Today we're launching a new Microsoft-oriented interview series called Perspectives at http://perspectives.on10.net. The show will touch on a variety of topics including robotics, digital identity, e-science, and social software. The format is an audio podcast plus a blog, where the blog provides partial (but substantial) text transcription Where appropriate, it uses screencasts to show software in action.
The first episode, with Henrik Nielsen and Tandy Trower, explores the Microsoft Robotics initiative. We discuss why robotics is -- as futurist Paul Saffo believes -- a Next Big Thing, and Henrik and Tandy explain how the concurrency and decentralised-services infrastructure that supports the robotics platform is broadly relevant in an era of loosely-coupled services.
Episodes in the pipeline include:
Vittorio Bertocci, author of the new book Understanding CardSpace. We trace the evolution of the identity metasystem, explore the rationale for CardSpace, and consider the unsolved problem of public online identity for individuals.
Catharine van Ingen (MSR) and Dennis Baldocchi (UC Berkeley) on the Fluxdata project. We discuss their work on Fluxdata.org, a Sharepoint-based e-science system that hosts CO2 data from a worldwide network of sensors and supports collaborative analysis.
Kyril Faenov and Rich Ciapala, on a new HPC effort to deliver cluster computing as a service that professors can use to enable students to explore and analyze large data sets.
Claire
