eScience @ Microsoft : Beta

Touchless

eScience — 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

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

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

eScience — 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/

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

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

eScience — 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

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

New drop of .NetMap available

eScience — 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

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

Live Mesh Video

eScience — 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 -

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

NY Times Reader Beta for the Mac OS Now Available

eScience — Tue, 27 May 2008 20:33:39 GMT

Just saw this post that the NY Times Reader for the Mac is available - I'm interested in seeing how the Silverlight version works. I've been using the WPF version for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and really like the ease of reading articles. I'd like to see some research journals and magazines adopt this model as well.

NY Times Reader Beta for the Mac OS Now Available

If anyone out there has not had an opportunity to use the NY Times Reader to read the NY Times, you're missing out on a great experience! The Times Reader is a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) application that let's you read the paper on or offline in a rich format. It's been available for over a year now, but you do have to pay a subscription fee to use it. <...>

The NY Times has now released a beta edition of the Times Reader for the Mac. What's interesting about this version is that it is built using Silverlight in combination with Cocoa (the native Mac programming language), and the Safari WebKit. The application runs as a stand alone desktop application on the Mac and is very similar to the WPF PC version. Tim Heuer posted about it on his blog. The NY Times folks have shared some technical details over on their blog.

[Thanks JrzyShr Dev Guy]

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

Windows HPC Server 2008 Beta 2 is Here

eScience — Fri, 23 May 2008 18:32:47 GMT

Windows HPC Server 2008 Beta 2 is available on Microsoft Connect and Ryan Waite goes into detail on much of the new stuff. I'm really excited to start seeing scientists utilize and evaluate the new version - I think many of the new pieces especially Network Direct, PowerShell integration, and the HPC Basic Profile will surprise users. The other piece I'm looking forward to is the release of the next Top500 list in June...

We completed a few great Top500 runs in the last few weeks. We can’t talk about the numbers until the International Supercomputing Conference in June but it looks like Beta 2’s new MPI stack and new Network Direct RDMA interface are starting to hum.
Windows HPC Server 2008 Beta 2 is Here

HPC Server 2008 Beta Technical Overview

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