UK Academic Team Blog : Technology

Imagine Cup Registrations

ukacademia — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 14:44:17 GMT

Hello Everyone,

Interest for the Imagine Cup has been strong and we can confirm the various categories are now open for competition. From experience we know that the next couple of months will be key in getting great UK representation in the Imagine Cup.

Here are just a few of the reasons for encouraging your students to compete:

- PR: The Imagine Cup attracts the attention of both regional and national newspapers, together with technology and education press and news websites such as the BBC. Having students from your university compete in the Imagine Cup is great for raising the profile of your university in two important ways. Firstly it demonstrates the quality of your graduates to IT employers and makes them more attractive as employees (e.g. Dominic Green, UK winner of the 2008 competition) and secondly, it attracts new students to your university.

- Skills Development: Fundamentally the Imagine Cup is about helping students get real world experience with Microsoft technology. The skills learned during the various competitions compliment their studies and are invaluable when students apply for jobs with IT companies.

- Students Inspiration: With every technology interest area catered for, the competition is a great way to channel students’ passion for technology out of class.

We want as many UK institutions and students to get involved with the Imagine Cup as possible, and to help you participate we provide:

- Giveaways for students: Every week we give away web cams and Starbucks vouchers. We also hold a monthly draw for a Dell laptop, providing everything a student needs to see them through their studies and the Imagine Cup competition.

- Donation of an Xbox 360 gaming lab kit for your university: The university with the most registrations will receive 4 Xbox 360s, 8 wired controllers and an assortment of the latest Xbox 360 titles. You are free to use them for XNA development or as a social/recreation area for students.

If you would like to receive regular updates on the registration numbers from your university then please let me know and I will happily send them to you. You can contact me by telephone (0118 909 3409) or if you prefer by email (mailto:ukacinfo@microsoft.com).

And just to give you an idea of how we are doing so far, here are the top fifteen universities with the highest number of registrations:

University	Registrations
Brighton	89
Birmingham City	38
Cumbria	38
Bradford	37
Reading	35
Robert Gordon	35
Derby	31
Nottingham	24
De Montfort	23
Keele	23
Cambridge	20
Hull	20
Imperial College	20
Brunel	18
RHUL	20

If you would like to know more, them please email or telephone me. I’ll look forward to hearing from you.

Good luck,

Allison

Student Technology Day - Future User Experience Technologies

ukacademia — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 18:02:22 GMT

Hello All,

Filmed at the Royal Festival on 1st October, please find below the session by Paolo Barone on Microsoft Surface:

If for any reason you cannot view this clip, please do let me know.

Best wishes,

Allison

Student Technology Day - Microsoft Research Talk on CS Inside Halo 3 True Ranking System

ukacademia — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 17:53:11 GMT

For those of you who joined us at the Royal Festival Hall on 1st October and, especially for those who were otherwise engaged, please find below the session by Thore Graepel, Joaquin Quiñonero Candela and Ralf Herbrich on Microsoft Research Talk on CS Inside Halo 3 True Ranking System:

If you are unable to view the above clip, please do let me know.

Best wishes,

Allison

Student Technology Day videos

ukacademia — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 17:23:45 GMT

Hello All,

For those of you who made it along to the Royal Festival Hall and, especially for those of you who had other commitments, please find below Steve Ballmer’s Keynote Speech:

If you have any difficulty in viewing the clip, please don’t hesitate to let me know.

With best wishes,

Allison

UK High Performance Computing Award

ukacademia — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 17:11:22 GMT

Hello Everyone,

The Windows Server HPC team have created a special award for UK Software Design competitors who use the Windows HPC Server in their Software Design solution of the Imagine Cup.

Microsoft want to stimulate the thinking of UK students about how HPC can change the world. We want students to think big, and to use the world’s fastest systems to solve the world’s biggest problems. That’s what the HPC prize in the Imagine cup’s about.

