People started posting their condolences on Lee’s Facebook timeline so I guess it’s ok to post this note now. Earlier this morning I received the sad news that my good friend and colleague at Microsoft, Lee Dirks, and his wife, Judy, were killed in a tragic accident in Peru. Their …
I met Kyril back in 2006. I was already in Microsoft for a year when Jim Gray and Tony Hey asked me to join Tony’s Technical Computing team as an Architect. Kyril was in my interview loop for the job. We spent a lot of time talking about eScience, research, …
Jim Gray (1944-2012). Here’s to a wonderful human being, an amazing scientist, and a great role model. I am so honored to have known, have worked with, and have had him as a mentor in Microsoft. Jim was the one who advised me to move to the US and join …
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 …
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 …
/**/ Ahhhh! One of my “children” is growing up and maturing! I am so proud of the team over at Microsoft’s External Research. They have done an amazing job with Zentity. The new version packs a great set of cool new features, building on the extensible nature of the graph …
Sad day today at “the borg”. I really liked Robbie Bach’s and J Allard’s styles. I am sure they have their reasons (the ones they talk about and those that they keep to themselves) for leaving the collective. I liked J Allard’s farewell message. I couldn’t agree more with the …
/**/ It’s soooo great to see the Chemistry addin for Word (previously known as “Chem4Word”) on Codeplex as an open source project. Congratulations to all the folks over at External Research and to Alex Wade in particular for driving this wonderful project and making it what it is today. Few …
I have written about the Word add-in for Ontology Recognition (the focus of the BioLit project) in the past. The project was also mentioned in my contribution to the Fourth Paradigm book and our “A smart’ cyberinfrastructure for Research” article. It was one of the projects in which I was …
The Zentity folks at MSR’s External Research group (Lee Dirks, Alex Wade, and Oscar Naim) and the wonderful guys at the University of Southampton, School of Engineer Sciences (Steven Johnston, Mark Scott, Kenji Takeda, Simon Cox, and Less Carr) organized a Dojo event at Dev8D around Zentity. It was great …
The Zentity team is soliciting your feedback. They just broadcasted a message that I thought might be good to redistribute through this blog as well. Please note that the deadline for paper submission is FAST approaching. I’m looking forward to seeing all the things that the Zentity community is doing …
I just remembered that the Science Commons Symposium is taking place this coming Saturday. It’s promising to be a very cool event, organized by my friends over at External Research in Microsoft Research. I am really looking forward to it. The list of speakers is impressive! If you are around …
When Blaise first presented Photosynth at TED few years ago, everyone was amazed. Well, the work that he’s been doing over at Bing Maps is starting to show off and it’s absolutely wonderful. I just watched his recent presentation on “augmented-realy maps”. Blaise and his team continue to innovate big …
It’s been long time in the making but, finally, Tony is blogging :-) In fact, it seems that the entire External Research team might be posting through the same blog. Definitely worth following! And no, I am not just saying this because it’s my previous team and I really like …
The photographs that made it to the final round of the Bing homepage contest are amazing. The winning one is a photo of the Seattle skyline. It’s gorgeous. Justin Kraemer/ Justin Kraemer Photography This photograph of the Seattle skyline won the second Bing homepage-photo contest. It will be featured as …
The New York Times has a nice article (“A Deluge of Data Shapes a New Era in Computing”) about the “Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery” book, which also happens to include my “A platform for all that we know: creating a knowledge-driven research infrastructure” essay :-) Check out my October blog …