Spotlight

WorldWide Telescope: Reaching for the Stars Just Got Easier

WorldWide Telescope, from Microsoft Research, achieves something close to unimaginable: it brings the wonder of space exploration to our fingertips. The free public beta went live on May 13, making it possible for scientists, students, and other wistful watchers of the heavens to get almost close enough to touch the stars.

A collaborative effort fueled by members of the scientific, academic, and technological communities, WorldWide Telescope offers stunning, breath-taking views of constellations, planets, and galaxies. Discovery is enhanced by guided tours led by astronomers, and is supported by exciting exploration- and education-focused features designed for multiple levels of engagement.

Scientists and academics are talking about WorldWide telescope:

"WorldWide Telescope has enough capability that even professional astronomers and astrophysicists are eager to use it, not just as a mechanism for public outreach, but for our own work."

• Alyssa Goodman, Professor of Astronomy, Harvard University

"WorldWide Telescope is going to be a fantastic outreach platform for astronomy and perhaps even applied computing and information science."

• George Djorgovski, Professor of Astronomy, California Institute of Technology

"WorldWide Telescope is a great example of a piece of educational software that’s been designed intelligently from the ground up. And it is the most impressive one I’ve seen to date to handle the visualization of the sky in a very interactive, smooth, clean interface."

• Robert Hurt, Astronomer, NASA Spitzer Space Telescope

Read what Curtis Wong and Jonathan Fay from Microsoft Research have to say about a project that is—quite literally—out of this world.

Studying Fossils for Clues About Food Webs

Rich Williams, head of the Computational Ecology and Environmental Science group at Microsoft Research Cambridge, has been studying food webs in fossilized organisms—some of them 500 million years old. Food webs are intricate networks of feeding interaction within ecosystems. Williams and his colleagues have made some fascinating discoveries, and can link food web data from the ecosystems that supported Cambrian-age life to organisms that live in modern ecosystems. These discoveries are discussed in a paper published in the current issue of PLoS Biology.

In a recent article posted on www.research.microsoft.com, Williams talks about how he got involved in food-web ecology, paleontology and the mining of unprecedented research data.

Conference Management Toolkit Available for Academic Conferences

The Microsoft Academic Conference Management Toolkit (CMT) is a free conference management service for academics and researchers. It was designed and released by Microsoft Research approximately eight years ago and has been regularly improved and updated. Although it has not been officially advertised, CMT is used by more than 200 conference organizers every year—and these people learn about CMT almost exclusively via word of mouth. This time-tested resource can handle the entire workflow process for organizing and managing academic conferences, based upon peer-reviewed paper submissions.