Categories: MicrosoftResearchScholarly CommunicationsSemanticsZentity

A “smart” cyberinfrastructure for research

Many months ago, Tony Hey, Evely Viegas, and I were invited to write a “viewpoint” article for the Communications of the ACM. It should be of no surprise that we chose to write about “Semantic Computing” as it relates to research.

While the focus of my contribution to “The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery” book was about a future where a semantics-aware infrastructure is already in place, this article concentrates on some very interesting projects supported by Microsoft’s External Research group and how they relate to that ultimate vision of a “smart” cyberinfrastructure. The BioLit, the Chem4Word, Zentity, and myExperiment projects are briefly discussed. We call for the research community to invest more in the development of tools and infrastructure in this space.

A “smart” cyberinfrastructure for research:
Full text online, ACM Digital Library

BTW… My affiliation should be “Microsoft Research” and not “University of Newcastle upon Tyne” 🙂 (Update: Quickly fixed by the nice folks at CACM).

Savas Parastatidis

Savas Parastatidis works at Amazon as a Sr. Principal Engineer in Alexa AI'. Previously, he worked at Microsoft where he co-founded Cortana and led the effort as the team's architect. While at Microsoft, Savas also worked on distributed data storage and high-performance data processing technologies. He was involved in various e-Science projects while at Microsoft Research where he also investigated technologies related to knowledge representation & reasoning. Savas also worked on language understanding technologies at Facebook. Prior to joining Microsoft, Savas was a Principal Research Associate at Newcastle University where he undertook research in the areas of distributed, service-oriented computing and e-Science. He was also the Chief Software Architect at the North-East Regional e-Science Centre where he oversaw the architecture and the application of Web Services technologies for a number of large research projects. Savas worked as a Senior Software Engineer for Hewlett Packard where he co-lead the R&D effort for the industry's Web Service transactions service and protocol. You can find out more about Savas at https://savas.me/about