LiveSide - News blog : MS Research

WorldWide Telescope: Nearly 2 Million Regular Users And Two Award Nominations!

Sunshine — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 13:13:40 GMT

Since its public release in May 2008, nearly 2 million people around the world downloaded the free desktop observatory. PC World called World Wide Telescope a “phenomenal resource for enthusiasts, students, and teachers,” and tech blogger Robert Scoble called it “the most fabulous thing I’ve seen Microsoft do in years.” Here at LiveSide we reported on WWT frequently. We told you what WorldWide Telescope has to do with Microsoft Virtual Earth, about the new releases (new release about once every 3 months), the release of the web version of WWT and the partnership with Disney-Pixar.

On March 24, NASA and Microsoft Corp. announced plans to make planetary images and data available via the Internet under a Space Act Agreement. This will result in even more interesting data and images, including high-resolution scientific images and data from Mars and the moon, on top of the 25 terabytes of data and imagery already stored in the “cloud.”

The team will continue to “push the limits of technology to help professional astronomer, teachers and students of all ages explore the sky,” said Jonathan Fay, a principal research software design engineer at Microsoft Research. Together with Curtis Wong, a principal researcher with Microsoft Research, Jonathan Fay drove the creation of Worldwide Telescope. The WorldWide Telescope team also continues to establish relationships with educators and scientists all over the world, and to localize telescope data. The small team has built an application that allows local universities to translate WorldWide Telescope’s interface into different languages, starting with Chinese.

WorldWide Telescope has been nominated for two awards, the Edison Award and an American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) award. The Edison Awards “symbolize the persistence and excellence personified by Thomas Alva Edison,” recognizing ingenuity, innovation, and creativity in the global economy. The award is presented on April 1. The AIGA’s annual awards recognize the year’s best work “across all disciplines of communication design and strategy.” The AIGA award will be given out later this spring.

Congrats from us here at LiveSide, well done!

Update: Edison Awards - WWT won Silver - Curtis Wong of Microsoft wins a Silver Edison for his development of the WorldWide Telescope, in this year's the "Transportation" category (photo).

WorldWide Telescope
WorldWide Telescope Web Client (Alpha)

PRdomain.com | Microsoft | WorldWide Telescope Puts Wonders of Space on a PC
Presspass - NASA and Microsoft to Make Universe of Data Available to the Public
All previous articles about WorldWide Telescope

New from MS Research: URank - “Search Gets Organized”

Kip Kniskern — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 04:13:43 GMT

Just in from Microsoft Research, a new tool for ranking, sorting, and sharing search results called URank. URank, a research prototype developed at Microsoft Research by Emre Kiciman, Shuo Chen, and intern Konstantin Mertsalov, with some help apparently from Greg Linden and others, allows you to move search results around to personalize your searches, collaborate with others to share searches, and much more.

You can watch a screencast of URank (“IE8 users, right-click and download the file and open in Windows Media Player”), learn more from the FAQ, check out the home page, or play around with URank yourself (feel free to add kip [at] LiveSide [dot] net as a friend).

World Wide Telescope from MS Research is Live

Kip Kniskern — Tue, 13 May 2008 11:12:25 GMT

While this isn’t strictly a Windows Live service, it is still very cool stuff and we told you about it when it was first announced, and now the World Wide Telescope is live and available for download.

Check it out now at http://worldwidetelescope.org

(thanks to Brandon and Twitter for the heads up!)

Now I’m off to download and check it out myself. Have fun!

Task Market: a Microsoft Research Asia project

Kip Kniskern — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 23:49:00 GMT

While we wait for Microsoft to buy Yahoo!, and Wave 3 to begin, and now that Mix08 news is out, there's a little lull in Windows Live reporting. That's ok, though, it gives us some time to take a look at some interesting tidbits that aren't quite Windows Live.

One of these is called Task Market, a project of Microsoft Research Asia. Task Market attempts to be a type of Craigslist for simple business tasks, like writing, editing, translation, or design. Post a task on Task Market, or find a task you are interested in completing, agree to the terms, complete the task, and pay or get paid through PayPal.

