eScience @ Microsoft

Bing’s Best Images as desktop background

2010-01-18T16:50:37Z

I do look forward to seeing the daily image Bing has as background on the search page – and was really excited to see “Bing’s Best” as a Win7 theme, I’ve been enjoying some great photos rotating on my desktop…

Personalization Gallery - Windows 7 themes, wallpapers, and gadgets - Microsoft Windows

Cross Posted from Dan Fay's Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/dan_fay)

External Research Team Blog started

2010-01-13T00:23:59Z

The Microsoft Research External Research group has started a blog – the initial post is from Tony Hey CVP

Welcome to the Microsoft External Research blog

The inspiration behind this blog is a strong desire to foster connections that lead to meaningful breakthroughs; to engage in ongoing dialog in an open forum; to discuss and debate the information and ideas critical to harnessing the power of science and technology to address the most urgent global challenges.

Every day, I have the privilege of witnessing the wonder of discovery, regardless of where it takes place, or whether it’s undertaken by academic researchers and scientists around the world or within Microsoft External Research. For those of us at Microsoft External Research, the opportunity to collaborate with the finest and researchers and scientists working across the globe today is the core of everything we do.

[more]

External Research Team Blog

Cross Posted from Dan Fay's Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/dan_fay)

The Fourth Paradigm Book – now available on Amazon – Paperback and Kindle

2010-01-06T19:34:26Z

In addition to downloading the Fourth Paradigm book for free from the Microsoft Research website – you can now purchase a hardcopy or a Kindle version from Amazon. Of course using the Kindle for PC provides a great experience for reading the book.

The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery
~ Tony Hey (Author), Stewart Tansley (Editor), Kristin Tolle (Editor)

http://www.amazon.com/Fourth-Paradigm-Data-Intensive-Scientific-Discovery/dp/0982544200/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1261412243&sr=8-3

Cross Posted from Dan Fay's Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/dan_fay)

Data needs to be Discoverable, Accessible, and Consumable

2009-12-15T19:14:34Z

While the Data Deluge is upon on the scientific communities, how to manage and share the scientific data is still a challenge. To really allow data to be useful for scientists and general consumers data needs to be Discoverable, Accessible, and Consumable.

Discoverable – How do you find the data? Searching for data via search engines is not the right way to find the information. Sites like data.gov is a good start for getting to scientific data, but how to find the smaller pots of data.

Accessible – To do anything useful with the information/data – it needs to be made available – that means the data needs to be easily downloaded, not hidden behind many web pages and locked up behind passwords.

Consumable – it needs to be straight forward (one-click) to bring the data into applications for analysis (ie. Excel, MatLab, etc). Put it into the hands of the users.

Cross Posted from Dan Fay's Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/dan_fay)

FREE PowerPoint Twitter Tools by SAP Web 2.0

2009-12-15T15:50:19Z

Very cool integration of Twitter and PowerPoint – good way to have interactive presentations…could see this being used in classes with students.

Here’s a view of WorldWide Telescope tweets

FREE PowerPoint Twitter Tools

Ever wanted to make presentations a more interactive, Web 2.0 experience?

The PowerPoint Twitter Tools prototypes are now available. Created using SAP BusinessObjects Xcelsius (but requiring only PowerPoint for Windows and Adobe Flash to run), the twitter tools allow presenters to see and react to tweets in real-time, embedded directly within their presentations, either as a ticker or refreshable comment page.

There are currently eight tools – you can easily cut and paste them into your own powerpoint decks:

PowerPoint Twitter feedback slides

PowerPoint Twitter ticker bar

PowerPoint Twitter voting — bar charts and pie chart

PowerPoint Mood meter

PowerPoint Crowd meter

PowerPoint Zoom text

PowerPoint Twitter update bar

PowerPoint AutoTweet

FREE PowerPoint Twitter Tools | SAP Web 2.0

Cross Posted from Dan Fay's Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/dan_fay)

First Annual U.S. Computer Science Education Week

2009-12-07T21:01:23Z

The United States House of Representatives has designated December 6–12 as National Computer Science Education Week, in honor of Grace Hopper. Microsoft in conjunction with ACM and other partners are helping to promote the importance of CS education.

