A diagnosis of cancer can be particularly foreboding for any patient. However, new treatments become possible as we learn more about the disease, and the application of research techniques more commonly found in the social sciences are now providing new insights.Although medical investigators have been…
I'm in Beijing for the tenth annual Microsoft eScience Workshop, which runs from October 22 to 25. As in the past, the workshop takes place at the same time and in the same location as the IEEE International Conference on eScience. No coincidence, of course—why not…
I recently sponsored an event in Manizales, Colombia, training biologists on .NET Bio and BioHPC, two projects that make computational research easier in the life sciences. As part of the training, Jarek Pillardy—the head of the Cornell Bioinformatics Facility (CBSU) at Cornell University—and some of…
On June 11, 2013, Queensland University of Technology (QUT) launched the Open Source Software Group and Virtual Lab at the university’s new Science and Engineering Center in the heart of Brisbane. This exciting venture will enable students to create software solutions for real-world problems—through emerging…
As computer scientists, we have the privilege of working on challenging problems, the solutions to which can markedly improve lives—and in some cases, even save them. It is just such a challenge that Senior Researcher Antonio Criminisi and his team at Microsoft Research Cambridge have…
On October 5, 2011, on the stately campus of the University of Edinburgh, Sir Tim O’Shea, principal of the University of Edinburgh, and Rick Rashid, chief research officer of Microsoft Research, officially inaugurated a significant joint initiative in informatics. It was standing room only in…
It was barely a year ago that European scientific and industry leaders came together with the goal of developing, testing, and deploying a high-quality, interoperable cloud platform for industry and research. The result was VENUS-C, which stands for Virtual multidisciplinary EnviroNments USing Cloud infrastructures. Jointly…
On April 19 and 20, the Microsoft Biology Initiative welcomed a small, focused group to the Microsoft Biology Foundation Workshop 2011, held at the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The workshop was a clinic in the use of the Microsoft Biology…
I am pleased to announce the release of Microsoft Biology Foundation (MBF) 2.0 beta 1, an open-source Microsoft .NET library and application programming interface for bioinformatics research. This beta provides the first significant update since MBF 1.0. Notable improvements include: Increased capacity for de novo…
(from left to right) Fayçal Djeffal, Konrad Scheffler, Moustafa Youssef received the 2010 TWAS-AAS-Microsoft Award in a ceremony held in Nairobi, Kenya. On February 26, 2011, three African scientists received the 2010 TWAS-AAS-Microsoft Award in a ceremony held in Nairobi, Kenya. The award, funded by…
You may be familiar with the Microsoft Biology Foundation (MBF), an open source bioinformatics .NET library that is designed to provide core functionality for genomics research from commonly-used file parsers to algorithms and web connectors. We're pleased to announce that we are continuing to invest…
As we approached the holiday season in Colombia, we had already received one of the biggest gifts on our wish-list: on November 12, the government of Colombia officially committed to the establishment of the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology in the city of Manizales,…
