Saturday, December 4, 2010

Chrome to Windows Phone 7 Now Available

Approved and waiting for your download, Chrome to Windows Phone 7 is now available in the mobile OS' operating system. True to its name, once you download both this app and the applicable Chrome extension, a quick click on the Windows logo in your otherwise Google browser will send links or selected text to your Microsoft mobile. Join your Android friends in embracing the Continuous Clientlifestyle.

Microsoft Research: Zentity

With Zentity, researchers can extend existing data models by adding additional relationships and properties to these relationships. Zentity is flexible and extensible, taking advantage of the optimization and performance available from Microsoft SQL Server. Zentity provides a built-in ScholarlyWorks data model with pre-defined entities—such as lecture, publication, paper, presentation, video, file, person, and tag—along with basic properties for each of these and well known relationships—such as author, city, and version. The platform also provides support to create custom entities and design custom data models by using our Extensibility API. Learn more...

New Features

Here’s what’s new in this release:

  • New services: Pivot Collection Service and Zentity Data Service
  • New client applications:
    • Pivot Viewer and ODATA Viewer, in collaboration with Microsoft Live Labs
    • Visual Explorer, in collaboration with MSR Asia
    • PowerShell admin console
  • .NET 4.0 support
  • ODATA support
  • Data model agnostic
  • Multi-tier application support
  • Zentity SDK
  • Improved deployment experience

System Requirements

To run this software, you’ll need the following:

  • Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows 7 Ultimate or Enterprise
  • Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0, IIS 7 or above, Application Server role installed, Silverlight version 4, Windows SDK for Windows 7, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Native client, Windows PowerShell 2.0
  • SQL Server 2008 Standard Edition or above, SQL Server 2008 R2, SQL Server Express with Advanced Services (with file stream, full-text search and named pipes enabled)

For more detailed information, see the system requirements section in the Installation Instructions document (also included with the downloaded .zip file).

Installation Instructions

To install Zentity 2.0, do the following:

  1. Extract the contents of the .zip file to a folder.
  2. Open the folder containting the extracted files, and then run the corresponding client or server MSI installation wizard.
  3. Follow the onscreen instructions to install Zentity 2.0.

For more detailed information, see the Installation Instructions document (also included with the downloaded .zip file).

Thursday, December 2, 2010

Research in Software Engineering (RiSE)

coordinates Microsoft's Research in Software Engineering in Redmond, USA. There mission is to advance the state of the art in SE, to bring those advances to Microsoft’s business, and to take care of those SE technologies that are critical to the company, but not inherently linked to particular products.


http://rise4fun.com/Fine

Sunday, November 28, 2010

NCBI BLAST on Windows Azure

Making Bioinformatics Data More Accessible to Researchers Worldwid

BLAST on Windows Azure enables cloud-based analysis of vast proteomics and genomic data.Built on Windows Azure, NCBI BLAST on Windows Azure enables researchers to take advantage of the scalability of the Windows Azure platform to perform analysis of vast proteomics and genomic data in the cloud.

BLAST on Windows Azure is a cloud-based implementation of the Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). BLAST is a suite of programs that is designed to search all available sequence databases for similarities between a protein or DNA query and known sequences. BLAST allows quick matching of near and distant sequence relationships, providing scores that allow the user to distinguish real matches from background hits with a high degree of statistical accuracy. Scientists frequently use such searches to gain insight into the function and biological importance of gene products.

BLAST on Windows Azure extends the power of the BLAST suite of programs by allowing researchers to rent processing time on the Windows Azure cloud platform. The availability of these programs over the cloud allows laboratories, or even individuals, to have large-scale computational resources at their disposal at a very low cost per run. For researchers who don’t have access to large computer resources, this greatly increases the options to analyze their data. They can now undertake more complex analyses or try different approaches that were simply not feasible before. more

Thursday, November 18, 2010

iRobot & Kinect Sensor



While there have already been a lot of great proof-of-concepts for the Kinect, what we're really excited for are the actual applications that will come from it. On the top of our list? Robots. The Personal Robots Group at MIT has put a battery-powered Kinect sensor on top of the iRobot Create platform, and is beaming the camera and depth sensor data to a remote computer for processing into a 3D map -- which in turn can be used for navigation by the bot. They're also using the data for human recognition, which allows for controlling the bot using natural gestures. Looking to do something similar with your own robot? Well, the ROS folks have a Kinect driver in the works that will presumably allow you to feed all that great Kinect data into ROS's already impressive libraries for machine vision. Tie in the Kinect's multi-array microphones, accelerometer, and tilt motor and you've got a highly aware, semi-anthropomorphic "three-eyed" robot just waiting to happen. We hope it will be friends with us. Video of the ROS experimentation is after the break.