U.S. Computer Science Education Week on Microsoft Research
Computer Science Education Week on Facebook

Computer Science Education Week, December 6-12, 2009, recognizes that computing:

Touches everyone’s daily lives and plays a critical role in society
Drives innovation and economic growth
Provides rewarding job opportunities
Prepares students with the knowledge and skills they need for the 21st century

U.S. Computer Science Education Week - Microsoft Research

Cross Posted from Dan Fay's Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/dan_fay)

TAU – perf tuning for HPC

2009-11-25T21:03:00Z

TAU, the performance tuning OSS software for HPC on Linux has been successfully made available to support Microsoft Windows 7, Microsoft Windows HPC Server 2008. Please see release note section 5.

Cross Posted from Dan Fay's Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/dan_fay)

Cray Brings Windows 7 to HPC

2009-11-13T03:41:09Z

Now what computational scientist wouldn’t want one of these under their desk. I like the tagline, “putting ‘work’ back into workstation”.

Cray Brings Windows 7 to HPC

by Michael Feldman, HPCwire Editor

If you thought Windows 7 was just for mere mortals, think again. Microsoft's latest OS is about to show up in Cray's newest CX1 deskside supercomputer that puts a Windows workstation and a Windows HPC Server cluster into a single box. Called the CX1-iWS (for integrated workstation), the machines are to be sold exclusively through Dell and will range in price from $39K to $55K.

The idea behind the iWS is to retain the interactive experience of a personal workstation, but extend its computational power to that of a small HPC cluster. It's generally aimed at technical computing users who have simply run out of compute headroom on their two-socket machines, but are loathe to give up the intimacy of the workstation environment. A generic CX1 can be configured to provide the equivalent capabilities, but the iWS is preconfigured to deliver this experience right out of the box.

Since Windows 7 and Windows HPC Server 2008 form a natural client-server relationship, cluster administration and job management becomes relatively seamless. In addition, since there is disk storage shared between the workstation and the cluster, data management becomes much more straightforward. As long as your data set fits in 4 TB, no data transfers back and forth between client and server will be necessary.

HPCwire: Cray Brings Windows 7 to HPC

Cross Posted from Dan Fay's Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/dan_fay)

The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery – Book Released

2009-10-16T17:39:17Z

Today Microsoft Research announced the availability of the book - The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery. The book focuses on the change of all sciences moving from observational, to theoretical, to computational and now to the 4th Paradigm – Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery. This is based on Jim Gray’s insights captured via his final public talk to the National Research Council on Jan 11, 2007. This is truly a legacy of his work.

The book is available from the web and is released under a Creative Commons license.

Part 1: Earth and Environment	Part 3: Scientific Infrastructure
Part 2: Health and Wellbeing	Part 4: Scholarly Communication

I feel fortune to have been able to contribute the introduction to the Earth and Environment section - I had many discussions with Jim on need for balance between data and computations, and the need to make scientific exploration through the use of computing technologies much easier for scientists. I had also “borrowed” many of Jim’s slides to discuss the change to the upcoming fourth paradigm, he made the points so succinctly – there was no need for marketing fluff.

The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery

Presenting the first broad look at the rapidly emerging field of data-intensive science

Increasingly, scientific breakthroughs will be powered by advanced computing capabilities that help researchers manipulate and explore massive datasets.

The speed at which any given scientific discipline advances will depend on how well its researchers collaborate with one another, and with technologists, in areas of eScience such as databases, workflow management, visualization, and cloud computing technologies.

In The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery, the collection of essays expands on the vision of pioneering computer scientist Jim Gray for a new, fourth paradigm of discovery based on data-intensive science and offers insights into how it can be fully realized.

Praise for The Fourth Paradigm

“The impact of Jim Gray’s thinking is continuing to get people to think in a new way about how data and software are redefining what it means to do science."

