How Microsoft’s External Research Division Works with a New Breed of E-scientists (opens in new tab)
Tony Hey, CVP for the External Research Division within Microsoft Research, leads the company’s efforts to build external partnerships in key areas of scientific research, education, and computing. He’s been a physicist, a computer scientist, and dean of engineering, and for five years ran the UK’s e-Science program. These experiences have given him a broad view of the ways in which all the sciences are becoming both computational and data-intensive. Microsoft tools and services, he says, will support and sustain the new breed of scientists riding this new wave.
Meet Three New Faculty Fellows Who are Revolutionizing Computer Science (opens in new tab)
Because new faculty are so vital to the future of academic computer science, the Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellowship Program identifies, recognizes, and supports five exceptional new faculty members engaged in innovative computing research each year. This program now encompasses 20 academic researchers whose exceptional talent for research and thought leadership make them standouts in their fields. The selected professors are exploring breakthrough, high-impact research that has the potential to help solve some of today’s most challenging societal problems. Learn more about how this program is making a difference first hand from three Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellows.
Academics to get a glimpse of Microsoft’s Sphere (opens in new tab)
Microsoft researcher Hrvoje Benko demonstrated the Sphere at the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit at the Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, WA. Sphere is a multi-user, multi-touch-sensitive display that permits easy 360-degree access for multiple users, with a high degree of interactivity without shadowing or occlusion. Check out this video to see more.
On July 28, Microsoft External Research announced a set of free software tools aimed at allowing researchers to seamlessly publish, preserve and share data throughout the entire scholarly communication life cycle. The Microsoft e-Journal Service. This offering provides a hosted, full-service solution that facilitates easy self-publishing of online-only journals to facilitate the availability of conference proceedings and small and medium-sized journals. The Article Authoring Add-in for Word 2007 enables metadata to be captured at the authoring stage to preserve document structure and semantic information throughout the publishing process, which is essential for enabling search, discovery and analysis in subsequent stages of the life cycle. The Creative Commons Add-in for Office 2007 allows authors to embed Creative Commons licenses directly into an Office document (Word, Excel or PowerPoint) by linking to the Creative Commons site via a Web service. The Research Information Centre. In close partnership with the British Library, this collaborative workspace will be hosted via Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and will allow researchers to collaborate throughout the entire research project workflow, from seeking research funding to searching and collecting information, as well as managing data, papers and other research objects throughout the research process. Hear more first hand.
On July 28, Tony Hey, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s External Research Division, announced a set of free software tools aimed at allowing researchers to seamlessly publish, preserve and share data throughout the entire scholarly communication life cycle. He also discussed collaborative initiatives intended to unlock the potential of multicore computing. Collecting and analyzing data, authoring, publishing, and preserving information are all essential components of the everyday work of researchers — with collaboration and search and discovery at the heart of the entire process. With these tools, Microsoft External Research is supporting that scholarly communication life cycle with free software tools to improve interoperability with existing tools used commonly by academics and scholars to better meet their research needs. Microsoft researchers partnered with academia throughout the development of these tools to obtain input on the application of technology to the needs of the academic community, while Microsoft product groups submitted feedback on how the company’s technology could optimally address the entire research process. The collective efforts resulted in the first wave of many tools designed to support academics across the scholarly communication life cycle. The tools are freely available now (opens in new tab). Hear first hand from Lee Dirks, director of scholarly communication for External Research division.
Microsoft Research Faculty Summit (opens in new tab)
This week the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit will once again bring together more than 400 thought leaders from academia, government, and Microsoft to reflect on how the maturing of the computing disciplines has opened an exciting range of opportunities for research and development. I sat down with Harold Javid to get a little more info on the conference and what you guys can expect to see in my upcoming coverage.