Just registered. This time I am determined to do better than last time :-)

I had seen the "Evolution of dance" clip when it was making the rounds on the Internet more than a year ago. I saw it again as I was playing with Windows Media Center's Internet TV beta (it is currently one of the top picks). It was funny then and it's funny now.

I knew about the rest of the new features but I hadn't heard about 'automatic properties' (or I'd heard and forgot). Cool.

Ok... I don't usually advertise Microsoft products (in fact, I don't think I've ever done that), but this deal is pretty cool.* If you are a student, you can get Microsoft Office Ultimate for $59.95 (that's VERY VERY cheap**). There is a UK version as well.

* and also one of my good friends here in Seattle is involved with the promotion :-)

** please, no jokes about Open Office being free :-)

I was reading the Wired "Inside the High Tech Hunt for a Missing Silicon Valley Legend" article again :-( I never stop to be amazed with how many peoples' lives and careers touched over the years.

I looked again at the last few messages he sent me (the very last being on the Sat evening, before he disappeared). I loved his messages. Short, precise, expressing his enthusiasm about technology. I remember the 'right on' (those were his only words) message when we initially made contact, back in 2003, after the WS-GAF team circulated the whitepaper-critique on the Grid community's approach to architecture and the use of Web Services specifications and his 'wow!' message few days before he disappeared on the overview of some of the things I was planning to do (and I am now doing).

Like with so many others, Jim was more than keen to mentor me. He had asked me to formalize our mentorship relationship (Microsoft has an internal program), which of course I accepted in an instance! I don't think I've ever mentioned this on my blog but Jim is the reason I ended up in Redmond and in the US. When I decided to start looking for my next career move after Newcastle, I ended up having various offers. At the end, I narrowed down my options to MSR Cambridge and joining Don Box in CSD, Redmond. Different career paths, different environments, different people. In the end, I asked Jim and it was his advice that lead me move to the US.

When Tony Hey asked me to join his Technical Computing team, it was another tough decision. I was seriously enjoying working with Don on new technologies (hopefully you'll hear about it some time next year) and was learning a lot next to him. But the opportunity to work with Tony and push my own ideas was also great. I didn't know what to do. Most people thought I was crazy leaving Don and the CSD's very prestigious architecture team. It was a huge gamble and I was hesitant. I went to Jim again, who not only offered his advise but, as I found out later, he started talking with various people in the company to figure out where I would be more successful and where I would have more impact. He even called me to discuss it and tell me his thoughts.

I was planning to go spend a week at his lab last March. Work closely with my mentor and try to learn as much as I could. Lots of the stuff I am doing now are the result of his encouragement and direction (e.g. my involvement with the scholarly publishing folks, supporting researchers with services in the cloud, data-intensive computing, etc.).

I am off to HPTS again next month, his favorite event. I do hope he surprises us all and turns up there!

The recent "Does SOA need MEST on top of REST?" article brought MEST back into the news, which is great. Jim and I talked about these ideas on how to reason about service- and message-oriented systems more than 2 years ago (just look at the date my last long MEST-related post was published). MEST always represented our attempt to highlight what's good about REST, as an architectural style, in the context of service-oriented systems.

Of course, we didn't merely describe MEST in the abstract but we also linked it to existing technologies (Web Services at the time) and particular implementation approaches. We even wrote a chapter for a book with specific code examples as illustration on how we believed a message-oriented API should look like and offered by a Web Services middleware platform. Unfortunately, after loooong delays, that book is going to be published in 2008 instead of 2006 :-( not our fault)

In addition to talking about APIs, we also applied our understanding of MEST to SSDL. A group of students in Newcastle won the first prize in a competition by building a service-oriented application using SSDL and we even saw an SSDL-driven framework, called Soya, emerging as a result of Patric's efforts.