— Bill Gates, Chairman, Microsoft Corporation

The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery - Microsoft Research

Cross Posted from Dan Fay's Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/dan_fay)

Amazon Web Services support Sloan Digital Sky Survey DR6 Subset

2009-09-30T00:11:45Z

Now that AWS is supporting SDSS, there is probably useful integration between the Worldwide Telescope and the SDSS datasets that can be leveraged, beyond what is currently supported - such as seeing the all the known galaxies in a 3D view – seeing the lattice structure of the universe.

Search and Browse data from the Virtual Observatory and plot data over imagery: WorldWide Telescope delivers one-click contextual access to distributed Web information and data sources and Interoperates through SAMP and other popular tools like TopCat, Aladin, SAOImage DS9 and many more.

Data derived from researchers using the AWS datasets can integrate imagery and catalog data directly into WorldWide Telescope using the WWT Developer Kit.

Professional features

Virtual Observatory Cone search/registry look up and SIMBAD search
Load and Adjust basic FITS images and AVM files
SIAP with footprint preview
Connect your Telescope to WWT
Multi-monitor cluster rendering
Visualization of large scale structure
SAMP Inter-application communication
Full dome projection

New Public Data Set: Sloan Digital Sky Survey DR6 Subset

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey, or SDSS, is now available as a Public Data Set.

Weighing in at 180 GB, the SDSS is the most ambitious astronomical survey ever undertaken. The researchers have used a 2.5 meter, 120 megapixel telescope located in Apache Point, New Mexico to capture images of over one quarter of the sky, or about 230 million celestial objects. They have also created 3-dimensional maps containing more than 930,000 galaxies and 120,000 quasars.

Amazon Web Services Blog: New Public Data Set: Sloan Digital Sky Survey DR6 Subset

Cross Posted from Dan Fay's Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/dan_fay)

Achieving Climate Sustainability – Article in American Meteorological Society

2009-09-25T20:29:02Z

Bill Gail has written a thoroughly thought provoking piece Achieving Climate Sustainability in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. One of the things I really like about Bill is that he understands the challenge of climate sustainability and the intersection of the Earth system’s three fundamental components: physical, ecosystem, and human. Right now most definitions of sustainability only applies to climate as a physical system and thus overlooks the interactions of the physical system with both ecosystems and humans.

Achieving Climate Sustainability

William B. Gail

It is often assumed that climate change policies, including the Kyoto Protocol and the follow-on Copenhagen agreement now being negotiated, align well with sustainability's tenets. A closer look reveals this is not the case. First, they treat climate change as a one-time problem - anthropogenic greenhouse gases - with a one-time solution. In contrast, research has begun to reveal that human-caused climate change is far from monolithic. Moreover, the clear trend is for societal climate influence to increase and diversify, not decline and simplify. Second, they fail to address the impact of natural climate change on ecosystems and society, an area that is less-well understood than the public commonly believes. A sustainable framework that guides human interaction with Earth's climate system must encompass the broader aspects of climate change and reconcile the reality of ongoing human influence. This includes the highly-controversial use of overt human influence to benefit society and ecosystems.

Achieving climate sustainability will be far from straightforward, if we even choose to proceed. The concept unearths deeply-held philosophical and religious conflicts, stretches our scientific capabilities, and forces us to address a considerable spectrum of practical concerns. Should we not choose to embrace it, we will find that our policies become less and less effective with time as climate problems expand beyond society's ability to avoid or eliminate them individually. This article elaborates on the need to include sustainability within the climate dialogue and explores the complex considerations that will quickly become part of the public debate.

CAPSULE SUMMARY

As humans and nature become increasingly interconnected, there is a need for public dialogue about sustainability as a framework for addressing climate change.

AMS Online Journals - Achieving Climate Sustainability

Cross Posted from Dan Fay's Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/dan_fay)

Project Gemini – Videos available

2009-08-26T17:35:05Z

I previously posted about using Project Gemini as a tool for scientific analysis – as a quick way to learn about them and see them in action, take a look at the one minute Gemini videos by Donald Farmer. One of the latest videos is about using Reports as data sources and highlights the orange button for getting data sets. This is a perfect way for scientists to publish data and easily make the feeds available for others to consume. It could even be included in papers to easily enable research reproducibility.

