The two main anchors of the exhibit was the physical model of the JWST and the WorldWide Telescope Theater.  Over the 3 days the WWT Theater hosted over 70 talks using WWT Tours, PowerPoint, and live Skype QnAs – all on a 20 million pixel wall sized display wall.  

Behind the scenes – this immersive experience was pulled together by Microsoft Research and our partners for the theater – Epson, NVIDA and Scalable Display Technologies.  The 8 Epson projectors worked flawlessly pumping out pixels for over 14 hours a day and this was in a tent without air conditioning and lots of humidity – especially during the first two days of rain.  The 8 projectors were driven by 2 NVIDIA Quadro K5000’s in a single PC.   The display wall needed the DirectX 11 support to show off the latest WWT Eclipse Alpha build that leverages DX11.  Delivering all those pixels to the display wall was one piece, but to make the images seamless and immersive the Scalable Display Manager (SDM) was used.  The (SDM) software with it’s EasyBlend technology, made it a snap to wrap and blend the pixels coming from the individual projectors into a really seamless experience. 

This whole setup allowed the team to utilize the wall as a very, very large Windows desktop and take advantage of all the Windows applications for the presentations – including

• PowerPoint 2013, which takes advantage of DirectX and hardware acceleration and was able to handle the unique aspect ratio so the whole display was used for content
• Skype – probably the largest Skype image for Skype session on a desktop you’ve ever seen
• OneNote 2013 – used for displaying notes and twitter names for a NASA Social at SXSW
• SkyDrive – was used to deliver PowerPoint presentations and WorldWide Telescope Tours to machine driving the display wall and kept them in sync – so edits were always captured
• WorldWide Telescope – used to deliver tours exclusive created for the JWST SXSW exhibit. 

While most of you might not need to create a wall sized display like this one – it shows how desktop technologies created for Windows scales to create immersive experiences.  Let me know if you decide to create one….

The Data Mining Add-ins allow you to harness the power of SQL Server 2012 predictive analytics in Excel and Visio and they have been updated to include 64-bit support for Office 2010, and now Office 2013 as well. Use Table Analysis Tools to get insight with a couple of clicks. Or dive into the Data Mining Client for full-lifecycle data mining, and then visualize your models in Visio.

Download Microsoft® SQL Server® 2012 SP1 Data Mining Add-ins for Microsoft® Office® from Official Microsoft Download Center

There is a good overview and tutorial available at the Data Explorer help site.   I also like all the datasets that can be connected to directly…what other data types/file types would help on the Science side?

• Connect to a web page
• Connect to an Excel or CSV file
• Connect to an XML file
• Connect to a Text file
• Connect to a Folder
• Connect to a SQL Server database
• Connect to a Windows Azure SQL database
• Connect to an Access database
• Connect to an Oracle database
• Connect to an IBM DB2 database
• Connect to a MySQL database
• Connect to a SharePoint List
• Connect to an OData feed
• Connect to a Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS)
• Connect to Windows Azure Marketplace
• Connect to Active Directory
• Connect to Facebook

PREVIEW NOW AVAILABLE: Microsoft "Data Explorer" Preview for Excel: Try the upcoming capabilities for Self-Service BI with the Microsoft "Data Explorer" Preview for Excel. This preview gives you an early look into upcoming features that simplify access to public and corporate data. Now you can easily discover, combine, and refine data for better analysis in Excel.

 

Microsoft Data Explorer Preview for Excel

Office Preview | Microsoft BI

In the Microsoft Research booth this year we have experts from many different areas available to talk about challenges with collecting, visualizing and managing data.  We also have Windows 8 and Office 2013 running on the machines to show what is possible from Surface devices, Desktops, and really large touch screens like the 82'” one from Perceptive Pixel in the booth. 

You think a tablet is a touch device?  Just touch one of these and you’ll realize that pads are mini compared to the 82"

Also we are hosting the following FireSide Chats at the booth tomorrow – Wednesday.

Wednesday 10:00am -10:30 am   

Also glad to see the support for Windows Phone and all HTML apps via the link https://app.core-apps.com/agu-fm12 on that AGU program guide.

Recently, at SuperComputing 2012, the Weather Forecast on Windows Azure demo was presented to predict the weather for the next 3 days. As expected, the demo was greatly received by the crowd of computational and weather research professionals. Here is Wenming’s demo script, together with the Live Weather service demo here. This article on Running Weather Research Forecast as a Service on Windows Azure is an excellent reading that can help you get started with reinvigorating classic applications on the cloud service.

