Next, I wandered over to a mega-booth from Microsoft Research Cambridge called Science for the 21st Century, featuring no fewer than six demos. There was a lot to absorb, so before diving in, I found Stephen Emmott, director of the lab's European Science Initiative, to get a quick overview. In four short minutes, he provided a comprehensive look at his group's motivations and priorities, so I thought it best to stay out of his way and let him explain away:

Stephen Emmott

"All the demos we've got here, the thing that ties them all together is the thing that ties all of our work together, which is our focus on developing new conceptual methods, techniques, and tools for helping scientists model and study complex biological systems.

"Understanding complex natural systems is rapidly becoming the most important and active area of science, certainly for the next 50 years, and the reason for that is because it's where the greatest scientific and societal challenges are: understanding biological systems, living systems. After 50 years of spectacular success in molecular biology, we still don't know how a cell works. And that's going to require building models of complex organisms.

"On the other hand, understanding what's happening to climate change and environmental change ... a lot is known about the physical aspects of climate change to do with carbon, but virtually nothing is known about the other important aspect about what regulates climate change, which is the biosphere, the biological components like the Earth's forests. So we've got the Forest Dynamics project here, which is modeling the relationship between forest dynamics and climate regulation.

"Interestingly, complex natural systems are also where the biggest societal, social, scientific challenges are.The biggest technological, economic opportunities for growth over the next 50 years are also around understading complex natural systems. If we can understand biological systems, it would, in medicine for example, revolutionize our ability to understand and treat disease. And it would probably revolutionize our ability to build novel, biological-based energy sources.

"One of the most efficient users and converters of energy on the planet are plants, and we don't know how they do that. If we understood how they do that, we'd have a big energy- and technological-innovation opportunity.

"The one thing that underpins the proper development of a science of complex natural systems is models and modeling. A lot of data is already known, so it's a question of how you bring all that data together. That's why we focus on complex natural systems, and that's why we focus on modeling and new modeling techniques.

"If we can crack even some of those problems, it would give us enormous insights into how we can think about a model and build much more complex engineered systems, software systems. There's an interesting interplay between understanding and doing science and its impact back on computer science and, naturally, our software engineering. That's the main motivator for everything that we're doing."