Computer science can cover multiple disciplines, such as using computers to design a vaccine for AIDS, said Rico Malvar, a Microsoft distinguished engineer and director at Microsoft Research.

Among those perusing Microsoft Research projects at the event were some local high school students. Technology projects on display included:

-- Dryad, for parallel programming on large PC clusters. This effort involves making it easier for programmers to program large clusters for applications such as data mining. The project currently is not being applied to wide-area, grid computing, however.

"We're assuming you own all the computers," in the cluster, said Michael Isard, a Microsoft researcher involved in Dryad. The project is currently in a research stage, with no release date set.

-- Wild Thing. This technology for expression matching makes it easier to search the Web by enabling users to enter just a few characters of a query to receive back broad-based data. It recognizes previous searches and is considered ideal for conducting searches from mobile devices.