There are 350 of us in Redmond at the 11th annual Microsoft Research Faculty Summit from 27 countries, representing a broad range of technical fields.
The summit brings together "thought leaders from academia, government, and Microsoft to reflect on how current computing disciplines open new opportunities for research and development. Faculty Summit 2010 investigates compelling research topics such as Architectures of the Future, Natural User Interaction, Future Web / Web 4.0, and Accelerating Science."
For about 300 of us, it's the first time we've attended. The last two days have been stimulating and eye-opening. AZGS is gearing up to run one of the largest data integration efforts in the nation with our work on the National Geothermal Data System. Many of the issues we have to deal with are being addressed by software engineers, computer scientists, GIS experts, systems analysts, and others.
In addition, there are other national scale data integration efforts under, especially for environmental and biological data sets. There is a lot we can do to partner with these projects, leverage each others resources, and seem common protocols and procedures.
On Wednesday, a small group of us is staying over for a day-long brainstorming session ("mind-swap") between environmental researchers and Microsoft technologists. As a result of this event, MSR expects to "initiate collaboration projects using Microsoft technologies to solve environmental research problems."