Vancouver, BC March 17^th – 21^st

Last week the Microsoft Research WorldWide Telescope and the MIT EyeWire team were invited to present a Virtual Reality in Space experience exhibit – the demo that went from neurons to space in a vivid, 360 degree experience from the International Space Station to ocular neurons.  The immersive experience utilized our 16 Megapixel Wall display and two Oculus Rift goggles all powered by WWT.  Without the goggles, you can experience a video of the tour.

In addition to the VR demo, on Thursday (3/20/14) NASA unveiled a new 360 deg mosaic of the Milky Way – the 20-gigapixel GLIMPSE360 mosaic and it was showcased on our TED2014 display wall, as well as online via browsers with our embedded WWT HTML5 control.   The official press release from NASA and Spitzer called out the Microsoft WWT integration and the ability for web viewers to have instant access to the GLIMPSE360 imagery – check it out for yourself – the imagery is beautiful. 

One of the more interesting interactions of the TED experience was having Cmdr Chris Hadfield be engaged by the ISS visualization on the display wall – especially since he spent much time on the ISS and knows it as well as anyone. 

More articles on the experience:

NEXT Blog on Exhibit by David Chen

NASA's Spitzer Telescope Brings 360-Degree View of Galaxy to Our Fingertips – NASA press release

Tour the Milky Way in 20 billion pixels – CNET

Wisconsin scientists create dramatic 360-degree portrait of Milky Way – Journal Sentinel

New online Windows Azure training for researchers

The global Windows Azure for Research program has been going strong for almost six months, and we’ve been delighted by the response from the researchers around the world who have eagerly attended our in-person training events. Today, we are pleased to announce an online version of the training.

New online Windows Azure training for researchers - Microsoft Research Connections Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

Building cloud virtual machines for research

As regular readers of this blog know, the Windows Azure for Research program recurrently solicits proposals on the use of Windows Azure, Microsoft’s cloud-computing platform, in scholarly research. Winning projects receive a one-year allocation of Windows Azure storage and compute resources.

We review these proposals on the fifteenth of even-numbered months (February, April, June, and so forth), so the next deadline, February 15, is fast approaching. This marks our third round of solicitations, and the response so far has been outstanding, as a review of current grantees and their projects attests.

In addition to these standing, bi-monthly requests for proposals, we are initiating a new set of calls, focused on specific cloud-based research topics. Submissions for the first of these special calls are due on March 15, 2014.

Our first special call—Science VMs for Research—requests proposals to build virtual machine (VM) images that can be shared with communities of users. While it is standard practice for scientific communities to share important open-source, domain-specific software tools, using these tools often involves complex installation procedures or the resolution of library conflicts. Cloud computing obviates such impediments by enabling communities to share a complete operating system image, pre-installed with all the tools needed by specialized groups of users. Thus, a newcomer to the group can install the image in the cloud and be doing productive work very quickly. Moreover, the community can keep the cloud-based VM image updated with the latest version of the software.

Building cloud virtual machines for research - Microsoft Research Connections Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

Announcing E-book version of Scott Guthrie’s “Building Real-World Cloud Apps with Windows Azure”

We have published online and downloadable e-book versions of Scott Guthrie’s presentation titled Building Real-World Cloud Apps with Windows Azure (original video version is available here: part 1, part 2).

Along with the e-book we published the code for the Fix It application that Scott developed to demonstrate many of the recommended cloud development patterns. Before publishing the code, we worked with Microsoft Patterns and Practices to do a thorough code review and testing. In an Appendix to the e-book, we document what we learned from that process, listing issues we fixed and issues we deferred to a later release.

If you’re curious about developing for the cloud, considering a move to the cloud, or are new to cloud development, you’ll find in this e-book a concise overview of the most important concepts and practices you need to know. The concepts are illustrated with concrete examples, and each chapter links to other resources for more in-depth information.   

Announcing E-book version of Scott Guthrie’s “Building Real-World Cloud Apps with Windows Azure” - .NET Web Development and Tools Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

• Twenty four design patterns that are useful in cloud-hosted applications. Each pattern is provided in a common format that describes the context and problem, the solution, issues and considerations for applying the pattern, and an example based on Windows Azure. Each pattern also includes links to other related patterns.
• Two primers and eight guidance topics that provide basic knowledge and describe good practice techniques for developing cloud-hosted applications. The format of each primer and guidance topic is designed to present this information in a relevant and informative way.
• Ten sample applications that demonstrate the usage of the design patterns described in this guide. You can use and adapt the source code to suit your own specific requirements.

