Work by Microsoft's R&D group played a part in revamping Windows, a researcher said Friday, but not all the toil made it into Vista.
Microsoft Research contributed to the SuperFetch effort, a feature within Vista that predicts which applications are used when, then pre-loads them so that they're instantly available. "As part of a long term set of projects, we want to teach the computer to learn from users to make the machine more proactive," says Eric Horvitz, a principal researcher with Microsoft's R&D as well as the president-elect of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. "We want to use the system's idle time to make things punchier."
Horvitz and his colleagues developed the core algorithms that make up the predictive part of SuperFetch, the technology that plays Nostradamus for the operating system. Their work, says Horvitz, was able to predict which applications users would open by time of day and also by day of the week.
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