An antique Bodhisattva statue located on Level 64, Swissotel the Stamford
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All posts for the month November, 2008
Zheng Yantao (NUS) received the 2008 Fellowship Award from Hon Hsiao-Wuen (MD, MSRA) during the Singapore 21st Century Computing Conference. Dr Su Guaning (NTU) and Prof Tan Eng Chye (NUS) witnessed the ceremony.
This years 4 winners from Singapore and Australia top universities received the Microsoft Research Asia Fellowship award after undergone a highly competitive and stringent process. These students received an open internship invitation to Microsoft Research Asia, a cash award and a commemorative plaque.
Australia
- Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller (Melbourne University)
Floyd’s invention “Remote Impact” was recently short-listed amongst the top 11 most innovative games at the 2008 European Innovative Games Award 2008. - Dong Yifei (University of New South Wales)
Singapore
- Huang Yi (Nanyang Technological University)
Huang Yi is currently undertaking her internship under Steve Lin in MSRA. - Zheng Yantao (National University of Singapore)
Yantao is a member of NUS SoC’s Lab for Media Search.
Congratulation to ALL our 2008 MSRA Fellowship winners across Asia Pacific.
This is the view of the Singapore financial district from the very top of South-east Asia’s tallest hotel – Swissotel the Stamford.
This morning, I took apart in my first “Swissotel Vertical Marathon“. Having trained (in)consistently in the gym’s Stairmaster on 4 grand occasions, I felt I was all set to attempt my tallest challenge – a 73-storey climb.
The overall turnout was huge. I was proud to see the encouraging numbers of female participants. The event emcee also mentioned that there were about 150 nationalities registered for this event.
I maintained an easy pace during the climb and the result was 13mins 53secs. I reckon next year I want to achieve 13min 15secs timing.
Here is a selection of the pictures taken during the 2008 Swissotel Vertical Marathon in Singapore.
Related link: 1,500 take part in Swissotel Vertical Marathon (Channel NewsAsia)
Last week in Singapore, Rick Rashid, Microsoft Senior Vice-President (Research) highlighted how computer science theories (and not just computers) are increasing scientists’ arsenal to fight the HIV virus. Below is an extract from the interview “Microsoft takes computer science into fight against HIV“.
Computer science is giving scientists new ways to look at the virus that causes AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome), perspectives that may help efforts to develop an effective vaccine and other medicines, according to the head of Microsoft’s research arm.
“It’s really focused on new ways of thinking about how to describe and analyze systemic activities within a cell,” said Rick Rashid, “Computer science theory, especially computer science languages, can actually be used to describe cell processes, and then the mathematics that we use to analyse programs can also be applied to analyse cell activities because there’s an underlying mathematical relationship,” Rashid said.
“It’s opening up peoples minds to how computers can help them, not just to do their work better, but how the underlying theory and underlying computer science changes the way they look at their problems,” he said.
Since 2005, Microsoft has sought to apply machine-learning techniques, including technology used in spam and antivirus filters, to AIDS research. The goal is to find genetic patterns in HIV that can be used to “train” the human immune system to fight the virus. In particular, Microsoft has looked for ways to track how HIV mutates to evade the human immune system.
“The idea is that because the genome is basically digital, it can be described as a string and analyzed as a string. It opens up an opportunity to think about a lot of problems in that space as data mining or machine-learning problems,” Rashid said.
Last month, I took a personal holiday back to Australia (surprise!) and New Zealand. It was mainly to catch up with my friends in both Sydney and Melbourne and also try something new before I turned 29.
The highlight of my New Zealand stay was my trip to Queenstown. If you are into adventure holidays and winter sports, Queenstown is your place. This place is just action packed, naturally beautiful and simply worth the money and time to get there. There are so much things to do and to see there.
During this trip, I took the plunge (literally) and tried bungy jumping of the original Kawarau Bridge. I even had a dip when I free-fall into the river. It was such an exhilarating experience!
