In this talk, Dan'l Lewin (speaking on behalf of Microsoft) walks the audience through a series of hands‑on demos, research directions, and policy considerations that illustrate how Microsoft’s experimental “garage” culture, emerging interface technologies, and massive research organization are being leveraged to reshape civic technology and urban infrastructure. He describes a Kinect‑based 3‑D capture and rapid‑print demo that turns a person’s scan into a physical model, and explains how such inexpensive sensors combined with cloud‑scale, “transparent” computing can enable voice‑, visual‑, and 3‑D‑telepresence interfaces that feel automatic to users. Lewin then highlights Microsoft’s research scale (over 1,000 PhDs) and its strategy of hiring experts in fields relevant to future product lines, while emphasizing open publication and collaboration with academia. The talk shifts to legal and jurisdictional challenges surrounding data access, subpoenas, and international treaties, illustrating Microsoft’s stance on respecting local law. Finally, Lewin outlines Microsoft’s civic‑tech initiatives, especially partnerships with cities like Chicago, to use 3‑D mapping, sensor‑driven infrastructure monitoring, and data platforms to address urban problems such as flooding, aging sewer systems, and supply‑chain constraints on fresh food. He calls for broader public‑private collaboration to future‑proof city infrastructure and invites the audience to build on these ideas.
Chapters
Yep. When can we go to Microsoft and try it? Say that again? We as a class, can we go to Microsoft and try it? Yeah, I mean, there is a— we could work on following up and having the local team host you at our site in Mountain View. There's a— remember what I said, we can work on the team. But we have a garage there. We have a garage there where there's lots of toys. I mean, Kenny used to work on my team. We just transferred him to the garage. And he's a super geek. He's a garage geek. He is a super geek. And the other day, just this week, I was walking out of the main building and he had a group of guests out in front of the big Microsoft logo. They were taking their picture and there were drones flying all over their heads because he was doing all this kind of stuff. So we have a garage and people play and we invite people in. Emily and I will follow up and we'll see if we can find a host and if you guys want to find your way there, I'm sure somebody would be glad to give you an hour or 2 and give you an exploration. We do have really fun one that Master Kenny is really good at which we've done for a lot of international political leaders who come to the Bay Area, they want to visit Silicon Valley and we host them on our campus. And that is we use a Kinect sensor and it's on a little tripod like the camera back there. And we put the Prime Minister, whoever, the King, whoever is in the room, we put him in a chair and Kenny just walks around him literally at this pace with a sensor. And he comes around the back and he says, okay, we're done. And then as fast as that printer can print, which takes a long time these days, you know, it's not like 10 minutes, it's maybe an hour or 2, there's a 3-dimensional model, a little doll that gets created just by walking around them with that camera. So you can see that, you know, this very inexpensive sub-$100 little sensor thing and some interesting software just walking around an image and then bang, you've got output. So you can start to think how quickly you'll fast forward using tools and development environments that will allow, you know, with the likes of an AutoCAD-type skill set, you'll start to see people say, you know, I want one that's like this but I wanna tune it. I want it this color, I wanna change this shape, or I'd rather have an edge that does this. Just like you saw with that motorcycle tank, you'll start to see those things emerging. Our enthusiasm is quite high. All of that leads to this invisible notion of transparent computing and storage just up there that you don't have to think about, not like what you're probably already thinking about. It's like, okay, give me the control panel and I need more computers, great, push button scale, it all happens automagically. That's where our enthusiasm comes, and we will continue to push this frontier of interface, both voice and visual engagement, and then the idea of starting to use 3-dimensional imagery to do transport and effective meetings and things like that. Not long ago, just to take a little segue, not long ago, within the last 6 or 8 years, I'm not calling them out for any reason other than this is what they did, but Cisco and HP and a couple of companies, those two to be to be called out, were offering up these conference rooms that you could put in your building as a large corporation and spend $500,000 worth of outfitting and equipment to make that room such, to your point about the little girl and the guy, that you could have a little Star Trek-y-like meeting where you're sort of like, beam me up. You could pretend that you're sitting in a room with people on the other side of the country or wherever. who also spent $500,000 on outfitting their conference room to be an exact image of what your conference room was. Well, we're doing it off the shelf in real time using, again, Skype infrastructure, peer-to-peer, and then boom, with these lenses. So, and that's, we saw that coming in spades. As a company, we have 1,000+ PhDs in our research organization. We are the largest computer science department in the world by far. And every one of those people are hired to further the state of the art in their field, We don't tell them what to do, but we only hire them in the fields that we think are relevant to our future. So we've got anthropologists and MDs, but they're mostly computer scientists. They're thinking deeply about these kinds of things, and they all publish freely and openly and work with the academic community all around the world. Part of my work, which is really kind of the last slide, and we'll get into Q&A, but we're already there. Part of my work is thinking through these public-private partnerships with the universities. Thinking how the academics who are in the university community, not the ones doing