Jared Jackson Jared Jackson is a Research Software Development Engineer in the External Research group at Microsoft Research. My current professional interests focus mainly on delivering computational tools to scientists. The goal of this work is to enable scientists that increasingly rely on computers to complete their research not to have to become computer scientists themselves or rely heavily on a paid programming staff. We can ammpolish this by providing innovative and easy to use tools for working with scientific workflows, allowing parallel computing, storage capabilities, and fault handling. I have also been involved with efforts to integrate robotics and gaming into the teaching computer science at the college level.

Links

Scientific Workflow

• We demonstrated an early version of Trident, our scientific workflow workbench at TechFest 2008.
• One of the first group of scientists to work with Trident come from the Neptune project, deploying a large sensor network off the Pacific Ocean. Trident workflows, using Windows Workflow Foundation underneath, can communicate with COVE, an 3D under-sea visualization tool, much like Virtual Earth.

Robotics

• Institute for Personal Robots in Education - The institute is a collaborative effort between The Georgia Institute of Technology, Bryn Mawr College, and Microsoft to create standard hardware, software, and curriculum materials for introducing robotics to beginning Computer Science students. It even has its own blog and wiki.
• Very much related to the IPRE is the Myro software robotics platform. This platform provides an easy interface to controlling robots using any .Net language, including IronPython.
• The Microsoft Robotics Studio is also a key technology both for the IPRE as well as Myro.

Gaming in Education

• Alice is a very interesting project teaching early programming concepts through a 3D game or story creation tool.