There’s a good cover story article on Microsoft’s Smart Building Pilot Program in the latest The Leader, it describes the Microsoft Real Estate and Facilitates group effort in using more technology to improve the energy performance of the buildings they...

Don’t miss the Learn Windows Azure event next Tuesday, Dec 13th…. Learn Windows Azure Next Tuesday (Dec 13th) Next Tuesday, Dec 13th we’ll be holding a special Learn Windows Azure training event for developers.  It will provide a great way to learn...

Dealing with scientific data can be challenging – especially since it’s in many different formats, files etc.  The SQL Labs release of Microsoft Codename “Data Explorer” looks to be a tool that can help bring together many different data sets in...

For the last couple of days at Supercomputer 2011 we’ve been demoing WorldWide Telescope being driven via Kinect for Windows – probably the single largest Kinect driven application out there.  While we’ve done something like this before (ie. Mix...

There is a new release of the Python Tools for Visual Studio and it includes Pyvot : a connector to Excel that allow data transfer and manipulation – check out the tutorial .  It also has a PyKinect , to leverage Kinect for new natural user interactions...

Earlier today I had the pleasure to give the kickoff talk for the release of The Fourth Paradigm book in Portuguese .  Being able to highlight the thinking's of Jim Gray on which the book is based and the scientists who wrote articles for the book...

Just read the The World According to LINQ article in October’s Communications of the ACM – Erik Meijer does a really good job describing LINQ and how it can be used with Big Data from my different data sources – ie. DBs, REST services and other unstructured...

Microsoft Research is putting .NET Bio , a bioinformatics toolkit into the Outercurve Foundation , allowing community involvement in the future of this open-source project. See the full post by Simon Mercer describing the transfer to Outercurve as a new...

I just realized that Docs.com has support for PDFs – so to test it out, I put up a copy of The Fourth Paradigm book MSR put out and the Silverlight viewer works great – no need for a plugin.  Try it out and see what you think…. Here’s the link to...

Today summer seemed to come to an end – the “marine layer” moved in from the coast and brought cool weather and clouds…so much for the last few weeks of nice sunny warm weather.  I’ve been off for the past few months and really tried to stay away...

Last week the Worldwide Telescope team put out some tools to support astronomy and earth-system science with a strong emphasis on time-series support and 3-D rendering.  This includes the beta release of new tools and SDK for WWT.  They include...

If you are a professional or student interested in visualizing astronomy data then you should not miss the Astro-Viz 2011 workshop. We invite participants who span a broad range of interests and expertise, including: visualization and graphics experts...

For those of you interested in Geospatial issues – check out the new strawman proposal for adding Geospatial to the OData protocol . Geospatial data support in OData This is a strawman proposal. Please challenge it in the OData mailing list . OData supports...

Just saw that the Business Intelligence folks have setup BI Labs – It will be interesting to see all the prototypes and concepts as the come out and how they can be used for Scientific research/exploration.  I’m currently looking at the Fuzzy Lookup...

Today’s Bing Image of the day is the Cats Eye Nebula – if you want to explore it more you can see it in the WorldWide Telescope Web Client    Bing Cross Posted from Dan Fay's Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/dan_fay)

Today is the 2nd anniversary of the launch of WWT – congrats to Jonathan, Curtis, and the rest of the small team.  Besides the initial windows client (that lead to Scoble’s post - Microsoft researchers make me cry ) there is the web client (silverlight...

Here’s a really good article on KQED’s Climate Watch on Albedo and why it’s important in a warming planet – it’s also really good to see Jeff Dozier’s work highlighted in the article.   btw, last year Jeff was awarded the Jim Gray eScience Award...

Lately I’ve been looking at OData – the Open Data Protocol and have been wondering if this is the universal way to make Data Discoverable, Accessible, and Consumable – and as Roy pointed out “Shareable”.  It seems to have many of the characteristics...

Here’s a good way to get up to speed on WindowsAzure and contribute to a worldwide distributed computing project ( Folding@Home ) – by participating in the webcast you’ll also receive a temporary, self-expiring full-access account to work with Azure for...

In the latest WWT release put out on Tax Day (April 15th) – one of the features that was included was the ability to utilize WWT in different projections – so you can use WWT in Planetariums. Below Paul Bourke tested those features out on his iDome (btw...

It’s great to see that the technology behind the SenseCam work out of MSR Cambridge is now available for anyone to utilize.  It’s had some real success as an aid for people with memory loss – check out the papers – but it could also be used as a...

The article from HPCwire on  Microsoft Injects More Goodies into Windows HPC highlights some of the new features in beta2.  I’m especially happy to see the support for Win7 desktops as computational nodes – desktop cycle stealing, something...

I’m a sucker for good technology and really useful  interfaces and applications – I just saw this post from the MSPress about the TechNet Desktop Player – not only will it be really useful for finding tech resources based on your role, but also if...

I hadn’t seen the Bing Earth Day Photo Contest till today…there are some really good prizes for both the students and their schools.  I was looking at some of the photos – since you can submit ratings and there are some really good ones that have...

For those interested in adding chemical symbols to documents – checkout the Chem4Word project , you can install the Chem4Word add-in which utilizes the Chemical Markup Language and makes it easier for students, chemists and researchers to insert and modify...