Om Malik asks a question that surely is on every techie and Microsoft investor's mind: how is Microsoft (Nasdaq:MSFT) spending its colossal $7 billion R&D budget?  He was able to find a few hints on a recent Bill Gates speech at the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit, held in early August.  While I enjoyed reading the speech, I must confess that downloading the slides did not give me too much info, other than a few universities with which Microsoft is cooperating, including MIT, Harvard, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon and Illinois.  For good measure, Robert Scoble dropped in and left a few hints, including the Channel 9 video tour of Microsoft Research or the Windows Embedded Lab Tour.

That said, the home page for the event itself (the Research Faculty Summit) was also packed with links to various research initiatives including the Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL), DateLens (an information visualization project) and Piccolo.NET (a toolkit to help build 2D graphics that users can interact with).