World Wind lets you zoom from satellite altitude into any place on Earth. Leveraging Landsat satellite imagery and Shuttle Radar Topography Mission data, World Wind lets you experience Earth terrain in visually rich 3D, just as if you were really there.
Link to article...
This platform allows biologists to browse through a large database of information about food webs, find webs of interest, and then visualize links using TreePlus (see below). It is essentially a front end to relational data tables that offers coupled interaction, searching, and simple bar chart visualization to replace complex queries. EcoLens is a customization of PaperLens, and the next generation application, NetLens, is more generic and feature-filled.
GeneNotes assists biologists to collect and manage multimedia information related to cherry-picked of genes/ESTs.
The UBIC2 project aims to develop a framework and platform for the next generation of bio-computing – pervasive heterogeneous bio-information computing.
I really like the features of OneNote Mobile that Chris Pratley describes in this post.....
Out and About with OneNote Mobile
Designing for Usability in e-Science An International Workshop on Interrogating usability issues in new scientific practice, within the Lab and within Society A workshop to explore both the design needs for EScience, and the implications of designing for eScience The National EScience Center Edinburgh, Scotland January 26-27 (Thurs-Friday) 2006
Designing for Usability in e-Science
An International Workshop on Interrogating usability issues in new scientific practice, within the Lab and within Society
A workshop to explore both the design needs for EScience, and the implications of designing for eScience
The National EScience Center Edinburgh, Scotland January 26-27 (Thurs-Friday) 2006
Link to source...
Interesting Tech Reports from Microsoft Research
MSR-TR-2005-129 - Service Oriented Database Architecture: App Server-Lite? David Campbell http://research.microsoft.com/research/pubs/view.aspx?tr_id=983 As the capabilities and service levels of enterprise database systems have evolved, they have collided with incumbent technologies such as TP-Monitors or Message Oriented Middleware (MOM). We believe this trend will continue and have architected the upcoming release of SQL Server to advance this technology trend. This paper describes the Service Oriented Database Architecture (SODA) developed for the Microsoft SQL Server DBMS. First, it motivates the need for building Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) features directly into a database engine. Second, it describes a set of features in SQL Server that have been designed for SOA use. Finally, it concludes with some thoughts on how SODA can enable multiple service deployment topologies. MSR-TR-2005-127 - Leveraging Information Across HLA Alleles/Supertypes Improves HLA-Specific Epitope Prediction David Heckerman; Carl Kadie; Jennifer Listgarten http://research.microsoft.com/research/pubs/view.aspx?tr_id=981 We present a model for predicting HLA-specific CTL epitopes. In contrast to almost all other work in this area, we train a single model on epitopes from all HLA alleles and supertypes, yet retain the ability to make epitope predictions for specific HLA alleles. We are therefore able to leverage data across all HLA alleles and/or their supertypes, automatically learning what information should be shared and also how to combine allele-specific, supertype-specific, and global information in a principled way. We show that this leveraging can improve prediction of epitopes having HLA alleles with known supertypes, and dramatically increases our ability to predict epitopes having alleles which do not fall into any of the known supertypes. Our model, which is based on logistic regression, is simple to implement and understand, is solved by finding a single global maximum, yet performs on par with (to our knowledge) the best published results. MSR-TR-2005-123 - Indexing the Sphere with the Hierarchical Triangular Mesh Alex Szalay; Jim Gray; Gyorgy Fekete; Peter Kunszt; Peter Kukol; Ani Thakar http://research.microsoft.com/research/pubs/view.aspx?tr_id=977 We describe a method to subdivide the surface of a sphere into spherical triangles of similar, but not identical, shapes and sizes. The Hierarchical Triangular Mesh (HTM) is a quad-tree that is particularly good at supporting searches at different resolutions, from arc seconds to hemispheres. The subdivision scheme is universal, providing the basis for addressing and for fast lookups. The HTM provides the basis for an efficient geospatial indexing scheme in relational databases where the data have an inherent location on either the celestial sphere or the Earth. The HTM index is superior to cartographical methods using coordinates with singularities at the poles. We also describe a way to specify surface regions that efficiently represent spherical query areas. This article presents the algorithms used to identify the HTM triangles covering such regions MSR-TR-2005-122 - Using Table Valued Functions in SQL Server 2005 To Implement a Spatial Data Library Jim Gray; Alex Szalay; Gyorgy Fekete http://research.microsoft.com/research/pubs/view.aspx?tr_id=976 This article explains how to add spatial search functions (point-near-point and point in polygon) to Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005 using C# and table-valued functions. It is possible to use this library to add spatial search to your application without writing any special code. The library implements the public-domain C# Hierarchical Triangular Mesh (HTM) algorithms from Johns Hopkins University. That C# library is connected to SQL Server 2005 via a set of scalar-valued and table-valued functions. These functions act as a spatial index.
MSR-TR-2005-129 - Service Oriented Database Architecture: App Server-Lite? David Campbell http://research.microsoft.com/research/pubs/view.aspx?tr_id=983 As the capabilities and service levels of enterprise database systems have evolved, they have collided with incumbent technologies such as TP-Monitors or Message Oriented Middleware (MOM). We believe this trend will continue and have architected the upcoming release of SQL Server to advance this technology trend. This paper describes the Service Oriented Database Architecture (SODA) developed for the Microsoft SQL Server DBMS. First, it motivates the need for building Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) features directly into a database engine. Second, it describes a set of features in SQL Server that have been designed for SOA use. Finally, it concludes with some thoughts on how SODA can enable multiple service deployment topologies.
