Blogs are great for supplementing real-life events, by giving space and time for specific examples and links which can’t be referenced at the time. I was invited to give a talk last week at the first-ever NASA Information Technology Summit in Washington DC, and the topic I chose was “Government and the Revolution in Scientific Computing.” That’s an area that Microsoft Research has been focusing on quite a bit lately, so below I’ll give some examples I didn’t use at my talk.
One groundrule was that invited private-sector speakers were not allowed to give anything resembling a “sales pitch” of their company’s wares. Fair enough – I’m no salesman. The person who immediately preceded me, keynoter Vint Cerf, slightly bent the rules and talked a bit about his employer Google’s products, but gee whiz, that’s the prerogative of someone who is in large part responsible for the Internet we all use and love today.
I described in my talk the radical new class of super-powerful technologies enabling large-data research and computing on platforms of real-time and archival government data. That revolution is happening now, and I believe government could and should be playing a different and less passive role. I advocated for increased attention to the ongoing predicament of U.S. research and development funding.
Alex Howard at O’Reilly Radar covered the NASA Summit and today published a nice review of both Vint’s talk and mine. Some excerpts: Continue reading →
Filed under: Government, innovation, Microsoft, R&D, Technology | Tagged: Alex Howard, analysis, analytics, API, Bing, Bing Maps, biology, chemistry, data, data visualization, dataviz, Dryad, EntityCube, Google, Government, IE, IM, IT, JPL, Microsft Research, Microsoft, NASA, NodeXL, O'Reilly, ontology, open source, opendata, opengov, opensource, OSS, research, RSS, science, scientific computing, scientist, semantic, semantic computing, SNA, social media, social networking, social networks, tech, Technology, Vint Cerf, Zentity | 8 Comments »
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