You know how mutli-core is about writing a program that uses more than one cpu? Well HPC (High Performance Computing) is the next step up: it’s about programming for hundreds or thousands of CPUs. This is for all the stuff that needs more compute than you can get from a single server. Think about online gaming, when you have hundreds of people simultaneously modifying a visual database – that needs more power than you can get one a single CPU. Think about calculating the temperature over 20,000 land sites in the UK and then projecting that forward into the future, one minute at a time, for 500 years. This all needs heavy duty computing – and that’s HPC. It’s the A380 of the computing world.

To win the HPC prize you don’t need to have a working system – but tell us how your design would scale-out from one CPU to a thousand. And explain how all that power would help. The award will be given to the Software Design teams who demonstrate technical competency with HPC, have a real world need for high performance computing and present the commercial viability of their implementation.

HPC is used in lots of places – last year the two winners used HPC for genetic engineering and motorway design. People in the UK use HPC for everything from theology to thermodynamics, archaeology to aerodynamics, gaming to genetics. How could you use it?

If you’ve got questions please contact your local HPC or SuperComputing Centre. Or email Michael...

Good luck and hope to see you at the finals.

Best,

Allison

ITA Student Pass

ukacademia — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 19:00:27 GMT

Hello,

I’d like to tell you a little about the ITA Student Pass which gives students access to a large number of e-learning courses free of charge. The e-learning materials will provide your students with access to training on real-world technology and industry-recognised certification.

You might even envisage an opportunity to incorporate some of the e-learning into the curriculum for new courses or simply to replace existing materials.

If you would like your students to have access to Microsoft e-learning materials I can supply, upon request, a series of unique codes for you to distribute to them.

To see a demonstration of what e-learning has to offer please click demo.

For the codes themselves, please email i-allmc@micrsoft.com with a subject header of ITA Student Pass.

With Best wishes,

Allison

MSDN: What’s New in Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1?

ukacademia — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 17:32:02 GMT

Hello,

I want to invite you along to a free half day event taking place in Exeter on 23rd October 2008 and which was created with developers in mind.

Technical experts from the UK MSDN team will deliver a range of demos and provide insight into the latest enhancements across many areas of the .Net Framework. This is your opportunity to broaden your knowledge base and stay ahead of these latest developments.

If you think this is something you’d like to attend, you can find out more or register by clicking here.

In the meantime, have a lovely weekend.

Allison

Microsoft Research Asia - 10th Anniversary Innovation Forum

ukacademia — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 11:29:56 GMT

On August 12, Bill Gates, Chairman of Microsoft^®, joined visionary technologists from Microsoft Research (MSR) Asia, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology, and the University of Hong Kong, to celebrate a decade of ground-breaking collaboration during the Microsoft Research Asia's 10th Anniversary Innovation Forum.

Gates, who delivered the keynote speech, said that Microsoft’s relationship to academia in the Asia Pacific region remains vital and that cultivating the next generation of researchers should continue to be a focal point of MSR Asia’s work. “For the last 10 years, great collaborative work between Microsoft Research Asia and the region’s world-leading academic researchers has resulted in a wide range of exciting technology innovations,” Gates said. “As Asia becomes more and more of a global centre for innovation, I have no doubt that Microsoft Research Asia and its academic partners will have an even bigger impact on the world of technology.”

At the MSR Asia Innovation Forum, Bill Gates said that the success of Microsoft depends on its ability to attract and retain the best talent from around the world—something he believes MSR Asia is doing well.

To learn more about this collaboration and to hear Bill’s speech, click Innovation.

Best wishes,

Allison

News from the Faculty Summit

ukacademia — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 11:03:08 GMT

Lee Dirks, the Director for Education and Scholarly Research, announced five new ‘lifecycle’ tools for academics and researchers. The tools are as follows:

Research Information Centre
Creative Commons (an add-in to Microsoft Office)
Article Authoring (an add-in to Microsoft Word)
E-Journal Hosting Service
Research Output Repository Platform

To hear more about these tools from Lee, please visit Channel 8.

If you have any questions, do contact me and I’ll see if I can get them answered for you.

