A while ago Xbox Division head honcho Phil Spencer mentioned that Kinect Games Creative Director and poster boy Kudo Tsunoda is going to step back into the limelight this year. Yesterday Xbox Games Marketing Lead Aaron Greenberg said that he's working on something "amazing" on Twitter.

But here's where things get interesting: in the last few days on the Microsoft career opportunities website new ads have started appearing with the mysterious label "OSG.KUDOT."

The mystery is easily decrypted, as "KUDOT" quite obviously stands for "Kudo Tsunoda," while "OSG" is the acronym for "Operating Systems Group," indicating that the ads are for Tsunoda's team within the Operating Systems Group.

The Operating Systems Group is a core team within Microsoft Research described as follows:

The Operating Systems Group is part of the Systems and Networking Research Area. The most important job of an operating system is to provide a context within which programs can be created and run. Our group conducts fundamental and applied research into the base abstractions to create this context. To make our work relevant, we build prototype systems to evaluate our ideas and to prove their implemention into practical systems.

The new ads themselves offer quite interesting insight. Both the ads for a Principal Program Manager and a Senor Producer mention the use of "cutting edge" and "Industry-leading" technology, but more importantly, they clarify that the candidates will work on the production of a "product." This means that the team isn't just working on some abstract theory, but on something tangible.

An ad for a Principal Software Engineer is equally interesting, as it mentions "Research, investigate, and develop new service and cloud computing opportunities." This indicates that Microsoft's cloud is involved in the project, and more specifically cloud computing, which is the application of the "power of the cloud" to processing elements like AI, Physics or other tasks normally handled by a platform's CPU and GPU. It also requires passion for games, which means that the project is gaming-related.

It'll definitely be interesting to see what Tsunoda is working on, considering the long time spent working out of the spotlight. Whether it'll be at Windows 10's event on January 21st, or we'll see him walk the E3 stage again, we can't know, but color me intrigued.