Some of you might know that Bob Dylan is amongst my favorite artists. I’ve seen him only twice so I can’t wait to see him again. Probably sometime this year since he’s touring again to support his new album. So I love the way that WolframAlpha answers the question.

“How many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man?”

“the answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind”

:-)

Thanks to Susan for forwarding.

This falls under the same category as “the answer to life the universe and everything” :-)

Updated:

Ha ha ha ha: velocity unladen swallow (thanks to Steve)

Just noticed from his tweet feed that Jim is going to be sharing his brains through the Web. I suspect (haven’t talked to him about this yet) that he’s going to present most of the thinking that we are putting in our Web book. I know that I am biased but I think it’s going to be super interesting.

As part of our Scholarly Communications-related activities in Atlanta (check out my previous post about Zentity v1.0), Alex Wade is going to talk tomorrow about a cool service: Translator. The web form-based translation does not represent anything new but check out the AJAX-based service. If you notice on the left column of my blog, three flags have appeared that allow you to read the contents of my web pages/blog posts in different languages without leaving my site or changing the URIs.

I think it’s cool.

I am in Atlanta for the Open Repositories 09 where I’ve joined the rest of the Scholarly Communications gang (Lee Dirks, Alex Wade, Pablo Fernicola, and of course Tony Hey).

Tony Hey just announced the general availability of Zentity v1.0 (download). It’s been a loooong but very rewarding road over the last 1 1/2 years. Lee and Alex have been absolutely fantastic to work with and the Persistent team have been amazing. MSR’s Santosh Balasubramanian was the driving force at the beginning and Anthony Hanses at the end. Even though I am naming Harsh “no issues” Thakur, “stay on track” Shailesh Nikam, and Sandeep “commando” Maurya in this post, there were many others who worked really hard to make Zentity v1.0 a reality today. Congratulations and many thanks to all of them.

While I am confident about the quality of the release, there are bound to be problems that we are going to fix. I am already seeing some interesting questions appearing on the Zentity twitter stream. Please go ahead and send me an email, tweet your questions, suggestions, feedback. We are all going to do our best to capture it and respond as soon as possible.

We are also holding a workshop on Thursday (Tools for Repositories - the Microsoft Research & the Scholarly Information Ecosystem). A large part of the Scholarly Communications effort (lead by Lee Dirks) will be presented there… the free tools and plugins and services we are making available, discussion of ideas, concepts, the future, etc! I am going to be there to discuss with the attendees the inner workings of Zentity, to show them how to use it as a development framework for interesting, data/semantics-driven applications. In addition to the reasoning examples I have shown in the past, I am going to demonstrate a brand new Silverlight-based sample from the museum domain. Along the way, we’ll utilize the great Microsoft tools and runtimes.

I want the workshop, and the Zentity session in particular, to be interactive and attendee-driven. So, tweet against the Zentity stream or email me with what you’d like to see during the workshop; send a challenge about what you’d like Zentity to do for you; talk about an application you’d love to see on top of repository/semantic store.

There is also an article-interview about Zentity with Lee, Alex, and myself over on the Microsoft Research site… Facilitating Semantic Research. I am going to be posting more information about the rest of the semantics-related work we’ve been doing and is steadily delivered.

(Photo by Kathleen Kennedy Knies)

Summary of links:

• Zentity twitter stream
• Zentity official page
• Zentity v1.0 download
• Zentity forum
• Open Repositories 09 workshop on Tools for Repositories - the Microsoft Research & the Scholarly Information Ecosystem
• Scholarly Communications feedback email

Links to some previous related entries:

• “The Age of Semantics”
• “Microsoft and "Research-Output" Repositories”
• “Research Output Repository Platform”
• “Relationships can have properties as well”
• “Merging data graphs - myExperiment & Resource-Output Repository Platform”
• “Extending Famulus using arbitrary data models”
• “Research-Output Repository Platform (Codename ‘Famulus’) Beta 1 is Live”
• Famulus and M - Added "symmetric" relation
• Building an MGrammar-based application for Famulus

More on this blog under the “Scholarly Communications” category.

