eScience @ Microsoft : Cool Software

Science Analytics – look to use Project “Gemini”

eScience — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 19:34:37 GMT

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)

Instant Search - The Real Live Search Bing API experiment

eScience — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 18:41:24 GMT

If you’d like to see instant results while you’re typing in your search query try out “The Real Live Search” from Long Zheng from istartedsomething – it uses the fast Bing AJAX APIs and the JSON results to give you information as you type. It’s really neat to see – here’s an example doing a WorldWide Telescope search The image doesn’t do it justice – try it out yourself.

I wonder if it could be integrated with the Windows 7 via the Federated Search support – much like Long was able to do with the Flickr Search Connector for Windows 7

The Real Live Search – Bing API experiment - istartedsomething

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

SciScope app and code available for download

eScience — 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

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

Project Tuva: Richard Feynman is now available to all.

eScience — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 21:15:31 GMT

Project Tuva, an enhanced video player showcasing Richard Feynman’s “Messenger” lectures is available for all to try out. It’s the way I’d like to view talks and related information – check it out. Not only does it allow for web links, images, but it also integrates with the WorldWide Telescope control to help augment the example Feynman uses in the gravitational talk. Currently only the first lecture in the series “Law of Gravitation – an Example of Physical Law” utilizes all the annotations/links, but the do all have the transcripts, so you can search on something like “particles” and see where it is mentioned in all the different videos, and then jump directly to the location.

Microsoft Research and Bill Gates Bring Historic Physics Lectures to Web

Lecture series by celebrated physics professor Richard Feynman is now available to all.

REDMOND, Wash. — July 14, 2009 — Microsoft Research, in collaboration with Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates, today launched a Web site that makes an acclaimed lecture series by the iconic physicist Richard Feynman freely available to the general public for the first time. The lectures, which Feynman originally delivered at Cornell University in 1964, have been hugely influential for many people, including Gates. Gates privately purchased the rights to the seven lectures in the series, called “The Character of Physical Law,” to make them widely available to the public for free with the hope that they will help get kids excited about physics and science.

The historic lectures and related content can be seen at http://research.microsoft.com/tuva. The name “Tuva” was chosen because of Feynman’s lifelong fascination with the small Russian republic of Tuva, located in the heart of Asia.

Feynman was one of the most popular scientists of the 20th century, equally regarded for his scientific insights as well as his ability to convey his enthusiasm for science through his lectures and writings. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 and was also known for his quirky sense of humor and eccentric and wide-ranging interests.

“No one was more adept at making science fun and interesting than Richard Feynman,” said Gates. “More than 20 years after first seeing them, these are still some of the best science lectures I’ve heard. Feynman worked hard during his life to popularize science, so I’m sure he’d be thrilled that now anyone, anywhere in the world, can just click a button and experience his lectures.”

Curtis Wong, a principal researcher with Microsoft Research, enhanced the experience of viewing the lectures by integrating the historic video with a Microsoft Silverlight-based video player that allows viewers to search the lectures for references to particular subjects, take notes that are synchronized to the video, and click on hyperlinks to related Web content, among other customized operations.

“There is a lot of public interest in building innovative educational resources online,” Wong said. “This is an opportunity to take some existing educational content and utilize software and the wealth of resources available on the Web to create a richer learning experience. And because people can annotate the lectures with their own comments and links to related resources, I expect this experience to become richer and richer over time.”

Microsoft Research has been exploring video annotation for many years and chose to publish the Feynman “Messenger” lectures with a new enhanced video player. Neither Microsoft nor the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation were involved in the acquisition of the rights to the lectures.

Microsoft Research and Bill Gates Bring Historic Physics Lectures to Web: Lecture series by celebrated physics professor Richard Feynman is now available to all.