Although I have moved on and I am not really active in discussions in this space, it's great to see the community listening to what we had to say all that time ago. Jim, Ian, and I are now working on a book to apply our understanding of the Web, the discussions and experience from all these years ago in the context of building contemporary distributed applications. I find it to be another great educational activity.

I've started interacting with Evelyne Viegas lately and I have found that we are thinking alike when it comes to semantics. I am really looking forward to working with her more closely to advance the agenda within Microsoft. I think we can do great stuff together, especially now that we are part of the same extended team (External Research within Microsoft Research).

Evelyne just announced an interesting Request for Proposals that she is driving. The model that her group (External Research Programs) is different from what we do in Technical Computing, in terms of the level of funding. Our two approaches are complementary. Evelyne's call is an exciting opportunity to further advance our understanding in the semantics space (please, don't think just 'Semantic Web'... when I think about this space my mind goes to microformats, machine learning, knowledge representation, folksonomies, knowledge inference, etc. etc.). So, start writing those proposals!

Microsoft Research is pleased to announce a new worldwide Request for Proposals (RFP):  Beyond Search – Semantic Computing and Internet Economics. For full details, guidelines, and instructions, please visit http://research.microsoft.com/ur/us/fundingopps/RFPs/BeyondSearch_RFP.aspx

This Request for Proposals is done in partnership with Microsoft adCenter in support of its collaboration with the academic research community.

Submission deadline

The RFP due date is November 1, 2007, 5pm PDT (-8 UTC/GMT)

Awards

The total amount available under this request for proposals (RFP) is $1,000,000. Microsoft anticipates making approximately 20 awards averaging $50,000, with a maximum of $100,000 for any single award.

RFP highlights

To advance academic research and publication in the area of Internet Research and, in particular in data mining, information finding, information supply, and internet economics, Microsoft intends to make available to the RFP awardees a Microsoft adCenter Search query log excerpt with 100 million search queries along with ad click logs sampled over a few months, and a Live Search query log excerpt with 15 million search queries with per-query search result click-throughs. In addition, Microsoft adCenter will provide advertiser accounts to all winners.

This RFP has two tracks:

- Track 1 – Semantic Computing

- Track 2 – Internet Economics

Microsoft encourages proposals for either track which describe innovative research using the adCenter, Live Search, and SDK assets in bold, novel, and unconventional approaches to further Internet Research and related technologies, including interdisciplinary research.

I was invited (in place of Fabrizio Gagliardi who couldn't make it) to keynote at an EGEE workshop in Thessaloniki. Given the industry focus of the workshop and the discussion around Grid computing adoption, I am planning to talk about some observations that Tony and I have made in the past and also start, for the first time, to articulate our vision on "eResearch in the Cloud" and how we are going to execute... just snippets this time. The title of my talk is "Looking at the clouds for the future of Grid Computing" :-)

I am now at Heathrow waiting for 9 hours for my next flight to Athens and then Thessaloniki. After that, I will be working from my family's home for few days before heading to the UK and Newcastle, together with Roger Barga (who still needs to update his page) and Marc Holmes from Microsoft's Technology Center in the UK (he's a great architect), for meetings with Paul Watson, David Leahy, and the CARMEN folks. I am soooo looking forward to this and the great opportunity to do something really fascinating there, linked to the "eResearch in the Cloud" vision.

The other day I almost had a "close encounter" with another car, after having got the exit from SR-520 and was turning into 40th towards Microsoft's main campus. I was in the middle lane, as always, and ready to turn right. As you can see from the map below, the middle lane is supposed to turn towards the outer lane on 40th. Well, the car in front of me decided to stop just after the pedestrian crossing so that it could get into the inner lane, hence blocking the correct way. I wasn't expecting it to do this so I had to break relatively hard (we weren't going fast) and then go around it.

It's a good think I am not the typical Greek driver so no fingers or honking or verbal abuse took place. Very good think in fact because as I was going around I looked to check out the driver... yes, it was Bill Gates :-) BTW... he drives an Audi (not even close to my simple A3 of course).