Dan on eScience & Technical Computing @ Microsoft : Software

SciScope app and code available for download

Dan Fay — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 02:47:08 GMT

Earlier today the code behind the SciScope site was made available at SciScope.CodePlex.com. This enables others to make their datasets/repositories available and allow others to discover, download and utilize their data in a simple to use website. Also the semantic support is quite useful in finding related data.

SciScope Project Description

SciScope (see it live) is a prototype web application that allows data discovery from across multiple distributed heterogeneous data repositories. It leverages Bing Maps (formerly Microsoft Virtual Earth) and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 to support queries involving spatial, temporal and thematic constraints over an index of sensors operated by agencies such as USGS, EPA and NOAA as well as user provided data. SciScope leverages taxonomies stored as triples in SQL Server to provide search suggestions and for dealing with semantic heterogeneity between different data repositories.

_{SciScope screenshots (discovering/downloading insecticide data, browsing ecoregions left to right) for video tutorials click here}
This CodePlex release includes some desktop tools to simplify data publishing and content crawling for SciScope namely Catalog Publisher and Catalog Updater.

SciScope - Home

SharePoint Designer Available for Free

Dan Fay — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 03:29:52 GMT

Since I utilize SharePoint Designer allot for editing internal SharePoint sites…this is a really good thing to see.

Customize SharePoint with SharePoint Designer

We are implementing a number of changes to promote and facilitate even more customization efforts on top of the SharePoint platform including making SharePoint Designer 2007 available as a free download.

Download SharePoint Designer 2007 for free

SharePoint Designer Home Page - Microsoft Office Online

MSR Open Tools to Enhance Scientific Research Efforts Building on Science Commons Ontologies

Dan Fay — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 20:50:46 GMT

At ETech 2009 today, the announcement went out that Science Commons in conjunction with MSR External Research released the source code to two Word 2007 add-ins to allow scientists to markup terms and phrases in their documents/papers with ontologies, such as the ones at http://neurocommons.org. Some of this is based on previous collaboration with Phil Bourne from UCSD.

“Microsoft’s openness in working with the Science Commons has significant implications for the scientific research community because it will make it easy for authors to link their documents straight into the semantic Web of science — making that research, data and material easier to find and use,” said Philip E. Bourne, Ph.D.

You can seem more about the add-ins at Pablo’s Blog - Ontology Add-in for Word 2007

Microsoft Releases Open Tools to Enhance Scientific Research Efforts Building on Science Commons Ontologies

REDMOND, Wash., and SAN JOSE, Calif. — March 11, 2009 — The nuggets of information necessary for science to progress are often hard to find, submerged deep within the Web, or within databases that can’t be easily accessed or integrated. As a result, many scientists today work in relative isolation, follow blind alleys and unnecessarily duplicate existing research.

Addressing this critical challenge for researchers, Microsoft Corp. and Creative Commons announced today, before an industry panel at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (ETech 2009, http://en.oreilly.com/et2009 ), the release of the Ontology Add-in for Microsoft Office Word 2007 that will enable authors to easily add scientific hyperlinks as semantic annotations, drawn from ontologies, to their documents and research papers. Ontologies are shared vocabularies created and maintained by different academic domains to model their fields of study.

This Add-in will make it easier for scientists to link their documents to the Web in a meaningful way. Deployed on a wide scale, ontology-enabled scientific publishing will provide a Web boost to scientific discovery.

Science Commons, a division of Creative Commons, is incubating the adoption of semantic scientific publishing through creation of a robust database of ontologies (http://neurocommons.org) and development of supporting technical standards and code. Microsoft Research has built a technology bridge to enable the link between Microsoft Office Word 2007 and these ontologies.

[more]

Microsoft Releases Open Tools to Enhance Scientific Research Efforts Building on Science Commons Ontologies: Breakthrough collaboration helps researchers make easier connections on the Web.

WorldWide Telescope Academic Development Kit Release -Microsoft Research

Dan Fay — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 01:21:39 GMT

With this ADK, users can convert their own astronomical images/data to the format that can be read by WWT and share with other WWT users. Can’t wait to see more images/datasets made available.

WorldWide Telescope Academic Development Kit, January 2009 Release

The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) Academic Development Kit, January 2009 release contains two utilities that enable people to convert their astronomical images, panoramas, sky surveys, and planetary textures to a format that can be read by WWT and shared with other WWT users. It produces image pyramids of the photographs, thumbnails, and WTML files. WTML files are XML files in the WWT format that point to the images on the Internet and store details of how they are to be displayed in WWT and metadata such as image title and credits. The WWT SphereToaster Tool enables users to provide images in an equirectangular format that covers all or part of the inside or outside of a sphere. This includes, for example, cylindrical projections of panoramas and all-sky surveys. SphereToaster converts these to a different projection system—the TOAST system, currently unique to WWT—and then stores an image pyramid of the resulting TOAST-projected image. The tool also produces thumbnails and WTML files. The WWT StudyChopper Tool enables users to provide photographs of small parts of the sky, such as a high-resolution image of the Crab Nebula, and enter appropriate coordinate information and metadata. It creates image pyramids of the photographs, thumbnails, and WTML files. Once the output image pyramids and thumbnails are hosted by the user's servers and the WTML files are made available to others, anyone with access to the WTML files will be able to browse the images in WWT.

