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The Hermes Series – Issue 2

Welcome to the second edition of The Hermes Series, a non-regular and often random collection of notes & thoughts about knowledge representation and reasoning, graphs, technology, and all things from around the Web. In this second blog post in the series ... The Internet of Things and Glanceable Data The Economies of Digital Assistants and Personalized Experiences Artificial Stupidity, Meaning, and Structured Data Application Discoverability and Actions with Facebook What's Success Read more [...]

My files in the cloud using SkyDrive

I have been using the beta version of SkyDrive for a while now and I love it. I was a huge user of Live Mesh for its peer-to-peer synchronization capabilities. I am certain I will miss that feature but I understand the need to remove complexity and streamline features as the service scales to support 100s millions of users. The Windows blog announced the upgraded services yesterday so I can now talk about it :-)... "Making personal cloud storage for Windows available anywhere, with the new SkyDrive" Read more [...]

The Hermes Series – Issue 1

I am an information junkie I enjoy keeping up with the world of technology. I take notes, keep links, and write about the things that interest me. I try to identify the connections with what I do at work, with what excites me. I like to share. I learn a lot from discussions and alternate points of view. I find it very rewarding to engage in dialogs. Introduction to the The Hermes Series Hermes was the messenger for the Greek gods. Whenever I can, I will spend some time aggregating those news I find Read more [...]

Welcome to the new http://savas.me look

As I suggested a week ago, my weblog was going to change. The majority of the work has now been done. There are still few things that I need to fix or transfer from my old site but most of the content is now in its new place and the redirects should just work. If you encounter any problems, please let me know. History It was towards the end of 2003 when Jim and I started working on a personal blogging platform which we called pblog. It was a collection of ASP.NET components and a database-driven Read more [...]

Blog changes coming up

In the coming days, this blog and my entire corner on the web at http://savas.me are going to change. After 8 years of faithful service, I am retiring "pblog", the blogging engine I wrote back in 2003 and further evolved few years later. I have already transferred all the blog entries to WordPress and I am now setting up the theme and looks of the site. I am giving some advance notice because some links might break. I am going to try my best to put redirects in place but in most likelihood there Read more [...]

Come work for our team!!!

In my previous post I shared my excitement about my new role in Microsoft. I work together with some amazing people on hard problems, in a domain that really excites me: data, information, knowledge at scale. We now want to grow the team and so we want YOU! :-) We are looking for good Developers and Program Managers. If you are passionate about shipping quality services, you need to talk to me. If you are interested in an environment that encourages small teams, agility, and frequent release Read more [...]

My new challenge in Microsoft

Over the last three months I've been having an incredible time at work. I opted not to talk about it because I wanted to make sure that it sticks this time :-) Before my current role, I participated in great startup efforts within Microsoft, projects with great vision and immense possibilities. We've learnt a lot from the incubation efforts and we've even shipped stuff. Sometimes it was frustrating too. It happens :-) As I mentioned in my post on "Knowledge Representation and Reasoning in Read more [...]

Knowledge Representation and Reasoning in 2012

Happy New Year everyone! 2011 was a slow year for this blog. Early last year I joined Erik Meijers team in order to work on an incubation project that involved actors, distributed graph-based processing, a highly-scalable and reliable document store, and more. Given the non-public nature of the project, I couldn't really talk about it. It was a lot of fun and we learnt a lot. The nice folks in the team are continuing the work but I decided to move on, following my dream to work on knowledge representation Read more [...]

A crazy Savas trip :-)

When Lee Dirks asked me to represent the Microsoft Research Connections team at a Digital Public Library of America meeting at Harvard Law School in Boston, I immediately checked my calendar. The DPLA folks are starting a wonderful new journey of defining a platform for digital libraries so they needed input from industry Software Architects. This is Tony Hey's group so I am always wiling to help if I can. Also, Lee is such a great guy so it's difficult for me to say "no" :-) I checked my work Read more [...]

XLDB 2011 conference – Observations

Granted, Netflix had to build their own pipeline based on open source technologies. They used the right tool for the job. They used a NoSQL solution for reliably gathering/recording their data at scale. They used an RDBMS where it made sense.

Netflix is a big company. They can build their own data processing infrastructure from the various pieces. However, what about all those smaller companies that want to collect and process data that is critical to their growth, competitiveness, survival? Wouldnt they benefit from cloud solutions that are scalable, reliable, and NOT managed by them!