Cloud Design Patterns

This guide from the Microsoft patterns & practices group, produced with the help of many people within the developer community, provides solutions for common problems encountered when developing cloud-hosted applications.

    The guide:

• Articulates the benefit of applying patterns when implementing cloud applications, especially when they will be hosted in Windows Azure.
• Discusses the problems that the patterns address, and how these relate to Windows Azure applications.
• Shows how to implement the patterns using the features of Windows Azure, emphasizing benefits and considerations.
• Depicts the big picture by showing how these patterns fit into cloud application architectures, and how they relate to other patterns.
• 

Cloud Design Patterns

Creating Research and Scientific Documents Using Microsoft Word

By Alexander Mamishev, Murray Sargent

Publisher: Microsoft Press

Released: October 2013

Research fuels innovation—and with this focused guide to Microsoft Word, you can help increase your team’s collaborative power and effectiveness, and bring new research to life. Writing proposals, reports, journal articles, theses, and other technical documents as a team poses unique challenges, not the least of which is consistent presentation and voice. You must also manage the formatting and accuracy of figures, equations, and citations, and comply with the style rules of external publications. In this book you’ll learn from the authors’ extensive experience managing the authoring and publication of technical content, and gain specific practices and templates you can apply right away.

• Focuses on the unique challenges of writing and producing documents in an academic or commercial R&D setting
• Demonstrates how to use Microsoft Word to increase the quality of collaborative document preparation—including formatting, editing, citations management, commenting, and version control
• Includes downloadable templates that help automate creation of scientific documents
• Offers best-practices guidance for writing in teams and writing in the scientific genre

Creating Research and Scientific Documents Using Microsoft Word

Hello, my name is Rob Fatland and this is the first in an occasional blog primarily about earth system science.  That is: The task of understanding our habitat using interwoven system models. 'Our habitat' now extends from -35,576 feet (10843 meters) thanks to James Cameron to +29,029 feet (8,848 meters) thanks to Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary. And that's the last time I'll use English units, by the way; if Americans can follow the British into the intricacies of this bizarre language we can certainly follow them in the adoption of the metric system. Which brings me to today's topic, the interpolation of trajectories.

Do you write code? Do you crawl under the hood of a computer or go behind the curtain and direct activity like some Great and Powerful Oz? I would consider it a "YES" if you work with formulas in Excel or if you use hypertext markup, or if you write programs in JavaScript or Python or C or C# or MATLAB for example. If so you may have noticed that not everything works the way we want the first try, and so we have a culture of wants (why we write the code) and bugs (the mistakes that get in the way). I have one such science want -- predicting the future of the northeast Pacific Ocean -- that brings me back under the hood just about every day; and this produced an amusing bug the other day. So my very first Hello World earth system science blog is about to turn into a bug report... so I better come up with a nice way of tying this up in the next couple paragraphs. Wish me luck.  

I use a virtual globe application called Worldwide Telescope (WWT) to draw and explore earth science data in geospatial context. This has advantages and disadvantages. The main disadvantage is a big learning curve and a very Wild West programming environment. The advantage is that WWT is much more powerful than Google Earth. I can draw a millions of data points and geometric objects and animate them in time.  For example visualizing current flow in coastal oceans is quite feasible on a moderately powerful PC laptop; see for example the video embedded here.  There are two key ideas in creating visualizations of this sort: First, do the processing in advance on a super computer, and second, interpolate between solutions (times and locations) for the flow of a marker dropped into the model ocean.  Parker MacCready, the scientist I work with, creates trajecotories as discrete locations sequential in time separated by a kilometer or so, and while the water moves about on the map sometimes it also goes up or down in the vertical direction. With Nels Oscar, a graduate student at OSU, I built Narwhal, a software library for visualization that (among other things) does trajectory interpolation.  This is just like filling in the gaps in a coarsely rendered animation, commonly known as key frames. Provide intermediate marker locations and the apparent motion becomes smooth and easy to understand.

To the goofy bug, then, I was calculating how many intermediate points to interpolate between successive coarse points of a trajectory, a calculation using distance based on depth, longitude and latitude. You would think that I would scale those three types of units to the same thing, so that 50 meters change in depth would not correspond to 50 degrees of latitude (or about 5,550,000 meters) but alas... well, it's fixed now. It points up a danger of powerfulness in a programming language: Just because I can do something in one line of code doesn't mean it does what I think. Anyway one fixed bug is one step closer to that extrapolation of the northeast Pacific, which coincidentally all comes down to the microbes that form the base of the marine food web. Or in colloquial language: Bugs.  