MSR-TR-2005-127 - Leveraging Information Across HLA Alleles/Supertypes Improves HLA-Specific Epitope Prediction David Heckerman; Carl Kadie; Jennifer Listgarten http://research.microsoft.com/research/pubs/view.aspx?tr_id=981 We present a model for predicting HLA-specific CTL epitopes. In contrast to almost all other work in this area, we train a single model on epitopes from all HLA alleles and supertypes, yet retain the ability to make epitope predictions for specific HLA alleles. We are therefore able to leverage data across all HLA alleles and/or their supertypes, automatically learning what information should be shared and also how to combine allele-specific, supertype-specific, and global information in a principled way. We show that this leveraging can improve prediction of epitopes having HLA alleles with known supertypes, and dramatically increases our ability to predict epitopes having alleles which do not fall into any of the known supertypes. Our model, which is based on logistic regression, is simple to implement and understand, is solved by finding a single global maximum, yet performs on par with (to our knowledge) the best published results.
MSR-TR-2005-123 - Indexing the Sphere with the Hierarchical Triangular Mesh Alex Szalay; Jim Gray; Gyorgy Fekete; Peter Kunszt; Peter Kukol; Ani Thakar http://research.microsoft.com/research/pubs/view.aspx?tr_id=977 We describe a method to subdivide the surface of a sphere into spherical triangles of similar, but not identical, shapes and sizes. The Hierarchical Triangular Mesh (HTM) is a quad-tree that is particularly good at supporting searches at different resolutions, from arc seconds to hemispheres. The subdivision scheme is universal, providing the basis for addressing and for fast lookups. The HTM provides the basis for an efficient geospatial indexing scheme in relational databases where the data have an inherent location on either the celestial sphere or the Earth. The HTM index is superior to cartographical methods using coordinates with singularities at the poles. We also describe a way to specify surface regions that efficiently represent spherical query areas. This article presents the algorithms used to identify the HTM triangles covering such regions
MSR-TR-2005-122 - Using Table Valued Functions in SQL Server 2005 To Implement a Spatial Data Library Jim Gray; Alex Szalay; Gyorgy Fekete http://research.microsoft.com/research/pubs/view.aspx?tr_id=976 This article explains how to add spatial search functions (point-near-point and point in polygon) to Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005 using C# and table-valued functions. It is possible to use this library to add spatial search to your application without writing any special code. The library implements the public-domain C# Hierarchical Triangular Mesh (HTM) algorithms from Johns Hopkins University. That C# library is connected to SQL Server 2005 via a set of scalar-valued and table-valued functions. These functions act as a spatial index.
Just saw this call for papers for SciFlow 2006 - IEEE Workshop on Workflow and Data Flow for Scientific Applications in Atlanta - April 8, 2006 - looks really good...
Workshop scope--------------Today computational scientists across all disciplines create ever increasing amounts of often highly complex data. Generated raw and derived data may come from wet lab experiments, large-scale data-intensive and compute-intensive simulations, or real-time observations e.g. from remote sensors. Technical challenges include not only managing the volume of data, but also the complexity of managing computations distributed over the grid. In order to support scientists in their data management and analysis tasks, scientific workflows have recently gained increased interest and momentum as a unifying mechanism for handling scientific data. Scientific workflows pose a unique set of challenges due to the special nature ofscientific data and the specific needs for large-scale data collection, querying and analysis. The goal of this workshop is to foster a community of researchers advancing the various technical aspects of scientific computing and workflow management over grids. We invite contributions from researchers addressing diverse aspects of this emerging area. The workshop will include regular and short research papers and demonstrations. Position papers are also encouraged to attract discussions on work in progress.
Topics of interest------------------We invite regular and short papers as well as demonstrations (accompanied by descriptive papers) and position papers on relevant topics, including but not limited to: * Data management challenges in scientific workflow systems * Scheduling, resource allocation, and planning for scientific workflow systems * Distributed and Grid-based scientific workflow systems * Data-intensive, compute-intensive, metadata-intensive scientific applications * Highly interactive scientific workflow systems * Problem-solving environments for scientific workflow systems * Data and workflow provenance in scientific workflow systems * Query processing over scientific streams * Data mining scientific streams * Caching of scientific datasets and streams * Semantics in scientific grids * Interactive and real time management of scientific data * Archiving science grid data * Information discovery in science grids * Case studies of science data grids * Data, Event, and Activity Modelling for eScienceImportant Dates---------------Dec 15, 2005 Submissions dueJan 5, 2006 Acceptance notificationFeb 15, 2006 Camera-ready papers due
Organization------------Program co-chairs Roger Barga (Microsoft Research) Brian F. Cooper (Georgia Tech)Program committee Ian Foster (ANL/U. Chicago) Mike Franklin (Berkeley) Jim Frew (UCSB) Reagan Moore (SDSC) Kian-Lee Tan (NU Singapore) Marvin Theimer (Microsoft)