the computer science work because our research group does that, but the ones who are thinking about the social implications and the policy implications of the technology that's going to change the way people interact and how the regulatory regimes are going to say, oh, but wait, we need access to that phone, we have a subpoena, right, like the iPhone case. So what are those issues? Or in the case where we've sued the US government twice, We just sued them this week. And I don't know, about a year ago we sued them as well. They came to us and said, we want you to deliver the papers, which in this case is digital electronic mail, but technically the papers that belong to a person that are sitting in an Irish data center. We're a US company and this is a US person. And we said, you have a treaty, you, the US government, you have a treaty with Ireland by which you get those things. Don't ask us to do it. So there are international laws. They need to be extrapolated and bubbled up to how the digital world is gonna function. We just believe that local laws prevail, and we're not going to reach extraterritorially into a world and break that regime, which is hundreds of years in the making. Certainly 50-plus years, probably 100 years in the making in terms of international law sort of from the early 20th century, early 19th century and 20th. So with that in mind, civic tech is mostly concentrated around the mass migration of people to cities and the implications of living in a concentrated space with a lot of people where health, education, and all of the attendant issues of the environment are present and get— as they get concentrated and as the resources are limited, and they're truly limited on this planet, we need to build a better place for everyone. And technology is an instrument that pervades and underpins every problem that exists in a metropolitan area. If you look at health problems in the inner cities in São Paulo, Brazil, A lot of them are related to the fact that the supply chain cannot physically get fresh produce into the cities. Assuming you can get everybody to eat fresh produce, which would make them healthier. But the supply chain and the traffic and logistics problems are so great that that's one of the leading causes of the medical issues. There's a huge expense on society and an incredible loss of human potential. And so we're looking at the way in which all the technologies and the stuff that I've been describing, including the regulations and how we start thinking about this, how is this going to make cities and metropolitan areas more livable? And we're running a lot of public-private partnerships around the world, and we're working with a lot of the cities. And one of our number one cities is Chicago. They have a— it's a large-scale city in the US, They have made their city available as a platform. They've literally opened it up. They create special zones within it which public-private partnerships can occur. Universities, large corporations, we're partnering with all of our quote-unquote frenemies, all the big companies that we compete with. We're all at the table together. And we work really closely at finding projects and experiments that can deal with flooding issues, that can deal with, you know, road pavement issues, that can deal with as they redo the sewer systems, which are over 100 years old. How do they map and instrument what's there? And how do they do that in a proactive way by alerting everyone when this work is going on? So we'll take a small section of the city and say we're gonna dig all the way down, and when we do that, we're gonna model and pilot mapping that fully in 3 dimensions. And we're gonna break all the permitting challenges associated with bringing everybody in that ever might wanna do anything underground in that space and know how to instrument that so that the moment you put the sewer in and fill up the hole, somebody else doesn't show up with a permit and say, oh, by the way, I wanna go down there too, give me a permit, let's re-dig and then stop traffic for another 6 months. So if you were gonna think holistically and spike all the way down into the ground, What would the order of things be to do it right, instrument, make it work for the long term for the next 100 years so that you don't have to do that? So how do you future-proof retooling the infrastructure of a major old city? So we're thinking through these problems, again, doing our best to codify and frame what are the data requirements, who needs to be around the table, who does what, what are the trust and security and privacy issues associated with it, Can we suspend the short-term rules so that we can prod— so again, you need everybody to participate because it might be the case that the city has a regulation that says in an apartment building like Draper University, the temperature can never go below 65 degrees in the building or in your apartment or your room and it can never go above 78 degrees. The city might say those are the rules, or 80, whatever, pick a number, but there are rules in these things. Now what happens if you, because you're in the top floor, you go away for a week and leave the window open and it's cold out and all the hot air is being sucked out of the building? Is that Draper's problem? The answer is the city's got the rules, somebody operates the building, it's probably not Draper, there's probably a third party that operates the building. So what are the triangulations and the issues associated with Someone calling in and saying, hey, it's 62 in here and it's supposed to be 65. Because that's what happens in cities. There's all this churn and all these issues. So how do we do that so that we sort of automagically make this stuff work a little better? So we're trying to find these kinds of experiments. And that's really what civic tech is all about. And in my wildest dream, having been in this business for 40 years, to the extent I play a little bit longer for fun, it's to to see this through and to see what these things might look like and to hope that the likes of you all will build things that'll make it better for everyone else, 'cause we're lucky 'cause we're all here, right? So anyway, that's my talk. What do you guys wanna talk about? Thanks.