Best,

Allison

Microsoft Tech-Ed 2007 Conference DVD sets to give away

ukacademia — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 10:29:00 GMT

Good morning,

I thought I’d start the week with a give-away of the ten Tech-Ed Conference DVD sets sitting on my desk.

So, if you live in the UK and would like me to pop one in the post to you, email me your address details and the first ten to reply will get the goodies.

Have a good week.

Allison

remix UK – a 48 hour conversation

ukacademia — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 15:51:25 GMT

Hi Everyone

If you have been wondering 'where next for the web?' this event might just be for you and there is an early bird saving for the first three hundred people to book. Click here to reserve a place.

And if you have any ideas for a topic you would like to see presented at remix UK and have a good idea of just who you’d like to present it, there is a chance you can get it added to the mash up.

Best for the weekend,

Allison

Gamesfest 2008

ukacademia — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 18:21:55 GMT

Hello Everyone,

I thought you might like to hear about Gamefest 2008 which takes place on 6^th August at Chelsea Football Club and particularly, I thought you’d like to know about the early bird savings on registration if you book before midnight on 25^th July 2008.

Gamefest 2008 is a full-day game technology conference with a keen industry focus, including a Gamefest Expo of exhibiting Games Tools and Middleware Companies together with Authorized Test Vendors and is aimed at key personnel from small game studios to the largest game publishers.

There are forty talks across seven tracks ranging from Graphics to Producer & Business Development. In the Casual Games and XNA Game Studio track, for example, you will hear about Game Studio networking, performance, XNA Framework Content Pipeline and much, much more. You’ll also learn about plans to enable developers to drive the next wave of growth across the games industry.

So do come along and join us for a day of serious play.

Allison

New Silverlight Videos

ukacademia — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 17:05:00 GMT

Hi,

For those of you with an interest in Silverlight I thought you might like to take a look at a series of 'how to' videos available from the Silverlight team. You'll find everything from the basics through to best practices and even a series of tips and techniques.

For example, Todd Miranda shows how to dynamically add markers to a video at runtime and Peter Bahaa shows how to handle the back and forward buttons, all in Silverlight 1.0.

To browse the library of videos click here.

All the best,

Allison

Invitation to Convergence 2008 Copenhagen - Microsoft Dynamics Academic Alliance MDAA:00071306

ukacademia — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 11:26:00 GMT

Hi,

I thought you'd like to receive your invitation to an interesting event in Denmark.

Microsoft Dynamics Academic Alliance invites you to attend:

Microsoft Academic Preconference and Convergence 2008 Copenhagen, Denmark from 17 to 20 November, 2008.

Last year we hosted about 60 educators and researchers from 17 countries from around the world. We would like to see you this year!

The Academic Preconference will be held 17-18 November 2008.

· Includes two tracks (Educators and Researchers Track) with several special sessions, workshops and network opportunities for educators and researchers working with Microsoft Dynamics software. You will be able to network, exchange experiences and enhance your knowledge with like-minded educators and researchers.

· Location: Copenhagen Business School (CBS) – Kilevej 14a, 2000 Frederiksberg.

· Registration fee: no registration fee is associated with these two days.

· Please consider the following call for papers and presentations.

Call for Papers – Researchers Track - due by 1st September 2008:

Academic Preconference 2008 - Research Agenda

17 - 18 November 2008
Copenhagen Business School (CBS), Frederiksberg

Submit to: workshop@3gERP.org - Please write "Submission to 3gERP workshop"

See instructions attached.

Call for Presentation – Educators Track - due by 1st September 2008:

Academic Preconference 2008 - Educators Agenda
17 - 18 November 2008

Copenhagen Business School (CBS), Frederiksberg

Submit to: dynaa@microsoft.com – Please write “Academic Preconference - Convergence 2008 Presentation”

See instructions attached.

Convergence will be held 19-20 November 2008.