WorldWide Telescope Academic Development Kit, January 2009 Release - Microsoft Research

So you don’t think you can Sing?

Dan Fay — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 21:43:03 GMT

Now you can have your own musical accompaniment to match your voice without having to worry about artistic differences. I’ll have to play with Songsmith and see if can help even my voice sound decent :-) But you won’t see me posting the songs or videos online.

Just think – you can add a musical soundtrack to your everyday tasks…doing the dishes, walking the dog, or the one I like – kids ~~saying~~ singing “Science is Cool”….neat to see this product coming out of Microsoft Research.

What is Songsmith?
Songsmith generates musical accompaniment to match a singer’s voice. Just choose a musical style, sing into your PC’s microphone, and Songsmith will create backing music for you. Then share your songs with your friends and family, post your songs online, or create your own music videos.
Where can I get it?
A free trial download is available on our download page.

GrayWulf (on SQL Server) wins SC’08 Storage Challenge

Dan Fay — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 09:52:32 GMT

Congratulations to Alex Szalay and his amazing team at JHU for winning the SC’08 Storage Challenge – with the entry GrayWulf:Scalable Clustered Architecture for Data Intensive Computing. GrayWulf – is implemented with SQL Server 2008

Abstract:

Data intensive computing presents a significant challenge for traditional supercomputing architectures that maximize FLOPS since CPU speed has surpassed IO capabilities of HPC systems and BeoWulf clusters. We present the architecture for a three tier commodity component cluster designed for a range of data intensive computations operating on petascale data sets. The design goal is a balanced system in terms of IO performance and memory size, according to Amdahl’s Laws. GrayWulf pays tribute to Jim Gray who stimulated the system and its design. The hardware currently installed at JHU exceeds one petabyte of storage and has 0.5 bytes/sec of I/O and 1 byte of memory for each CPU cycle. The GrayWulf provides almost an order of magnitude better balance than existing systems. Our benchmarks are based on date from the petascale Pan-STARRS project, building the largest sky survey to date. The benchmarks involve sequential searches over hundreds of terabytes.

WALL•E's Universe in WorldWide Telescope

Dan Fay — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 07:24:27 GMT

Now this is fun science - Microsoft Research and Disney•Pixar team up to offer guided tours of the universe with WorldWide Telescope – how better to get our children interested in science and the universe – for most of us it was the Apollo Missions that interested in science and space, now WALL•E is a good ambassador.

WALL•E's Universe

Explore the Universe with WALL•E and Andrew Stanton. Zoom, pan, spin and learn about planets, constellations, stars and galaxies.

© Disney/Pixar

WorldWide Telescope

HPC - MPI.NET 1.0 Is Now Released...!

Dan Fay — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 21:12:04 GMT

PhilPen has posted that the folks at Indiana University have released MPI.NET: High Performance C# library for Message Passing. The runtime and source code are available for download as well as a Tutorial. This should make it much easier for folks to use any .Net language to write MPI apps – I’m interested in seeing ones written with F# and even PowerShell.

MPI.NET 1.0 Is Now Released...!

MPI.NET is a high-performance, easy-to-use implementation of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) for Microsoft's .NET environment. MPI is the de facto standard for writing parallel programs running on a distributed memory system, such as a compute cluster, and is widely implemented. Most MPI implementations provide support for writing MPI programs in C, C++, and Fortran. MPI.NET provides support for all of the .NET languages (especially C#), and includes significant extensions (such as automatic serialization of objects) that make it far easier to build parallel programs that run on clusters.

MPI.NET has been developed by the research staff at Indiana University in collaboration with Microsoft. Developers leverage the "Windows HPC Server 2008 SDK" in tandem with the MPI.NET SDK to build MPI.NET applications. An MPI.NET runtime component must be installed onto Windows HPC Server 2008 based clusters to host MPI.NET applications.

Regarding Windows Server : MPI.NET 1.0 Is Now Released...!

Touchless

Dan Fay — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 02:35:46 GMT

Touchless is a fun and very cool release available from Office Labs – all you need is a webcam and some objects to use as pointers/markers…

check it out.

Touchless

Touchless enables touch without touching by using a webcam to track color based markers. Touchless includes two parts:

Touchless Demo is an open source application that anyone with a webcam can use to experience multi-touch, no geekiness required. There are 4 fun demos: Snake - where you control a snake with a marker, Defender - up to 4 player version of a pong-like game, Map - where you can rotate, zoom, and move a map using 2 markers, and Draw - the marker is used to guess what.... draw!

