Maybe I am understanding this incorrectly, but it seems that most of this research is published publically and the papers are available on the author websites. Are they allowed to file patents for published work? Is there a delay between when they can file a patent and when they can publish the work? I would be interested if any person with legal knowledge here could comment...

There seems to have been a lot of UW and MSR collaboration in research lately. I remember reading earlier about their information retrieval lab collaborating with MSR, and their AI lab working with MSR. Now this seems like an HCI lab working with MSR. I guess this shows it definitely helps to build your computer science department close to a big software company.