A Return to Microsoft and MSR
After almost exactly two years outside Microsoft, I have returned to a full-time position in the company. I left my full-time position in February of 2006 when I moved to Barcelona, Spain. I haven't been very far 'outside' of Microsoft - I've spent most of the last two years working as a consultant or vendor on a couple different Microsoft projects. For most of the past year, I have been working under contract with Microsoft Research in Cambridge in the External Research/European Science Initiative's Technology Group, and that is the group that I have now joined full-time.
Most of what you will read here will be in some way related to our work in MSR Cambridge's ERO/ESI group (see: http://research.microsoft.com/ero), but I am not speaking for the group, Microsoft, or MSR - this blog is just me speaking for myself. In particular, our focus in ESI is on addressing the challenges of Science in the 21st Century through computational science approaches. In the main, we will be assisting researchers doing modeling and research in biology and ecology. Computational Science encompasses advanced data collection, annotation and analysis; data-driven and theory-based modeling; new collaboration mechanisms; advanced visualization; and augmenting electronic and traditional publication.
MSRC's ESI group is a research group and not a product group. As such, my development efforts are completely driven by the needs of our in-house researchers and their external collaborators. I am a developer and not a researcher, so what you will read here are practical applications of Microsoft and other technologies to the challenges of Computational Science. I'll share links, observations, commentary and code samples relating to data, computational tools and methods, cloud computing, visualization and publication.
One thing that I won't be doing is representing the science behind these projects. There will be Technical Reports (TRs) and published papers that will do that much better than I can here, and I will link to the ones that are related to our work in ESI. This blog is simply a source of sample material, observations, musings and discussions on the tools, methods and various practical matters of Computational Science.
I am not an official spokesperson in any manner for MSR or any of the MSR labs or Microsoft or MSR groups, including ESI. The opinions here are my own, and any sample code that I post or link to will be correct to the best of my knowledge, but is not warranted for any use or purpose and no license or rights are conferred by my posting or linking to any code or reference material.