· Here you will enhance your knowledge through Dynamics conference sessions and interactions with Microsoft customers, partners, Microsoft Dynamics specialist and industry experts and establish a true community that can be leveraged in your work.

· Location: Bella Center A/S, Center Boulevard, 2300 Copenhagen S

· Registration fee - Academic Alliance team will fund a main part of your registration fee at Convergence. Your costs will include €250.00 for your share of registration fee.

· Please request special registration codes from us to have the special academic fee.

Registration:

To register please fill in attached registration form and send to dynaa@microsoft.com.

Registration includes entrance at the registered event, the meals served as part of the agenda as well as a special educator evening gathering.

The number of participants is limited due to space restrictions and will be determined on a first come basis.

Customer Excellence Award - Excellence in Academics:

· The Convergence Customer Excellence Awards recognize, honor and celebrate customers/members that have achieved outstanding success with their Microsoft solutions as well as Microsoft partners’ solutions. Start to consider if that is your educational institution.

· Please submit your own nomination via the online form which will be available 1 July 2008. Find more details here: http://www.microsoft.com/Dynamics/convergence/copenhagen/2008/customer_excellence.aspx

To make sure to receive all details please write to dynaa@microsoft.com to be included on the mailing list.

We look forward to seeing you in Copenhagen!

MICROSOFT DYNAMICS ACADEMIC ALLIANCE

The Microsoft Dynamics Academic Alliance is a global program that enables educators to incorporate Microsoft Dynamics technology into the classroom. Currently, over 1,000 institutions around the world use Microsoft Dynamics products to provide students with an exceptional hands-on learning experience. If you would like to learn more about the Academic Alliance you are welcome to visit our website: http://www.microsoft.com/education/academic_alliance.mspx.

Conference on 3rd Generation Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (3gERP)

The 3gERP project aims to develop the academic foundations for a ‘standard’ flexible and highly configurable global ERP-system for Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs), which can be implemented and maintained at a fraction of the costs of current systems. The ambition of the project is to tackle some of the fundamental challenges and trade-offs existing systems have, for instance with regard to customizability vs. total cost including upgrades. If you would like to learn more about 3gERP please visit this website: http://www.3gerp.org

All the best,

Allison, your new Academic Information Manager

Mix it up!

ukacademia — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 23:29:00 GMT

Hi! I'm Alfred Biehler, working with Microsoft UK alongside Claire in Microsoft's Developer platform group. My focus is on all our UK developers, and I've been given the opportunity to attend the MIX conference at Las Vegas. My expectations of the event was high, and I'm not disappointed!

For starters: You can join in this amazing event by going to http://www.visitmix.com. You can see the sessions on http://sessions.visitmix.com, and/or you can even attend a UK re-run later this year in the UK... more details to come.

Let me briefly share with you the biggest wow moments for me during the first keynote, that just finished:

IE 8 beta is available for download now. (This beta is intended for developers). Amongst the new capabilities shown in IE8, was the ability for web apps to detect and act on losing a network connection, and a back button that really goes back - even on AJAX pages!
SQL Server as a service has been announced. This is huge! I've been talking about this since the end of 1999, and it's fantastic to see this now becoming available. This would allow developers to build applications that draw data from "the cloud", without the need to manage and run the database yourself.
Silverlight 2 beta 1 has been announced, with awesome demos, including how we'll experience the Olympics in a few weeks, how HardRock Cafe has a memorabilia site utilizing DeepZoom (seeing a 2bn pixel photo, zooming into any area very quickly), Aston Martin's virtual showroom experience and more.
I really enjoyed seeing also some of Microsoft's partners (that also competes with us) on stage, e.g. AOL email using Silverlight, and DoubleClick (Google) for building Silverlight Adverts.
And lastly - we saw demos of how Silverlight apps just worked on Nokia phones after the agreement that has been reached yesterday with Nokia to support Silverlight on their phones.

One statistic that blew me away, was that we're getting about 1.5 million downloads and installs of Silverlight per day.

If you do have a moment - go and have a look at the sessions @ Mix online!

Alfred