchronized Realities

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) promises future environments that support the well-being of their inhabitants through comfort and assistive environments. For the elderly users, ambient assisted living (AAL) scenarios are targeting safe and independent living at home. Especially the integration of home automation components, such as intelligent light, window, and climate controls seem promising for s...

A development environment for engineering intelligent avatars for semantically-enhanced simulated realities (demonstration)

As of today, the behavior of avatars in virtual worlds is usually realized by script sequences which provide the illusion of intelligent behavior to the user. In the research project ISReal, our research group developed the first platform for deploying virtual worlds based on Semantic Web technology, which enables agents to reason about and plan with semantically annotated 3D objects. Powerful ...

Hyena Myths and Realities

Hyenas, first of all, were regarded as scavengers and consumers of carrion. In his Natural History, Pliny the Elder (A.D. 23-79) spoke of them as the only animals that dig up graves in search of corpses (ab uno animali sepulchra erui inquisitione corporum). Conrad Gesner, the great sixteenth-century cataloger of natural history, reported that they gorge themselves so gluttonously after finding ...

Triage: endgame realities.