The second highlight was the trip to Milford Sound. It is a 12 hours day trip but the view along the way is quite special on its own. Miles and miles of flat green pastures, spring lambs with their mums, thick snowfall on the way to Milford Sound makes the trip rather enjoyable. Milford Sound takes the experience another level up. You feel in awe of nature.
You can find the remainder of my New Zealand (including Auckland) pictures from here.
Organising the 21st Century Computing Conference is the largest event I have ever been personally involved. It is a honour to be part of the team that brought the Asia lab’s flagship conference to Singapore. To commemorate this special event, I asked all the speakers to autograph my conference book.
Last Friday (7 Nov 2008), Microsoft Research Asia held its flagship conference – Computing the 21st Century Conference in Singapore for the very first time. There were more than 1100 researchers, academics, students and industry attendees at this event. Leading academics from Singapore took time from their heavy schedule to be at this event.
RADM(NS) Ronnie Tay, CEO, Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore was the guest of honour at this event. Dr Su Guaning (President, Nanyang Technological University) and Prof Tan Eng Chye (Deputy President & Provost, National University of Singapore) provided the academia opening address.
The University Presidents also witnessed the Microsoft Research Asia Fellowship award ceremony. Huang Yi was the NTU Fellow and is currently undertaking her internship in the Beijing lab. Her supervisor, Assoc Prof Cham Tat-Jen accepted the award on her behalf. NUS Fellowship was awarded to Zheng Yantao.
The conference kicked off with an introduction to MS Research, lead by Rick Rashid, the Senior VP (Research). This is followed by Raj Reddy, Tony Hoare, Hsiao-Wuen Hon and Butler Lampson. It is almost unheard of to have 3 Turing award recipients in 1 stage.
After Butler Lampson’s session, there was a vigorous Q&A session from the floor. 15mins later, Baining Guo, the Conference Chair announced the successful conclusion of the 2008 21st Century Computing Conference in Singapore.
More conference pictures – http://www.flickr.com/photos/bernardoh/sets/72157607566885535/
This is a moment in the websphere when I first heard about Barack Obama’s victory in the US election.
Below are screenshots of that news on the Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, ABC News, BBC News, CNN and Channel News Asia.
11 Nov 2008: Click here for the 2008 Singapore 21st Century Computing Conference summary and pictures.
This week, Microsoft Research Asia celebrates our 10th Anniversary with two major celebrations in Beijing and Singapore. The celebration kicks off with the Microsoft Research Asia Faculty Summit, Beijing Computing in the 21st Century (held in Peking University) and Innovation Day in Beijing. This coming Friday, 7 Nov 2008, Singapore will host the second leg of the Computing in the 21st Century Conference (21CCC) at Hall 601, Suntec City Convention Centre.
The Singapore event speakers line-up consist of:
- Raj Reddy (1994 Turing Award recipient),
- Butler Lampson (1992 Turing Award recipient),
- Tony Hoare (1980 Turing Award recipient),
- Rick Rashid (Microsoft Senior Vice-President, Research) and
- Hsiao-Wuen Hon (Managing Director, Microsoft Research Asia)
Computing in the 21st Century is an academic conference held by Microsoft Research Asia supported by the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Nanyang Technological University and the National University of Singapore. This event is targeted at researchers, academics, students and ICT trends/ research/ education policy decision makers.
For close to ten years, the conference has welcomed Turing Award recipients, famous Microsoft scientists and well-known scholars from all over the world to share their vision on the future of computing and exchange ideas with the innovative minds of China and Asia.
The conference Guest of Honour is RADM(NS) Ronnie Tay (CEO, Infocomm Development Authority, Singapore) and the event will also be opened by Dr Su Guaning (President, Nanyang Technological University) and Prof Tan Eng Chye (Deputy President & Provost, National University of Singapore)
Download Event Flyer. To register for the conference, please visit this link.
To find out more about this conference, please visit http://research.microsoft.com/asia/21stcomputing/2008/ENindex1_1.html
