I installed the beta of Windows Live Photo Gallery, which supports panoramic stitching, so I played around a bit.

Manycore Computing Workshop 07

Glastonbury 07

This last one is really nice, from the Pyramid stage before the Keizer Chiefs if I remember well.

I was at Nature Publishing Group's offices in London today to meet with Timo Hannay (Director of Web Publishing), Ian Mulvary (Product Development Manager), and Euan Adie (Product Development Manager). Wow! These folks are doing really cool stuff. More importantly, however, they are interested in doing even cooler stuff to help researchers around the world connect, collaborate, share, etc. We exchanged ideas and I think we identified lots of opportunities for collaboration. Expect to see more in this space.

Before the more interesting stuff, the first task would be to surface Connotea data into Word and through the Research Ribbon I am putting together.

I am in London for some work-related meetings and relaxing after what was an excellent Glastonbury. Yes, it rained. Yes, everything I was carrying with me got really really wet. Yes, I got wet to the bone while waiting under the rain for more than 3 hours to catch the first train of the day out of the area at 5am on Monday. Yes, there was so much mud, I couldn't find the grass. Yes, i had to pay professional cleaners to clean the mud from my luggage. YES, I HAD A BLAST even though i was covered in mud all the time!!! :-)

I seriously enjoyed "The Who", "The Killers", and Bjork from all the bands that I saw. As always, I was there, almost at the very front jumping around :-). However, Glastonbury is more than concerts. So, I immersed myself into the music, went dancing/raving till dawn, enjoyed some stand-up comedy, found audience participation and juggling shows, went on looooooong walks to explore the arts and crafts, tasted lots of ethnic food, absorbed lots of beautiful images and experiences, admired the fashion, etc.

It’s amazing to see 180,000 people not caring about the mud and the bad weather and just having fun. I am always fascinated by how so many people can co-exist without fights and arguments (3rd time there and, again, didn't see anything). Why can't we live like that all the time? (ok, perhaps without the mud :-)

I also met and spent some time with Carole and Dave and some of their friends. It was great hanging out with them. The project we are putting together had an excellent start :-) Here are some characteristic images...

Glastonbury, I am going to be there next year again (if I can get tickets, that is :-)!

The Manycore Computing Workshop 07, sponsored by my team, was a great success. It was great to see such a large part of the Parallel/Manycore Computing community coming together to exchange ideas and participate in discussions on "manycores for general purpose computing".

The first day of the workshop, the one opened to the delegates of the ICS 07 conference, was attended by around 150 people. The by-invitation-only second day saw around 120 people throughout the day.

Many of the attendees told me that they saw great value in a follow on event. We are now looking at the possibilities. Furthermore, the Workshop’s Program Committee (Jack Dongarra, Geoffrey Fox, Dennis Gannon, John Mellor-Crummey, Savas Parastatidis, and Mateo Valero) is considering the best way possible to disseminate the findings/discussions of the workshop. Again, I will post more information as soon as there is a decision.

I have now uploaded all of the workshops presentations (keynotes, position paper talks, and discussion panel talks). You can also find the submitted position papers.

I would like to thank our three keynote speakers, Burton Smith, David Patterson, and Andrew Chien, for their really inspiring talks, our position paper authors and presenters for sticking on time :-), and our fantastic panelists for initiating great discussions. Geoffrey Fox, John Mellor-Crummey, Mateo Valero, and Jack Dongarra, did a great job at forming and leading the discussion panels, the “heart” of the workshop. Last but not least, many thanks go to Linda Bookey for doing such a great job with the logistics of the workshop.

Until next time, Manycore thanks to everyone who contributed in making this workshop such a great success!

Statistics

People contacted: 231 (please accept my apologies if I missed you. I promise I'll do better next time)
People accepted the invitation: 125
People not replied: 24
Person responsible for contacting everyone and maintaining the database of invitations: 1 (me)
People not registered for the workshop although they should have been: 1 (me!!!!... yes, I forgot to register myself and as a result didn't have a badge :-)))

I've been out of coding practice (too much program management) so I decided to spend few hours today learning something new and starting a project I always wanted to do since I joined Tony Hey's group.

The "Research" Ribbon tab will allow people to consume various research-related services and also access research-related utilities. In the past, I talked about the integration with Live Search Academic. Today, I built an "explorer" of author networks using the Libra service, written by a group in MSR Asia, who have been very helpful in making their data available as XML over HTTP.

The idea is that you search for an author using keywords; it can be anything... a name, a research topic. You are given a list of authors that relate to the keywords you searched for (second screenshot). By selecting an author from the returned list, you get a list of his/her co-authors (second screenshot) and so on.

As I further develop this Word addin, one would be able to access related works, an author's publications for direct inclusion, etc.

The code will be coming soon to a Web site near you, once it's cleaned up and more functionality is added.

As Dan says, there are really no words to describe this. Well done to the entire team over at MSR for doing this. If I wasn't so busy with other things, there would have been a service somewhere in there to expose the functionality via SOAP/XML over HTTP :-( It's still in my "to do" list though.

Microsoft Research Releases Tools to Help Science Progress Toward an AIDS Vaccine

After two years of pioneering work and collaboration in AIDS research, Microsoft openly shares its software source code with the greater scientific community to help expedite global research.

My pals over at the SecPAL team have released a new version of their framework for declaratively capturing authorization policies in large-scale distributed systems (yeah... yeah... ok... "Grid" systems :-) This is fantastic work.

They just released a minor update that you should definitely check out. I hadn't realized that they had created a CodePlex project. Very cool.

You may also find this paper interesting from Marty and co: "Fine-Grained Access Control for GridFTP using SecPAL" (pdf)

I was recently pointed to this post by Richard Charkin who "stole" Google laptops as a way of protesting. Funny.