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

Project Trident: A Scientific Workflow Workbench available for download

eScience — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 02:58:03 GMT

Project Trident CTP is now available for download. Project Trident is a scientific workflow workbench MSR External Research has been working on for the past few years, which allows scientists to analyze large, diverse datasets. It’s built on Windows Workflow and utilizes SQL Server (Express or Server). Download it and try it out…

Project Trident

Built on the Windows Workflow Foundation, this scientific workflow workbench allows users to:

Automate analysis and then visualize and explore data

Compose, run, and catalog experiments as workflows

Capture provenance for each experiment

Create a domain-specific workflow library to extend the functionality of the workflow workbench

Use existing services, such as provenance and fault tolerance, or add new services

Schedule workflows over HPC clusters or cloud computing resources

Project Trident: A Scientific Workflow Workbench - Microsoft Research

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

Preview the upcoming Eclipse of the Sun in WWT

eScience — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 01:20:59 GMT

On July 22nd there will be a total eclipse of the Sun that will last for over 6 mins that is visible from within a narrow corridor that traverses half of Earth. One of the best regions to see it will be China and the organizers have published a WorldWide Telescope tour previewing the Eclipse.

See the trailer (below) for the project, "Multi-site Federated Live Broadcast of Solar Eclipse on July 22, International Year of Astronomy 2009"

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

Out of this World - NASA - International Space Station Photosynth collections

eScience — Thu, 07 May 2009 19:19:21 GMT

NASA released some out of the world Photosynth collections today – highlighting the International Space Station (inside and out) and the next Mars Rover. The photos by NASA astronaut Sandra Magnus really show off all the details of such a complex “flying machine” both internally and externally. Now I just need to find time to do the ISS Scavenger Hunt – I’m really interested in finding the Space dude

This robot toy action figure appeared on the Space Station. He or she stands guard to ensure that the stations robots are well cared for and used.

The Mars Rover is in JPL's robot-testing Mars Yard and you can see some real details of all the equipment it has on board.

NASA - International Space Station Photosynth collections

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

Wow - DeepZoomPix Technology Demo – Azure, Silverlight and Deep Zoom

eScience — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 08:46:50 GMT

Just tried out the DeepZoomPix Technology Demo – it’s pretty amazing – brings together Azure, Silverlight and Deep Zoom.

I tested it out with some Astronomy photos…

dfd

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

WorldWide Telescope – Busy couple of weeks – NASA and SilverLight

eScience — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 23:53:06 GMT

Yesterday the joint press release went out on the collaboration and Space Act Agreement we’re been working on with NASA for sometime. We’re really excited about working with NASA to process many datasets like the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and make them available in WorldWide Telescope. Having these images available in the TOAST (tesselated octahedral adaptive subdivision transform) projection format will not only benefit WWT but any viewer supporting that format. The benefit of using TOAST as Jonathan Fay one mentioned “It creates a 360-degree wraparound view that’s either a planet surface or the infinite sphere of the sky, and lets you represent it using a 3D graphics accelerator, very rapidly and efficiently. So we can have an image pyramid the way Deep Zoom does, and TerraServer before it, but we don’t have to give up the poles.”

NASA and Microsoft to Make Universe of Data Available to the Public

There is a really good article out talking about some of the background behind Curtis Wong and Jonathan Fay’s labor of love. WorldWide Telescope Puts Wonders of Space on a PC

The other big news is that at Mix09 we put out a alpha release of the worldwide telescope web client built using SilverLight. Now all the folks running Macs can see what all the buzz was behind Scoble’s post What made me cry: Microsoft’s World Wide Telescope from last year.

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

Using Flickr for Astronomy – and viewing in WWT

eScience — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 01:55:17 GMT

The use of online services such as Flickr to help scientists is in its infancy and applications utilizing commodity based solutions will continue to pick up momentum. I especially like the integration and the ease of use – science should be about discovery and exploration – not about the technology. Of course the ability to view those analyzed images in WorldWide Telescope completes the circle and allows you to view the image in context.

Check out the Orion Nebula.
After it opens up – click on the thumbnail at the top.

