Microsoft Tech Fest Day 2012 Report

By Brenda Cooper

I was lucky enough to get to take a look at how Microsoft sees the future this week.  This is TechFest week at Microsoft, where researchers and staff meet.  The first day of TechFest is open by invitation to select customers and VIPs. This created an opportunity for me to hear talks directly from researchers and to take a look at some of the work they were willing to share.

One thing I found particularly interesting was a big data tool. FetchClimate is available today online. It was designed to allow researchers (or, really, anybody) to easily obtain a variety of climate data.  This is cool all by itself, especially given that climate is an important research topic right now.  More important, there are a lot of data sets that go into this, and FetchClimate uses distributed cloud resources to return results quickly.  There are many applications for fast searches across large sets of data, from business intelligence (think of how much data an airline or a social media site has) to other scientific and health data searches.

We are creating data at an amazing rate.  The latest Digital Universe study at EMC states that the amount of data doubles every year.  So if we imagine that’s true for most industries, than the amount of data about genetics will be four time as great as today in two years and eight times as great in three years.   And so on.

It’s going to matter that we have tools to organize and search this data.  It’s also going to be important that this ability is available on a low or zero-cost basis.  FetchClimate is available – and kudo’s to Microsoft for making it free.   I also saw a number of other tools to help with big data, but this was the most interesting example available outside of the campus and usable by anyone.

Techfest felt like a place full of people “doing” the future.  These were smart educated scientists with new ideas, looking for ways to make the world a better place (for example, one application translated almost any language into almost any language), and trying to build the tools we’ll need.

One comment to Microsoft Tech Fest Day 2012 Report

• March 14, 2012
  

  In which I appear at Do the Future and Futurismic at Brenda Cooper says:

  [...] tech-fest Day 0 and to chat with people there.  I wrote a post pretty specifically about that for Do the Future, and incorporated it into my monthly column over at Futurismic.  I am feeling a bit more upbeat [...]

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