Latin American Faculty Summit 2010

Guarujá, Brasil, location of the 2010 Latin American Faculty Summit

Microsoft Research hosted the sixth annual Latin American Faculty Summit in Guarujá, Brasil, on May 12–14. The event was organized in collaboration with FAPESP. The theme of the 2010 event was Computing: Making the Difference.

Computing: Making the Difference

Advances in computational methods continue to create new opportunities for innovation in fundamental computer science and science in general. Researchers are investigating new multi-disciplinary approaches to important problems in health and wellbeing, earth and environment, astronomy, energy, and industry.

More than 200 academic leaders from around the world, as well as representatives from multilateral and governmental organizations, gathered to share their approaches and build new opportunities for creative innovation through research and development at the Microsoft Research – FAPESP Latin American Faculty Summit 2010.

About FAPESP

Founded in 1962, the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) is an independent public foundation with a mission to foster research and scientific and technological development in the State of São Paulo. In April 2007, Microsoft Research and FAPESP created the Microsoft Research–FAPESP Institute for ICT Research. The institute is committed to addressing social and economic development needs in Brasil by establishing a network of world-class researchers able to expand IT capabilities. Microsoft Research is excited to have FAPESP, an organization dedicated to rich academic research, as the sponsor of the 2010 faculty summit in Brasil.

Wednesday, May 12

Thursday, May 13

Friday, May 14

The following two optional tutorials, held the day before the main events of the Latin American Faculty Summit, were designed to support and facilitate research and innovation.

Tools to Support e-Research – Microsoft Research and the Scholarly Information Ecosystem

Presenter: Oscar Naim, Research Program Manager Microsoft Research

Abstract:
Microsoft External Research strongly supports the process of research and its role in the innovation ecosystem, including developing and supporting efforts in open access, open tools, open technology, and interoperability. Microsoft External Research collaborates with universities, national libraries, publishers, and governmental organizations to help develop tools and services to evolve the scholarly information lifecycle. These projects demonstrate our ongoing work towards producing next-generation documents that increase productivity and empower authors to increase the discoverability and appropriate re-use of their work.

This workshop provides a deep view into several freely available tools from Microsoft External Research and demonstrates how they can help supplement and enhance your e-research. The hands-on component of this session helps you gain a deeper technical understanding of the available toolset, which includes the following resources:

• Research Information Centre (RIC): An online virtual research environment for collaborative work
• Tools for authors
  • Structured document authoring (based on the NLM-DTD)
  • Ontology integration and markup
  • Repository search integration
  • ORE resource map authoring
  • Chemistry Add-in for Word
  • Article repository submission workflow (via REST and SWORD interfaces)
• Zentity: A research-output repository platform
• Other related services
  • Bing Translator (web service)
  • Document/file format conversion (web service)

Agenda

Health and Wellbeing Projects in Microsoft External Research

Presenters:

• Simon Mercer, Director, Health and Wellbeing, Microsoft External Research
• Kristin Tolle, Director, Devices, Sensors and Mobility for Healthcare, Microsoft External Research
• Oscar Naim, Research Program Manager, Microsoft External Research

Abstract:
The External Research team works with the academic community to accelerate research projects through the application of cutting-edge computing technology. In this workshop, we provide an overview of the team activities in healthcare and show examples of projects that combine next-generation computing technologies, hardware and software to advance the state of the art in healthcare delivery. Specifically, we present the Microsoft Biology Foundation, an extensible library of basic functions for genomics, demonstrating how it can be used the build scientific applications and integrate with Microsoft applications, and we also describe and give demonstrations of mobile healthcare applications such as portable ultrasound, cell phone-attached microscopes, etc.

Agenda