Friday, July 15, 2005

Take Me Out to the Ball Game Last night I took my daughters to the Mariners' game at Safeco Field. The M's were playing the Baltimore Orioles. We had a lot of fun (despite the fact that the M's sucked) and one of my daughters even kept score on a real scorecard (if you've never tried this, it's non-trivial). Rafael Palmiero of the Orioles came into the game with 2,998 career hits. In his second at-bat, he got a hit. In the top of the 8th inning (what would likely be his last at-bat of the game), he got walked. It was funny; with every pitch, hundreds of flashbulbs went off throughout the stands. And when ball four came and raffy started his trot down to first, the crowd booed our pitcher (Julio Mateo) loudly. My daughters asked why everyone was booing, and I had to explain to them that everyone wanted to be there for their little piece of history when he hit his 3,000th hit. I was angry, but at the crowd and not at Mateo. I was watching carefully; he didn't intentionally walk Palmeiro. But as I explained to my daughters, there's a reason that he has so many hits: he's a good hitter. The game was very close, and the M's didn't want to give him a pitch that he could hit well. They wanted to win the game. Sure, it would have been nice to see a piece of history in the making, but I'm not going to put aside my loyalties to the home team and start booing our own pitcher for doing his job. Mateo got a raw deal fromt he fans, and he deserved better. By the way, Palmeiro hit number 3000 tonight. 11:19:34 PM    comment []

MSR Faculty Summit Starts Monday It's been a crazy busy week. There's no other way to put it. Monday and Tuesday next week, we're hosting the sixth annual Microsoft Research Faculty Summit on Microsoft's Redmond campus. The event kicks off with a "fireside chat" discussion between Bill Gates and Maria Klawe, the Dean of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University. The general topic for the discussion is "the future of computer science" but that's very broad and it will be interesting to see where the conversation goes. By the way, we're webcasting it live -- here's a link to the webcast information so you can check it out. The rest of the event is going to be super cool too. We have about 400 faculty from 175 academic institutions coming to the event. It's really a research conference without the papers, and it's really the only conference left that covers the breadth of computer science. All the others have become super specialized, and ACM, IEEE, IFIP, and their counterparts in other parts of the world have pretty much given up on pan-CS conferences. I think that's a mistake, given the increasignly inter-disciplinary nature of computer science, and that's why we still do a broa-topic conference. Here's a pointer to a lot more information about the event, including information about the specific programs that we run to collaborate with academia to advance the state of the art in computer science (and e-science) research and teaching. Most of the sessions at the Faculty Summit are organized around these initiatives, because we're very serious about helping the community to make progress. In the spirit of "equal time," IBM has been driving a lot of press around their re-branded Academic Initiative lately, which according to their web site is about helping Linux, Eclipse and IBM products available to faculty and students. Yeah, we have a similar program at Microsoft called MSDN Academic Alliance to make sure that faculty and students have easy access to Microsoft technologies. Every IT company should have a program like that, because it's important for academia to have great access to a broad variety of tools and technologies -- students get the best education that way. But we don't think that's enough -- we have to be actively involved and collaborating to advance the state of the art in computer science and helping people to focus on the things that are really going to make a difference. That's why we have about 15 inititatives -- we think it's important to name the things that we believe are the most important areas (e.g. trustworthy computing, introductory computer science curriculum, mobility, software engineering) and work with the best people in the community to drive advances. IBM's Academic Initiative folks have been saying things that confuse or concern me recently. Here on their web site they say that the program was changed "to describe IBM's broad interest in graduating students who are aware of, excited about, and skilled in open standards, open source and IBM products." Boy, I hope they have greater ambitions for the field of computer science than that, for no other reason than in deference to the long-standing and distinguished reputation of IBM Research for great work and great collaboration with academia. When I read their news and releases, I'm left with the impression that they are aggressively trying to turn CS departments into a battlefield between Microsoft and IBM. I can't understand how that is in the best interests of the field of computer science. Yes, Microsoft wants students to learn Microsoft products, and yes, IBM wants them to learn Linux, Eclipse, and WebSphere. But if that's the limit to the conversation we have with faculty and students, then we all lose. This is a time of crisis for the field, and we have to rise above this. IBM yesterday announced that they had a special new license to make some downloads from their alphaWorks site available to academics. Alphaworks is a pretty cool site; most research labs have a similar download site (ours is here) and they are all fun and interesting to browse. So here's the funny thing though: what IBM really did was change their default licensing from a limited 90 days to unlimited duration for academics. That effectively brings them up to par with what all the rest of the industry labs have done for years -- and what Microsoft Research has had in place since it inception 14 years ago (unlimited duration for non-commercial use). It baffles me why IBM ever thought it was ok to have a 90-day license in the first place -- but at least they are doing the right thing now. Though personally I think we have cooler and more useful downloads on our site (including F-sharp and C-omega) than IBM has on theirs :-) And you can subscribe to the RSS feed to get notified of new downloads. Anyway, don't forget to tune in to the discussion with Bill Gates and Maria Klawe on Monday.   11:10:05 PM    comment []

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