I saw that and maybe its stretching it a little bit, but I know Patrice Simard was involved in this sort of research relatively early (he started at Microsoft i

I saw that and maybe its stretching it a little bit, but I know Patrice Simard was involved in this sort of research relatively early (he started at Microsoft in 99, and worked at Bell Labs before.) I would not be surprised if there were some other people there that were doing this sort of research even earlier. There is actually some very high quality ground breaking research that comes out of Microsoft, they just have had problems making it into products traditionally.