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New challenge
It was more than 18 months that I moved to the Technical Computing organization inside Microsoft. I had joined a startup team that worked on building a platform for large-scale compute and data processing on top of Azure. It was an amazing experience. We worked hard, produce great results, and learnt a lot. I met…
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“It’s up to us to write what happens next… together”
I hadn’t come across the “HOME” movie before. I watched it earlier today. Our home, the planet that we call Earth, deserves at least 1 1/2h of our time. Please please please watch this movie in its entirety!!! The cinematography is spectacular; the narration really beautiful; the conveyed message powerful, inspiring, moving. Make sure you…
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Squaw Valley skiing weekend
The last weekend of January I traveled to California to meet with Jim and Emil for a weekend of skiing at Squaw Valley. We were treated with an excellent weather on Saturday and amazing new 20-30cm snow on Sunday. Soooooo much fun! I hadn’t seen my pal Jim for a long time so I really…
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“The Joy of Stats”
Happy New Year everyone! The first blog entry of 2011 is about an 1-hour BBC documentary on the “Joy of Stats” (video on YouTube) with Hans Rosling as the presenter. Hans Rosling is a great inspiration to me. He always talks about the power of data and its analysis, a subject about which I care…
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“REST in Practice” in top 5 🙂
This is cool. O’Reilly had an ebook promotion for cyber-Monday here in the US. “REST in Practice” did very well. It was the fifth best-selling title 🙂 Tim O’Reilly published a blog entry about the top selling books. Not bad! 🙂 If you have read the book and would like to share your views with…
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Diplomacy 2.0?
I feel that I need to express my opinion on the recent Wikileaks-related events. I know that many of my friends or those who follow my thoughts on the Web might not agree with me but I always believe that it’s healthy to have a difference in opinions since it makes for interesting conversations 🙂…
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Isn’t automation supposed to help us do things faster?
I am a technologist. I am a geek. I know that. I make use of all sorts of gadgets or read about them. I try to follow all the latest developments. I read books to educate myself about new things. At work and at my free time I try to generate new technology. Technology is…
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Zentity v2.0
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 store which is at its heart.…
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Savas in a skirt and on a donkey 🙂
Well, after feeling extremely honored as a result of the Visiting Professor appointment, I thought it might be good to bring myself down to earth as fast as possible. So I asked my family to send me few photographs from my childhood. It’s always good for one to remember one’s humble beginnings 🙂 My brother…
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Professor Savas Parastatidis 🙂
I arrived at home after a fantastic weekend in New York. Since my cell phone had run out of battery while I was still at the JFK airport, I was only able to check my email after I got home. The first message in my mailbox: Subject: Professor Savas Parastatidis From: Paul Watson Hi Prof,…