Microsoft Continues To Do Good
There's an area where Microsoft gets far too little credit: helping to save
the world. Sure, Redmond didn't jump on the One Laptop Per Child initiative
soon enough. But Microsoft Research is doing amazing work on the world's biggest
problems, hooking up with top scientists to tackle disease, global warming,
pollution, and more.
How do I know? I spent months researching Microsoft and wrote a couple of stories
about what
it's doing and how.
Microsoft isn't doing pure scientific research. Instead, it's providing the
computational infrastructure, data mining, visualization techniques, new languages,
etc. to help the scientists who are doing all the heavy lifting.
Last week, Microsoft announced a series
of cash awards for those trying to understand the human genome and apply
that understanding to improving our health and the survival of our species.
Like with most things concerning Microsoft Research, there's a lot I actually
understand and much more that flies right over my inadequate head, such as the
award for work at Columbia University on "Phenotypic Pipeline for Genome-wide
Association Studies." What's a pipeline?
Then there's this from Johns Hopkins: "Genome Wide Association Study of
Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis in Finland." Uh, what's a Finland?
Posted by Doug Barney on April 21, 2008 at 11:52 AM