Last Friday, Microsoft Maven Mary-Jo Foley issued this report, unpacking details about Microsoft’s initiatives to marry its cloud-based resources with application development efforts involving Windows Mobile. The initiative, code named “Project Hawaii” is all about how Microsoft will encourage students – initially at the University of Southern California (USC), Univeristy of Wisconsin-Madison, and Duke University – to explore how to “use the cloud to enhance the user experience on mobile devices.”

Keeping with the Hawaiian theme, the program incorporates initiatives that have been conducted as part of Microsoft’s “Mobile Assistance Using Infrastructure” (MAUI) Project. Its purpose is to enable “a new class of cpu- and data-intensive applications that seamlessly augment the cognitive abilities of users by exploiting speech recognition, NLP, vision, machine learning, and augmented reality”. Based on experience with WinMobile 6 and 6.5, it determined that such a project is required to define how to overcome issues surrounding battery life (which it calls “energy limitations of handhelds) “by leaveraging nearby computing infrastructure”, which is believed to encompass resources in Microsoft’s storage and compute cloud (Azure) accessible over wireless networks (WiFi, WLAN, FemtoCell…)

In a nutshell, Microsoft says that the mobile “platform” runs on a Windows Mobile 6.5 smartphone (with Windows Phone 7 “in planning”). The services that are invoked in Microsoft’s cloud include Bing Maps for mapping services, and Windows Live ID for user identification. More detail on MAUI can be found on the Microsoft Research Web site.

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Tags: Microsoft, mobile speech, Mobile Platforms, Azure, Windows Mobile