Thanks to Robert Bruckner's Advanced Reporting Services Blog : Reports As Data Feeds for Gemini

Cross Posted from Dan Fay's Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/dan_fay)

TIME - WorldWideTelescope one of 50 Best Websites 2009

2009-08-24T23:29:15Z

TIME magazine has the WorldWide Telescope WebClient (Silverlight) on their list of 50 Best Websites for 2009. That puts WWT in with sites like Flickr, Twitter, Skype, YouTube, Amazon, and even PhotoSynth – not bad for the very small team we have on it :-)

WorldWideTelescope

Like Google Earth for the heavens, WWT aggregates terabytes of astronomical data from the world's biggest telescopes to create a single virtual scope that anyone can look through. WWT is not a model of the known universe, but rather a centralized repository for just about everything known about the universe. The idea is to democratize the science of astronomy with a single tool that can be used by students and scientists. Who knows, when everyone has access to the same data, maybe the next big discovery in astronomy will be made by an amateur? There are hundreds of terabytes of digitized sky — enough data for everyone

WorldWideTelescope - 50 Best Websites 2009 - TIME

Cross Posted from Dan Fay's Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/dan_fay)

Science Analytics – look to use Project “Gemini”

2009-08-21T19:34:37Z

When I first saw and heard details about Project “Gemini”, I was blown away by the technology and innovation created by SQL and Excel teams and that held up when I was able to test it out on my own. It will be especially useful for scientists that want to not only analyze large amounts of data in Excel, but also aggregate different datasets. This upcoming Excel 2010 add-in removes the storage limits of Excel by adding the in-memory database and brings the power of SQL Server and SQL Analysis Services into the hands of mere mortals. Scientists that utilize Excel for viewing/analyzing data will find this add-in extremely helpful.

Project Gemini Blog – Check out the videos -

Project "Gemini": Build powerful analytical applications

Need to make timely business decisions without having to use complicated and sluggish analytical applications? Love to use Excel? Project Gemini is an Excel 2010 add-in that allows you to create powerful analyses by quickly manipulating millions of rows of data into a single Excel workbook and utilize Microsoft Office 2010 to share and collaborate on your insights with your team.

You can combine native Excel 2010 functionality with Gemini’s in-memory engine to allow users to interactively explore and perform calculations on large data sets. In addition, you can easily streamline the process of integrating data from multiple sources – including corporate databases, spreadsheets, reports, and data feeds.

Share and collaborate with confidence by easily publishing your analysis to SharePoint 2010 and have other users enjoy the same slicer and fast-query capabilities when working on your Excel Services reports.

Are you part of Office 2010 Tech Preview? Register and then Download and learn about Project Gemini now! (Note: You need to have Office 2010 before you can use Gemini.)

Introducing Microsoft Office 2010 for Business

Cross Posted from Dan Fay's Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/dan_fay)

Mysterious object being built in garage

2009-08-21T18:54:31Z

Deep in one of the garages on campus – I ran across this project being built…a modern Stonehenge? maybe the spinal tap version of Stonehenge?

View Full Album

Cross Posted from Dan Fay's Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/dan_fay)

eScience @ Microsoft

Bing’s Best Images as desktop background

External Research Team Blog started

The Fourth Paradigm Book – now available on Amazon – Paperback and Kindle

Data needs to be Discoverable, Accessible, and Consumable

FREE PowerPoint Twitter Tools by SAP Web 2.0

FREE PowerPoint Twitter Tools

First Annual U.S. Computer Science Education Week

Computer Science Education Week, December 6-12, 2009, recognizes that computing:

TAU – perf tuning for HPC

Cray Brings Windows 7 to HPC

The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery – Book Released

Praise for The Fourth Paradigm

Amazon Web Services support Sloan Digital Sky Survey DR6 Subset

Achieving Climate Sustainability – Article in American Meteorological Society

Project Gemini – Videos available

TIME - WorldWideTelescope one of 50 Best Websites 2009

Science Analytics – look to use Project “Gemini”

Mysterious object being built in garage