In the next few days I’ll be posting and tweeting about all the MSR-related activities at the Open Repositories 09 conference. I am going there to join the MSR Scholarly Communications gang (Lee Dirks, Alex Wade, and Pablo Fernicola) and of course Tony Hey.

As I had previously mentioned, we are also holding a workshop on Thursday (Tools for Repositories - the Microsoft Research & the Scholarly Information Ecosystem). A large part of the Scholarly Communications effort (lead by Lee Dirks) will be presented there… the free tools and plugins and services we are making available, discussion of ideas, concepts, the future, etc!

I just found out that due to interest that exceeded our original planning/expectations, we were moved to a room x3 times the size. So, we are now opening up the workshop and the “space is limited” warning no longer applies. Please go ahead and register.

For workshop registration and related questions, please e-mail the workshop convener at: scholar@microsoft.com

Oh it’s going to be fun!

I’ve been following all the hype and discussions around Wolfram|Alpha. In few hours it’ll go live. I’ve been lucky enough to have played with it and I like it a lot. I can totally see its potential. I believe that the direction Stephen Wolfram and his team are taking to be the absolute right one (I am sure they haven’t been waiting for me to say that :-).

For those who have been monitoring my blog over the last couple of years, they’ll know that I have made a conscious decision to direct my career towards semantic computing, knowledge representation and reasoning. I am trying hard within Microsoft to apply many of the ideas and approaches that Wolfram|Alpha is now delivering. We are far away from what they have achieved and they seem to be executing really nicely. Even Google is recognizing that this is the right direction (Sergey Birn’s letter to the troops, Google squared).

Checkout the “Introducing Wolfram|Alpha” video. Very cool.

Few nights ago, my friends Sophie and David came over for dinner with my parents. It was a lovely evening.

During the dinner conversation, my father said the following joke that I think captures the Greek mentality towards work, especially by public sector employees. I am sure that every nation will have a similar joke to make fun of aspects of their day-to-day lives :-)

Please note that the other nations mentioned are random and no attempt is made to stereotype them... including Greeks... I just thought it was funny.

Here it goes (free translation from Greek)...

There was a conference to discuss developments in improving work-life balance. At some point, country delegates started to passionately support the work that was done in the area by their respective nations…

• British: “We have managed to reduce the length of time that it takes for workers to go from work to sitting with their families for dinner. They get off work at 5pm, they use our advanced Tube network, and by 5.30pm they are at home”.
• Japanese: “We have done even better. Our bullet trains are so fast that our workers finish work at 9pm and by 9.20 they are at home for dinner with their families”.
• Greek: “Ha! We finish work at 3pm but we are at home for lunch by 2.30pm” :-)

Which is soooooooo true :-)

If you are interested in publishing, equations, Scholarly Communications technologies, or if you just want to learn from a great developer and a really fantastic guy, then I highly recommend Murray’s blog. He’s a Microsoft veteran and amongst the nicest guys I’ve met in the company. Also, he’s one of the two people responsible for breaking the 640KB barrier. Some interesting stories there :-)

When Lee and I started the Chem4Word project, Murray was very supportive and gave us excellent advice. He became an advocate and helped us navigate through the executives to get the necessary backing for our effort.*

He’s just posted an excellent video about entering math equations in Word 2007 using the linear format.

Alex Wade gave me a demo of the latest Chem4Word build and it’s absolutely amazing to see the progress that the Unilever Centre for Molecular Science Informatics in Cambridge and Microsoft teams have made since I left External Research. Chem4Word was one of my favorite projects!

Paul Watson, my PhD supervisor, has recently started using twitter. I really love the fact that he’s stays in touch with all the recent technologies :-) Amongst other things, he tweets about the Digital Inclusion Hub, an initiative in the UK for which Newcastle has been awarded 12M UKP. That’s a huge amount of research funding and I am seriously pleased for Paul, Patrick, and the rest of the collaborators in Newcastle. They are doing some really interesting work over there and they totally worth the attention, support, and trust they get.

Official site: Inclusion through the Digital Economy