So hello world, welcome to the earthscience blog. My game plan: Let's use technology to explore and better understand the earth; let's see where we're all headed, and if there is trouble ahead as we now suspect then let's see if we can't figure out how to change course for the better. More on what's possible is at Layerscape, and more nitty-gritty at my informal supporting wiki.

Tuesday 12/10

Speaker

Affiliation

Description

10:00am-10:30am

Wenming Ye

Microsoft

Cloud Computing for Research on Windows Azure

2:00 pm - 2:30 pm

Dan Parish, Jeff
  Zhang

Microsoft

Refining and visualizing scientific research data using Microsoft Excel BI tools

4:00 pm - 4:30 pm

Matthew Smith

Microsoft

Biogeosciences software blitz – some tricks and tools you should know about and some that are on their way.

 Wednesday 12/11

10:00am -10:30 am

Wenming Ye

Microsoft

Cloud Computing for Research on Windows Azure

2:00 pm - 2:30 pm

David Maidment

The University of
  Texas at Austin

Water Data on the Web

3:30pm - 4:00pm

Jeff Dozier

University of
  California, Santa Barbara

Monitoring the Hindu Kush snowpack by satellite and computer

5:00pm - 5:30pm

Matthew Smith

Microsoft

Biogeosciences software blitz – some tricks and tools you should know about and some that are on their way.

 
Thursday 12/12

10:00am -10:30 am

Silvia Caldararu

Microsoft

Agricultural modelling for decision making: new tools, new data, new science

4:00pm - 4:30pm

Matthew Smith

Microsoft

Biogeosciences software blitz – some tricks and tools you should know about and some that are on their way.

 Friday 12/13

10:00am - 10:30am

Rob Fatland

Microsoft

Diving in to MBARI Experimental Data

From a system point of view, geographical areas are divided into restricted zones and confinement zones, based on the type of geographical limitation imposed on the offender.  A confinement zone is an area that the offender is not allowed to leave, and restricted zones are areas the offender is not allowed to enter.  The role of a tracking system is not to physically proscribe activity, so when an offender violates the boundary of a zone, an alert is generated and sent to monitoring personnel.

Safe Step adds a new level of analysis to the preceding model by determining undesirable behavior of the offenders and generating alerts based on such behavior.  In this way, the project serves to plant a seed for the behavior mining of criminal activity, and the prediction and prevention of proscribed activities before they occur.  Our system generates proximity alerts if two offenders approach closely, or if an offender moves close to the boundary of any zone.  Such proximity alerts can give law enforcement personnel advance notice of impending infringements.  Because the processing occurs on the data stream in real time, post-factual analysis of past history logs, while they can be performed, are not needed to generate alerts.

A multi-tier system architecture is employed.  Geo-traces are collected by SafeStep’s multi-threaded input adapters, or the TraceListeners, which push incoming GPS readings to the system’s query processor. The system’s query processor sends its output to an Alert Viewer, an IIS web application interface on the supervising agencies’ side using various web protocols.  Any popular map API can be used to represent locations and areas, such as Bing Maps.  The system query processor is built using Microsoft StreamInsight, a real time data stream management system. SafeStep leverages StreamInsight’s capabilities to execute a set of spatiotemporal continuous queries against the incoming stream. For example, a geographic intersection query is accomplished via a join query in LINQ.  Data streams and the resulting alerts are logged in a SQL Server Spatial database, where offender locations are represented as points, and restricted zones as polygons.  Lists of restricted or containment zones are maintained as tables in the database. The system was developed using Microsoft StreamInsight, a data stream management system (DSMS) integrating Microsoft SQL Server Spatial Library residing on an IIS Server to perform spatial operations.

Next steps would be to extend the capabilities of Safe Step to support more complex analytical queries with UI visualization and to implement a tree spatial index structure of restricted locations to enhance the search.  A module to develop queries input into the query processor would also greatly expand the flexibility of the system.

A demo scenario was developed using Safe Step, known as the Geospatial Criminal Tracker, that demonstrates the use of the location-based and the offender-based proximity alerts.  This video is hosted on YouTube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FP2NTQMn4Tw