Obviously this is just starting, and the tasks are (very) sparse, but a service like this would certainly make sense, especially for small business owners and freelancers to get together without having to commit to large contracts.

Microsoft Research Asia is celebrating its 10 year anniversary. Here's a little about MSR Asia, from their about page:

In its ten-year history, Microsoft Research Asia has grown into an organization that employs over 350 researchers and engineers, has welcomed more than 2,500 interns, has awarded over 250 Microsoft fellowships, has published over 1,500 papers for top international journals and conferences, and has achieved many technological breakthroughs. We have extended the scope of our university relations programs by establishing joint labs with universities in Asia, conducting joint research programs, and hosting top-notch visiting professors at our lab. These relationships have allowed us to create new opportunities for both Microsoft and the academia in the Asia Pacific region.

...

Areas of Research:

Natural User Interfaces enable users to interact with a computer using speech, gestures, and expressions.

Next-generation Multimedia allows people to search for and to be immersed in interactive online shopping, education, meeting, and entertainment activities.

Data-Intensive Computing explores the new infrastructures, algorithms, tools, and applications to collect, analyze, and mine results for data-intensive business in both the consumer and enterprise sectors.

Search and Online Ads take Web search and online advertising to the next level by applying data-mining, machine-learning, and knowledge-discovery techniques to information analysis, organization, retrieval, and visualization.

Fundamental Computer Science includes areas such as theoretical computer science (theory), systems, networking, and machine learning that will have an impact on multiple applications and products.

You can learn a lot more about the beginnings of MSR Asia in the book Guanxi: The Art of Relationships

(via Kurt Shintaku's blog)

Microsoft launches WorldWide Telescope into private alpha

Chris — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 06:10:00 GMT

It made Scoble cry, and soon it can make you cry too. The website for the latest Microsoft Research project, WorldWide Telescope, is now up at http://wwtelescope.com/. Here's how Robert describes it:

"So, back to the World Wide Telescope. You drag around the sky. There’s Mars. There’s the big dipper. There’s Betelguese. Etc. It’s just like the star party you probably attended in college.

But it has one difference between any telescope you’ve ever looked at.

You can zoom. Zoom. Zoom. Zoom.

We picked a point of light inside the big dipper. Zoom. Zoom. Zoom. Zoom. Holy ***, it’s two galaxies colliding. It looked like a star. Zoom. Zoom. Zoom."

No sign of the download yet, with Scoble saying its in private alpha right now. If you're interested in finding out more, Sunshine posted a bunch of info on it last week. We'll let you know when its open to all.

Update: Thanks to Scoble's Twitter, here's the embed of the TED talk featuring WorldWide Telescope:

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/224

Update2: Thanks to the pointer in the comments, there's also a small screenshot now up on the WorldWide Telescope website.

Earth? No, the Sky is the limit?!

Sunshine — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 23:11:00 GMT

We can already look at Earth with Virtual Earth, but what about the Sky? Microsoft doesn't have anything for that yet. Yes, that's right, YET! This might change on February 27th at the TED Conference in Monterey California:

Microsoft To Announce WorldWide Telescope On February 27

A source close to Microsoft says the company will launch new desktop software called WorldWide Telescope on February 27 at the TED Conference in Monterey, California....

The service will be accessed through a downloadable application - Windows only for now is what we hear. Users will be able to pan around the nighttime sky and zoom as far in to any one area as the data will allow. Microsoft is said to be tapping the Hubble telescope as well as ten or so earth bound telescopes around the world for data. When you find an area you like, you can switch to a number of different views, such as infrared and non-visible light.

From what we hear, WorldWide Telescope will be significantly better than Google Sky, which launched last August as part of Google Earth... The key is the user interface, which is seamless as you move around the sky and zoom in and out. Much of the Photosynth technology is said to have been used for the project. And the sheer amount of data Microsoft is accessing, said to be measured in the terabits, gives that great user interface something to show off...

Very interesting if you are into stargazing or astronomy. I hope it will be easier to use than Google Sky, I just had a first look at that today and it's still confusing me...