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How Microsoft's External Research Division works with a new breed of
e-scientists
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
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
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.
Take a Closer Look at a Few of the Free Software Tools to Helps
Scholars and Researchers
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.
Microsoft Research Unveils Free Software Tools to Help Scholars
and Researchers Share Knowledge
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. Hear first hand from Lee Dirks, director of scholarly communication
for External Research division.
Microsoft Research Faculty Summit
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. |
