This is great news for the Open Access movement!

After a couple of days of intense coding (lost almost an entire day fighting with inheritance and table mapping in Entity Framework Beta 3, which I really like btw), I am now ready to go for some much deserved skiing. Off to Whistler tomorrow for two days.

Waiting for Einar to come to the neighborhood so we can go together next time! Com' on dude!

I am not leaving my laptop behind though. I have some writing up to do in the evening (working on 4 new thinkweek papers) and I also have to finish my chapter for the Web book. Jim distributed his for review today and I can't possibly be left behind. I must finish the "Web Architecture" chapter (clearly the most difficult/controversial of the book*... the REST discussion is in there :-)

* Just joking... trying to excuse the delay.

The previous post reminded me of the talk I gave at SC07 about "The Web as the Platform for Research". Bill St.Arnaud recently blogged about it ("Cloud computing is the way forward rather than the Grid") with a quote from yours truly.

What you don't see in the presentation (and that was a big omission of mine) is Roger Barga's name. Roger and I work closely together to develop/evolve the ideas and we are running various projects that help demonstrate them. 2008 will be the year with many great deliverables coming from our team. It's all so very exciting :-)

In addition to the Program Manager for Scholarly Communications position (thanks to all of those who have already contacted me) and the internship opportunities, here are two more openings in my extended team. These two job openings are not for the Technical Computing group but applicants will still have the chance to work closely with both Roger Barga and me (I hope that this last bit will not scare people off; I hope not :-)

The External Research engineering team is responsible for realizing our "eResearch Platform" vision, which is about the tools and services necessary to support the lifecycle of research. Roger and I have lots of ideas and we try to focus on few of them at a time (the intern projects will be related to these ideas but will be on the speculative, rather than the engineering side). The engineering team is helping us realize part of that vision.

Positions available: Program Manager and Research Software Development Engineer.

Again, feel free to contact me with your CV/interest and I will put you in touch with Kalyan Basu, to whom these positions will be reporting.

Are you a PhD student in the US? Are you interested in working with a passionate team in Microsoft Research for few months? Do you want to experience life in Microsoft?

Are you a professor and have students who might be interested working in any of the areas below? Please let them know.

Roger Barga and I are looking for passionate students who are willing to come work with us. Topics of interest include (but are not limited):

• Cloud computing, data-intensive computing, services to support research at large scale;
• Social networking, data graphs at Internet scale, knowledge representation/inference, semantics;
• Scholarly communication, domain-specific networks, author networks, impact analysis, etc.

Please feel free to drop me a line, send me a CV, tell me about your interests: Savas.Parastatidis@<companyname>.com or my personal email (Savas@Parastatidis.name).

Please feel free to spread the word!

As Dan said, Microsoft Research moved to a new building at the beginning of November. It's really nice.

Today, I was walking by a section of the 4th floor with 'open' offices (no-wall offices... yes, they even have numbers). They are supposed to be hot-desks or they 'house' temporary staff. Someone who seemed to have been spending too much time at the office caught my attention... looks tired but happy :-)

Here's another simple, still very interesting, service from Amazon, with an interesting payment model. It's called SimpleDB and it allows queries over structured data. It's great to see Amazon delivering such services. I do hope that others, including my company, will follow.

"Amazon SimpleDB is a web service for running queries on structured data in real time. This service works in close conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), collectively providing the ability to store, process and query data sets in the cloud. These services are designed to make web-scale computing easier and more cost-effective for developers.

Traditionally, this type of functionality has been accomplished with a clustered relational database that requires a sizable upfront investment, brings more complexity than is typically needed, and often requires a DBA to maintain and administer. In contrast, Amazon SimpleDB is easy to use and provides the core functionality of a database - real-time lookup and simple querying of structured data - without the operational complexity.  Amazon SimpleDB requires no schema, automatically indexes your data and provides a simple API for storage and access.  This eliminates the administrative burden of data modeling, index maintenance, and performance tuning. Developers gain access to this functionality within Amazon's proven computing environment, are able to scale instantly, and pay only for what they use."

Are you excited about scholarly communications, libraries, open access, repositories for research output, semantics, ontologies, academic tools for research? Do you want to interact with clever people around the world and inside Microsoft? Would you like to work with Lee Dirks*? Do you want to be part of Tony Hey's vision for research? (Job description)

Drop me a line.

* Lee is a great guy. We work together all the time (yes, some interaction with me will also be necessary as part of your job but we are keeping that a secret... shhhhh! :-)

Trains are my preferred way of traveling, while buses are my worst because I get motion sickness when I try to read. I am on a National Express (ex-GNER... I didn't know about this) train from London to Newcastle. I knew that these trains offered WiFi access but just realized that it's now free! This is just toooooo cool.

BTW... I arrived in the UK yesterday. From the comfortable warm weather of the Persian Gulf, I am now in the cold weather of the UK. It's beautiful and sunny though, despite it being cold. I arrived relatively late last night so I didn't do anything. Jim managed to escape somewhere aboard (for work he tells me) so no book-writing pairing.

Coming back to London for Saturday to go and see Spamalot :-)

I am in Qatar for work-related meetings. This is my second day and still no luggage. I had to go cloth shopping. Traveled half way around the world to go to a mall :-(

Tony Hey and I went swimming to the sea today, just outside the Sheraton Doha hotel. It was fantastic. Swimming in December :-)

This place is interesting; it's like a city-wide construction site. Apparently there are 400 skyscrapers under construction, with work continuing throughout the night (as I can hear from my room). The Education City they are building looks impressive, from an infrastructure point of view. I do hope it's successful academically and commercially. The Qatar Foundation has lots of plans.

Now, don't ask me about how I feel about the way money is spent on projects like "The Pearl" instead of making life better for millions of people in underdeveloped countries.

I heard on the radio that the local ski resorts were going to be open from today. Unfortunately, I can't go this weekend. If I am not in Qatar next weekend for a work-related meeting, I am definitely going. Today, it started snowing in Seattle! I am at cafe Fiore at the top of the hill and this is how it looks like (from my cell phone)...