Touchless SDK is an open source SDK that enables developers to create multi-touch based applications using a webcam for input, geekiness recommended.

Touchless

Data Mining Services in the Cloud – Mine your Data, Any Place, Any Time

Dan Fay — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 22:24:38 GMT

This is great news - Software-plus-Services that any scientist/researcher could use. The SQL Server Data Mining folks have a Data Mining Service in the cloud they are testing out…I posted previously [OLAP and Scientific Data & Data Mining Addins for Office 2007 (Excel & Visio)] about the Excel addins that allow anyone with Excel to do Data Mining on Excel tables. Now the team is testing out SQL Server Data Mining Services – from which you can do the data mining directly from Excel 2007 or even upload a csv file.

So for fun – I downloaded a csv file of a stream gauge near Redmond into Excel and ran the “Highlight Exceptions” tool to find outliers in the dataset – it read the table, uploaded it to the service and in seconds returned the results - which included the number of outliers - in this case air temperature and it also highlighted in the table the rows. It was so easy. I can see it being used for many scientific datasets - even to clean them before doing other analysis, charting, graphs, uploads, etc.

The Table Analysis Tools included are:

Analyze Key Influencers
Detect Categories
Fill from Example
Forecast
Highlight Exceptions
Scenario Analysis
Prediction Calculator
Shopping Basket Analysis

Microsoft SQL Server Data Mining Services

Mine your Data, Any Place, Any Time

The SQL Server Data Mining team is working to extend the power and ease of use of SQL Server Data Mining to the Cloud. Our goal is provide services that allow you to build rich, predictive applications without worrying about server infrastructure, and showcase these services with cool applications that give you a glimpse of what’s possible. We bring you a technology preview of our work below. Enjoy!

Current Projects

Table Analysis Tools for the Cloud

Build powerful predictive reports on your data with just a few clicks!
- No data mining expertise required
- No server installation required
- All you need is your Internet connection

http://www.sqlserverdatamining.com/cloud/

F# – Sept CTP available and units of measure checking/inference

Dan Fay — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 20:07:22 GMT

The September 2008 CTP of F# is now available for download. F# is a functional programming language for the .NET Framework and really should be looked at by scientists/researchers. Also check out the F# Developer Center on MSDN for more info and resources.

There are a lot of new features in this release – here’s a sampling:

Broadly improved Visual Studio 2008 integration, which allows F# users to scale from scripting and explorative development, up to large-scale component and application design, all within Visual Studio.
Improvements to the F# language and libraries to make them simpler and more regular.
An exciting new language feature, Units of Measure, which extends F#’s inference and strong typing to floating point data.

The Units of Measure checking and interference feature is very exciting feature and potentially most scientifically revolutionary programming language features around - scientists and engineers to check out. This is because the F# compiler knows the rules of units

When values of floating-point type are multiplied, the units are multiplied too; when they are divided, the units are divided too, and when taking square roots, the same is done to the units. So by the rule for multiplication, the expression inside sqrt above must have units m^2/s^2, and therefore the units of speedOfImpact must be m/s.

Take a look at the SolarSystem sample - A Solar System simulation application, taking advantage of Units of Measure in F# to do physics simulation. Andrew Kennedy, who researched, architected and implemented this feature has all the details.

Other F# resources:

Microsoft F# Developer Center

New drop of .NetMap available

Dan Fay — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 17:58:55 GMT

There’s a new release (1.0.1.52) of .NetMap available – which includes both the Excel Template and the class libraries. The big feature in this drop is the ability to do Directed or Undirected graphs. This determines whether arrows are drawn on the graph. Also take a look at the discussion on using the class libraries in other apps.

.NetMap - Home

pptPlex from OfficeLabs – making PowerPoint fun again

Dan Fay — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 03:19:51 GMT

I’ve been using the internal drop of pptPlex from OfficeLabs for awhile and really enjoy using the zoomable canvas. glad to see they’ve made it available to a wider audience. I especially like being able to combine different presentations together and tailor your presentation to the audience. Try it and let me know what you think.

Project: pptPlex

pptPlex

Live Mesh Video

Dan Fay — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 22:37:07 GMT

I really like the functionality provided by Live Mesh…and the video below helps

gets the vision across. Beyond file syncing – I just tested out distributing a .NET 3rd party app using Live Mesh and the app runs flawlessly. So I could install an app on one machine and have it available to run on any of my machines on the mesh. So the “Click Once” deployment for distributing out an app is really interesting.

More info -

SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP - Released

Dan Fay — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 23:42:54 GMT

PHP developers can now integrate data from SQL Server now that the driver is available for download. Also glad to see that it works with SQL Server Express edition.

It is my pleasure to announce that version 1.0 of the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP has released! This release marks another step in Microsoft’s continued commitment to interoperability. To keep up with our announcements and customer feedback, please check out our team blog.

SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP Team Blog