I was pleasantly surprised to notice that http://maps.live.com (Live Search Maps provided by Microsoft) shows the traffic alerts in some of the major local roads in Greater Seattle Area.

Most of the online traffic or map services only show the Freeway and major Highway traffic.

This is definitely a wonderful value add to the Live Search Maps Service.  We used this today to decide the route to take to downtown from our house. It was great to be able to see the interior road condition and also see the alerts (such as traffic due to soccer game b/w Mexico and China in Qwest field :-)).

-santosh

Amazing video made by my cousin Meera for my nephew Ashrith. Ashrith was diagnosed with infant acute lymphocytic leukemia last year when he was 7 10 months old. He went through treatment and chemotherapy at the CHOP (Children's Hospital of Philadelphia) since last March (07).

I am overjoyed and ecstatic to say that Ashrith has been off chemo and treatment for around a month (everything has been great). I can't wait to meet him in May.

The above video was put together my the most talented person in our family - Meera. The hindi song selected for this video is very significant.

Demo -

Savas Parastatidis (architect of the Microsoft repository platform) created a demo for Open Repositories Challenge 2008 that shows the ability to pull data from two repositories, create the appropriate relationships and display the relationships in a WPF based network graph.

He pulls the relationships b/w people and resources from MyExperiment, and resources from Microsoft Research Output Repository Platform. He then creates a network graph displaying relationships b/w people and resources from the two repositories. He also displays a preview when the appropriate resource or person is selected. For ex. in the demo, you will notice upon selecting a video, the video is played.

This kind of visualization of relationships using network graphs on web pages (using technologies like Silverlight) is truly very useful to visualize the social networking relationships.

Additional info - http://savas.parastatidis.name/2008/04/03/2e308e65-a670-40a3-80ae-a283de1ee917.aspx

Blog - http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/001591.html 

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Slides - http://pubs.or08.ecs.soton.ac.uk/84/1/Research_Output_Repositories_-_Microsoft_Initiatives.pdf 

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The Presentation at the Conference today went well (Monday session was held by Microsoft for interop b/w repositories, with a few known members of the community). This session was open to all members of the conference - we had a decent turnout.

Lee Dirks went through the charter of TCI team, and Microsoft, in the Scholarly Communications space, followed by my presentation and Savas' demos providing the "Wow!" factor.

Overall the response/questions were positive. We had a few folks talk to us after the presentation for additional information and explanation.

-santosh.