If you are interested in Hadoop on Windows Azure, you may find more information here.

I learned that the organizing committee selected 79 students from over 250 applications worldwide. My half-day lecture on Open Data for Open Science was the last item on the program, but the room was still full and the discussion was hot. We talked about many ‘big data’ research topics during the lecture. Offline during the breaks, the conversation continued on data and how we can deal with data efficiently by using cutting-edge tools such as WorldWide Telescope, Layerscape, the various Add-on’s for Excel and Word, Windows Azure, and Azure DataMarket. I expect to continue some of the conversations in email.

As one of the students commented “who is not talking about big data today”? the consensus was that “big data” has become such a popular topic because it implies big social impact. Global Warming, biodiversity in the Amazon forest, renewable energy and sugar cane, … these are not just science projects but something that can potentially change our daily life. It attracts talents from multiple scientific domains and computer science to solve the big data problems together. That’s what this event did for the community beyond any given domain and beyond Brazil.

I want to congratulate the Organizing Committee and thank them for a wonderful eScience experience that the event provided for all the participants.

SenSys is the premier conference on networked embedded sensing system and a top forum for sensor network research community. This paper describes a game-changing way to perform location sensing by splitting GPS signal acquisition and processing between embedded devices and the cloud. By logging only a few milliseconds of raw GPS signals, the device can store enough information for resolving GPS-based location with 2~3 orders of magnitude less energy consumption than standalone or mobile phone GPS sensors. The signals are then sent to the cloud with sensor data to reconstruct the location and time that the samples are taken. In delay tolerant data acquisition applications such as animal tracking, float sensor networks, participatory environmental sensing, and long range time synchronization, CO-GPS is the ideal way to extend mobile device battery life. For example, the CO-GPS approach is a key enabling technology in Microsoft Research Project CLEO, a participatory environmental sensing system that we will showcase at the upcoming 2012 AGU Fall Meeting.

Congratulation to Jie and his team!

Reference: Energy Efficient GPS Sensing with Cloud Offloading, Jie Liu, Bodhi Priyantha, Ted Hart, Heitor Ramos, Antonio Loureiro, and Qiang Wang, The 10th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys 2012), Toronto, ON, Canada, Nov, 2012 (https://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=172624).

His My Campus Walk demo showcases StreamInsight for geospatical stream data analysis together with WorldWide Telescope for spatio-temporal data visualization; the real time geofencing scenario demonstrates simply how StreamInsight supports spatial operators; the Microsoft Shuttle Service demo illustrates how StreamInsight can be used to monitor, analyze and correlate spatio-temporal stream data that is generated by moving objects; and his Intelligent Transportation System demo has been one of the most requested ODOS demos.

 Attached is a wonderful article by Mohamed Ali, which describes StreamInsight and the four demos in detail. Please contact e3env@microsoft.com if you have any question or feedback.

StreamInsight for Open Data for Open Science.pdf

Started in one of our own computer labs on Microsoft campus, since ODOS2011, we have been having great success with our ODOS presentations. Sometimes, I forgot how heavily dependent our live demos are on the internet connection. At the eSceince2012 last week, some of the presenters’ big data live demos didn’t go as smoothly as we hoped for due to limited internet bandwidth.

That reminded me that I should have a backup plan for my future live demos at, for example, the upcoming e-SciBioenergy School. Meanwhile, some of my demo materials can be already shared here, to asynchronously leverage the bandwidth of the internet resources in your offices or research labs.  

 Here is the information on the Netflix example both Andy Conrad and I referenced on at ODOS-Australia:

• Learn OData by the Netflix example from here: https://developer.netflix.com/docs/oData_Catalog
• Enabled by the OData API, the Pivot View of NetFlix on the Azure cloud is here:  https://netflixpivot.cloudapp.net/

Here is the GeoSearch demo, a faceted geo-search experience enabled by Bing Maps, Windows Azure, and PivotViewer (created by Prof. Phil Yang’s team at George Mason University).

The stunning Puget Sound Flow Model demo, which was demonstrated at the eSceince2012 Adler Planetarium Reception, can be found here. You will need to install WorldWide Telescope (a free download) to see this demo. 

If you have any questions, please email us at e3env@microsoft.com.

OData Introductio and Sample Code.zip