March 2008 - Posts

• At the Data Intensive Computing Symposium

  Lots of clever people are gathered in Yahoo 's headquarters for the first Data-Intensive Computing Symposium . I see lots of familiar faces and the program looks VERY interesting. I really liked Randy Bryant 's change of his DISC term (PDF download... Posted Mar 26 2008, 01:36 PM by <savas:blog />

• Relationships can have properties as well

  I was asked a very good question by the people who are going to be using our "research-output" platform. They want to be able to capture information like this: "Paper P was authored by Author A while A was a Microsoft employee". The... Posted Mar 26 2008, 01:29 PM by <savas:blog />

• "Article authoring" add-in for Office

  If you write papers and you interact with publishers (especially in the bio field), I think you are going to like our thinking with this add-in for Office . It supports the XML format used by the National Library of Medicine , an easy way to collect metadata... Posted Mar 25 2008, 11:00 AM by <savas:blog />

• Microsoft and "Research-Output" Repositories

  What is Microsoft going to show at the Open Repositories 2008 conference in few days? Why is the entire "scholarly communications" section of the Microsoft Research Technical Computing team going there? :-) Lee Dirks, Alex Wade, Santosh Balasubramanian... Posted Mar 24 2008, 01:16 AM by <savas:blog />

• Loving last.fm

  After my latest soccer (erm... football) league game today, which we lost again :-(, I came to the office to catch up with some work. I installed last.fm for the first time and I am loving it. I felt like "Pink Floyd"-similar music while coding... Posted Mar 22 2008, 10:11 PM by <savas:blog />

• Experimenting with the myExperiment Web API

  I have been closely following the excellent work by myExperiment team. They recently presented at my team's All-Hands Meeting here in Redmond. It was nice to see David De Roure (co-principal investigator) and Jiten Bhagat (main developer) again. Microsoft... Posted Mar 20 2008, 04:09 PM by <savas:blog />

• Google Visualization API

  I just love it and I am jealous. We should be doing things like this as well. After the Gapminder folks moved to Google , we were all expecting something like this to be released. The execution is just beautiful... components that can be used in iGoogle... Posted Mar 20 2008, 12:02 AM by <savas:blog />

• A wonderful weekend at Whistler

  As I said in a previous post , I went to Whistler for few days. It was absolutely wonderful. I had a much needed downtime and enjoyed skiing. The first couple of days were fantastic. Sunday morning was really beautiful but in the afternoon it got cloudy... Posted Mar 18 2008, 11:42 PM by <savas:blog />

• "Universal Parallel Computing Research Center" x 2

  Today Microsoft and Intel announced a joint endeavor with UC Berkeley and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign around parallel computing. I've been heavily involved in this, coordinating Microsoft 's engagement on the technical side of things... Posted Mar 18 2008, 02:36 PM by <savas:blog />

• Natural language processing-based search in Vista

  Here's a feature I didn't know about. Alex Wade, who was the technical Program Manager responsible for this functionality in Windows Vista, showed me how to enable it. It's a pity that such a great feature is disabled by default. So... go... Posted Mar 17 2008, 05:24 PM by <savas:blog />

• Our world needs more teachers like Antanas Mockus

  This article is 4 years old but it's the first time I read it. Antanas Mockus is not the mayor of Bogota anymore (according to Wikipedia ). Definitely inspirational... I wonder how the world would look like if policy-making followed Mockus ' example... Posted Mar 17 2008, 04:44 PM by <savas:blog />

• WSJ - "Racing to Gain Edge on Multicore Chips"

  As I mentioned last week , my group is about to make a big announcement. The WSJ article tells only half of the story. Stay tuned until tomorrow! Read More... Posted Mar 17 2008, 12:49 PM by <savas:blog />

• Whistler

  I was at Whistler last weekend and I am going there again in a couple of hours. Yes, I finally took some time off (today and tomorrow). Last weekend it was fantastic but didn't really enjoy skiing. This week I will also spend some time with my friend... Posted Mar 13 2008, 03:53 PM by <savas:blog />

• Pending announcement...

  Finally, one of the big things I've been working on is coming into light... This is going to be a big announcement :-) More coverage and info next week. Read More... Posted Mar 13 2008, 03:33 PM by <savas:blog />

• Minority Report-style interfaces seem to be gaining momentum

  This is very impressive. From Engadget Read More... Posted Mar 11 2008, 01:49 PM by <savas:blog />