You can also add your own – check out Dinoj’s post on the WWT Data Blog - Sticking images on the sky with WWT. For fun you can see the crown for the Corona Borealis overlaid on the sky

See the article written by Frederic Lardinois on ReadWriteWeb.

The Great Gig in the Sky: Using Flickr for Astronomy

Flickr hosts a wide range of beautiful images, but a new project built on top of Flickr's API only focuses on photos of the night sky from amateur astronomers. The Astrometry.net project constantly scans the Astrometry Flickr group for new images to catalog and to add to its open-source sky survey. At the same time, this project also provides a more direct service to the amateur astronomers, as it also analyzes each image and returns a high-quality description of the photo's contents.

The Astrometry group currently has over 400 members, and as Christoper Stumm, a member of the Astrometry.net team, told the Flickr Code blog, the back-end software uses geometric hashing to exactly pinpoint and describe the objects in the images. When you submit an image to the Flickr pool, the robot will not just respond with a comment that contains an exact description of what you see in the image, but it will also annotate the image automatically.

While a lot of members of the Astrometry group use high-end telescopes and cameras, the Astrometry.net solver can also analyze images from consumer-level digital cameras.

While just being able to automatically analyze and catalog these images is pretty cool already, every description also contains a link that displays the image in Microsoft's WordWide Telescope.

Astronomy is one of those few scientific disciplines where dedicated amateurs can still make major discoveries and this is definitely one of the cooler applications of Flickr's API that we have seen in a long time.

The Great Gig in the Sky: Using Flickr for Astronomy - ReadWriteWeb

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

eclipse4SL: Eclipse Tools for Microsoft Silverlight

eScience — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 23:47:58 GMT

Just saw a posting that eclipse4SL - the Eclipse tools for Silverlight project is available. It is an eclipse plug-in that enables Eclipse developers to use the Eclipse IDE to create applications that run on the Microsoft Silverlight runtime platform.

The purpose of this project is the creation of open source tools integrated with the Eclipse development platform that enable Java developers to use the Eclipse platform to create applications that run on the Microsoft Silverlight runtime platform. Specifically, the project will be an Eclipse plug-in that works with the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) to provide both a Silverlight development environment and greater interoperability between Silverlight and Java, to facilitate the integration of Silverlight-based applications into Java-based web sites and services. The project has been submitted to the Eclipse Foundation and released as an open Eclipse project.

Eclipse Tools for Microsoft Silverlight

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

The Earth, Stars, and Planets in 3D

eScience — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 22:20:10 GMT

One of the coolest new features of the WWT Solstice Borealis Beta (released at the beginning of Jan) is the ability to see the Earth, Stars, and Planets in a stereoscopic 3D effect. I’ve been using the Anaglyph mode (View | {arrow} | Stereo | Anaglyph) which uses the stylish red/cyan glasses shown below to not only look at the Stars, but you can zoom all the way out and see the lattice structure made up galaxies of the universe. Checking out the planets, like Mars, Saturn, etc is also very impressive. Going down to Earth, you can change your perspective by holding down the ctrl key and then you can fly into objects like Mount St. Helens

Mount St. Helens in normal view Mount St. Helens in stereoscopic view

Check it out if you have a pair of red/cyan glasses – they are all the rage :-)

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

Science Images in Photosynth

eScience — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 23:44:24 GMT

Here are a few really good synths of scientific images in Photosynth. You can find others using Microscopes or Biology. And there is even a Dissected Cat if you have a strong stomach.

Obelia, polyps, golangia by ppberk

Micrographs of powder coating material by SynthSets

Frog Kidney by ppberk

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

NodeXL for viewing and analyzing network graphs is available again (formally .NetMap)

eScience — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 08:00:35 GMT

NodeXL – the app formally know as .NetMap is available again on CodePlex. NodeXL is a Excel template and addin for viewing and analyzing network graphs. There are a whole slew of updates and bug fixes. Check it out…. Cross Posted from Dan Fay's Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/dan_fay)

So you don’t think you can Sing?

eScience — 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.

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