LiveSide - News blog : Research

Happy Earth Day!

Sunshine — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 22:23:51 GMT

Today is Earth Day, a day designated nearly 40 years ago to inspire awareness of and appreciation for our environment. But it isn’t easy to be green, according to this study from MSN. Nearly 70 percent of people said that they would never limit toilet flushes to conserve water or use a kitchen compost. What Earth Day does do, is rise awareness of all-things-environmental.

Over on Microsoft's Environmental Sustainability Blog we read about why Earth Day Matters to Microsoft:

Effectively managing our scarce energy resources while addressing climate change - even as the world's population steadily rises - will be one of the great challenges of the 21^st century. Microsoft is working hard with our partners, customers and suppliers, as well as with governments and leading environmental organizations, to help address this critical environmental challenge. This Earth Day, I want to share the latest information on our Environmental Sustainability Strategy, which focuses on three core areas:

Using information technology to dramatically improve energy efficiency. Information and communications technology (ICT) products are responsible for around 2% of global carbon emissions, according to the analyst firm Gartner. Microsoft is working to create new technologies and improve industry best practices to reduce the energy use of information technology devices.

Accelerating research breakthroughs. Scientific research into the impact that human behavior has on complex environmental and biological systems provides the insights needed for effective policy change and increased environmental awareness. Microsoft Research is working with leading scientists to expand the boundaries of our knowledge by creating tools, technologies and models to enhance scientific understanding on a global scale.

Demonstrating responsible environmental leadership at home. Microsoft is committed to reducing our global carbon emissions per unit of revenue by at least 30% by 2012 (compared with 2007 levels). We have undertaken several initiatives to decrease our environmental impact, from green-building-designs to the introduction of food composting on all our campuses. We operate one of the world's largest company-owned fleets of buses to reduce congestion, emissions and employee commuting miles at our Puget Sound headquarters.

For more information on Microsoft's sustainability work please visit http://www.microsoft.com/environment

To celebrate Earth Day and help you create a more energy efficient IT infrastructure, TechNet Magazine is publishing a special online-only edition dedicated to Green IT.

Live Search is helping you go green by answering the following questions:

- What is my carbon footprint?
- What hybrid car is best?
- Where can I find stylish reusable shopping bags?
- How do I kitchen compost?

More tips and tricks for going green are offered on MSN Green.

Virtual Earth:

Los Angeles County just announced their Solar Map project which leverages Virtual Earth to allow homeowners and businesses to go online to determine if their properties are good candidates for solar power.

The Microsoft Research Team launched a new search engine called SciScope which is focused exclusively on rich environmental information presented on a Microsoft Virtual Earth map. The site facilitates data discovery and retrieval from millions of sensors that monitor the quality of the environment.

More information about the Solar Map and SciScope can be found on Chris Pendleton’s blog.

Photographers around the world can contribute to an ambitious project that will attempt to create a photo-composite of the world on Earth Day. The Earth Mosaic project started out as a wild idea to do something truly significant, involving photography. Something world-wide. More info over at the Microsoft Professional Photography Blog.

Happy Earth Day!

WorldWide Telescope gone 3D – Equinox Beta available now

damaster — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 12:47:51 GMT

Yesterday Kip added a nice bonus liveblog covering the keynote of Rick Rash from Microsoft Research, which announced an update to their space-exploration software WorldWide Telescope. Codenamed the “Autumnal Equinox Beta”, the update now features a 3D-engine that renders our Solar System and the Milky Way in complete 3D. Additionally, according to the team, this update also includes the following new features:

• Tour animation - text and inserted images can expand, contract, move, spin, fade, etc within a slide.
• WWT can now be localized to your language of choice. To begin with, we've added a second language - Simplified Chinese.
• Hundreds of new images from the Hubble, Chandra, Spitzer space telescopes
• A new Astrophotography section, with images from renowned astrophotographer Jack Newton.
• New surveys : GALEX in the ultraviolet band, Fermi in the gamma-ray band, as well as sixteen surveys about the Cosmic Microwave Background from the WMAP Science Team's Five Year release.
• Fifty new panoramas of Mars and the Moon, from the Phoenix, Spirit, Opportunity, Pathfinder, and Apollo missions.

Here’s a view of Saturn using WorldWide Telescope’s 3D solar system:

Soon in the next month the WorldWide Telescope will also allow users to get their own astronomical data and images into WorldWide Telescope format, and to produce WTML files - the XML format that WWT uses, and allowing them to set up their own WWT Communities online.

You can get the latest version over at the WorldWide Telescope website.

Microsoft: "We're in it to win!"

Matthew — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 07:51:00 GMT

We can't disclose a lot of what we saw [or even if we saw anything at all] at the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Global Summit [isn't that a typical Microsoft name?]. However, consistently we heard that Microsoft at all levels are committed to win. Both Steven [not Steve] Sinofsky and Chris Jones were very aggressive about driving that in, regardless of what's happened in the past. Although Microsoft might be more private about what they're planning or what's going to happen in the future, I think that's because of the criticism they've encountered in the past. The Internet industry is such a fast, always changing field that Microsoft's management is attempting to morph with it. They've realized that the first wave of Windows Live was a little rocky, but they're learning from it for wave 2. Just like Google is now becoming so large that they're being criticized as well, Microsoft is going back to basics. Ideas are going to be well developed inside the company before pushing them out to the public, where confusion can become rampant as we've seen. There's going to be a clear distinction between what's a Windows Live product and what's an MSN product, as well as what's a beta product, or a technical preview product. For example, Gary Flake emphasized that Live Labs products like PhotoSynth are Technical Previews and may or may not be developed into a beta or product. We've seen this with alpha products like PC Satisfaction Trial, which later developed into Windows OneCare Live beta, and now Windows Live OneCare.

Overall I was pleased with what I've heard and can say that no, Windows Live isn't dead, or will be for anytime soon [even MSN is still alive and kicking, and that started in 1995]. I think we're all going to hear a clear explanation of what Windows Live is, and what it will be for the future. It's an exciting time for the industry, and Microsoft is going to win! Go get them Steven!

@Matthew

Update: Please read the follow up post that can be found here.

Faceted Search - Text mining for Windows Live Search?

Kip Kniskern — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 22:44:03 GMT

Paula Hane at Information Today writes about a new search technology that may soon be included in Windows Live Search - faceted search. One of many search projects coming out of Microsoft Research Asia's Search Technology Center, faceted search tries to identify keywords, and then classify the search results into those topics. You can try out a beta of the new technology here.

While this may be an interesting new way of looking at search results for the casual search user, the lower costs associated with Microsoft's economies of scale may be priced as much as 90 percent less than text mining systems used in Enterprise search, by companies like Autonomy plc and FAST Search & Transfer, according to the Information Today article.

The Search Technology Center, in Beijing, is "dedicated to advancing the state-of-the-art in search technology and delivering a more intelligent and powerful search experience to MSN users around the world."

Thanks to David Hunter at Microsoft News Tracker for pointing to the story.