July 2008 - Posts

• F# for Scientists

  I saw Tony Hey earlier this week holding the “F# for Scientists” book so I had to check it out. Very very cool! I love it that F# is being productized and will be soon in the hands of developers. I’ve been following its evolution and rise to a product... Posted Jul 31 2008, 03:47 PM by <savas:blog />

• “3rd Annual Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science”

  While at the Faculty Summit, I talked with Ian Foster again who pointed me to the 3rd Annual Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computing Science . It looks very interesting and relevant to some of the work we are doing in MSR ’s External Research... Posted Jul 29 2008, 06:24 PM by <savas:blog />

• Lee on Channel 8

  In the first of a series of videos related to our recent announcements in the Scholarly Communication lifecycle space, Lee Dirks talks on Channel 8 . Fun!!! :-) Read More... Posted Jul 29 2008, 06:17 PM by <savas:blog />

• Research Output Repository Platform

  Yes, I know the name is boring. We have a better name but we weren’t able to secure it internationally in time for Faculty Summit. Anyway... “Research Output Repository Platform” will have to be for now. I talked about our efforts around the platform... Posted Jul 28 2008, 01:22 PM by <savas:blog />

• Creative Commons Addin for Office 2007

  When I joined Technical Computing , now part of External Research , we wanted to create an ecosystem of tools and services to support researchers worldwide. Today we announced the results of some of our efforts; there is still more going on. A tool that... Posted Jul 28 2008, 12:39 PM by <savas:blog />

• Supporting the Scholarly Communication Lifecycle

  Lee Dirks has been leading our efforts in the Scholarly Communication lifecycle. It’s been an absolutely pleasure working with Lee since he joined Technical Computing, which has now been integrated with External Research in Microsoft Research . He’s been... Posted Jul 28 2008, 12:14 PM by <savas:blog />

• .NetMap available on CodePlex

  .NetMap start a series of announcements by our group today. Marc Smith and his team have done a great job at delivering a network visualization plugin for Excel; and it’s open source . NetMap is a pair of applications for viewing network graphs, along... Posted Jul 28 2008, 12:05 PM by <savas:blog />

• Open Web Foundation

  Google , BBC , Facebook , and other big names sponsor the “Open Web Foundation” . They are ignoring W3C and OASIS ! Ok… you have to pay to participate in those organizations. But IETF ???? Dare Obasanjo has some more detailed commentary on the announcement... Posted Jul 26 2008, 09:26 PM by <savas:blog />

• Amazon’s recent S3 problems

  A great read for those, like me, who are into large-scale systems. See what happened in S3’s recent 9-hour downtime from the people at the center of it . ( via Werner Vogel’s blog ) Read More... Posted Jul 26 2008, 03:03 PM by <savas:blog />

• “Ahead in the Cloud” - Werner Vogel’s

  Werner Vogel just finished his “Ahead in the Cloud” talk here at the DISC 08 workshop . As always, very entertaining. Amazon is light years ahead of the rest of the industry in thinking about and delivering utility computing to the world. The talk was... Posted Jul 18 2008, 01:47 PM by <savas:blog />

• The 2008 Microsoft eScience Workshop

  My friend and colleague Kris Tolle is responsible this year for all things related to the 2008 Microsoft eScience Workshop . This meeting has been getting better and better with each year. The community amazes me every time with the wonderful things that... Posted Jul 18 2008, 10:38 AM by <savas:blog />

• Three day of Mapping and Reducing…

  I am spending today, tomorrow, and Friday at the University of Washington at an NSF -funded workshop on how to use Hadoop to write map-reduce computations. I already know map-reduce of course but it’s interesting to get some hands-on experience on Hadoop... Posted Jul 16 2008, 04:28 PM by <savas:blog />

• Amusing analogy of Google’s daily processing power

  20 Petabytes/day! Now, how much is that in rice units? :-)... “ I never knew Google was THIS massive! ” Read More... Posted Jul 14 2008, 03:46 AM by <savas:blog />

• Yup… Resources and WS are making the news again

  I remember the conversation going something like this a couple of years ago(paraphrasing for dramatization purposes :-)… - (My manager at the time:) Savas, we’d like to ask you to drive the latest technical efforts on WS-Transfer. - Eh? You do know that... Posted Jul 14 2008, 12:41 AM by <savas:blog />

• “So You Say You Want to Kill XML...”

  Great post by Ted Neward on Google ’s Protocol Buffers ( see also my previous short comment ). ( via Stefan’s post ) Read More... Posted Jul 14 2008, 12:19 AM by <savas:blog />