Computing in the year 2020

I am finally getting off my duff and researching a bit more. I've been stagnated in the here and now or in gaming worlds such that I have not been looking ahead enough. So while I play catch-up on some of the possible future directions our technology and society will run I will drop a few links here over the next few days, weeks, or months.

We all know the Giant Microsoft for what it is today and the recent past, but what about tomorrow? Microsoft has a large amount of highly skilled and intelligent people on its payroll, what are they working on when looking beyond the next product releases (Vista, Office 12, etc.)

In the summer of 2005, an international expert group was brought together for a workshop to define and produce a new vision and roadmap of the evolution, challenges and potential of computer science and computing in scientific research in the next fifteen years.
The resulting document, Towards 2020 Science, sets out the challenges and opportunities arising from the increasing synthesis of computing and the sciences. It seeks to identify the requirements necessary to accelerate scientific advances –particularly those driven by computational sciences and the 'new kinds' of science the synthesis of computing and the sciences is creating. Already this synthesis has led to new fields and advances spanning genomics and proteomics, earth sciences and climatology, nanomaterials, chemistry and physics.

Microsoft like Google labs and other R&D outfits at companies have some interesting stuff in the works; some of it immediately practical others very long running in viewpoint (Like Quantum Software, not to be confused with software by the current company named Quantum today). You can check out more of Microsoft's publicly released initatives here