Next month marks the tenth anniversary of RFC 2445. To celebrate the occasion, Derik Stenerson -- one of the original authors -- joins Jon Udell on Interivews with Innovators to discuss the past, present, and future of the venerable iCalendar specification.

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Scott Prevost is General Manager and Director of Product for Powerset, the company whose semantic search engine was recently acquired by Microsoft. In this interview he describes the history of Powerset's natural language engine, and explains how it works as part of a hybrid approach to indexing, retrieval, and ranking.

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Kristin Tolle is the Senior Research Program Manager for Biomedical Computing for External Research in Microsoft Research. Projects run the gamut, she says, from "bench to bedside". In this interview she discusses two major biomedical initiatives: Cell Phone as a Platform for Health Care, and [more ]

Roger Barga, a principal architect with Microsoft's Technical Computing Initiative, is leading the development of Trident, a "workflow workbench" for science. In its first incarnation, the tool will enable oceanographers to automate the management and analysis of vast quantities of data produced by the Neptune sensor array. But as Roger explains in this interview, it's not just about oceanography. Every science is becoming data-intensive. Triden…[more ]

Before joining Microsoft's Institute for Advanced Technology in Governments, Lewis Shepherd spent four years at the Defense Intelligence Agency where he helped usher in a new era of collaboration.

In this interview, he discusses how the Institute's small team of seven is exploring the nooks and crannies of Microsoft's research efforts and technology portfolios, looking for ways to…[more ]

Maurice Franklin is a 12-year Microsoft veteran whose career has focused on performance engineering and server scalability. He's also passionate about the concept of a space elevator, and recently organized and hosted a conference held on that topic at the Microsoft Conference Center.

In this interview he discusses reasons to build a space elevator, and describes how the concept, first proposed by Arthur C. Clarke, is evolving toward a practical implementation.

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Ted Semon, a retired software engineer, chronicles the efforts to develop a space elevator on the Space Elevator Blog, and volunteers for The Spaceward Foundation which administers competitions to develop several of the core technologies that will be needed to build the elevator.

Ted attended and spoke at the [more ]

Tony Hey, VP for the External Research Division within Microsoft Research, leads the company's efforts to build external partnerships in key areas of scientific research, education, and computing. He's been a physicist, a computer scientist, and dean of engineering, and for five years ran the UK's e-Science program. These experiences have given him a broad view of the ways in which all the sciences are becoming both computational and data-intensive. Microsoft tools and services, he says, will…[more ]

Jonathan Fay is principal developer of the WorldWide Telescope. In this interview he explains how the project has yielded not only a breakthrough software product, but also a reference model for the acquisition, transformation, and visualization of astronomical data. You'll learn not only how the WorldWide Telescope works, but also why it exists: To fulfill the education mission discussed in a related interview with Curtis Wong and Roy Gould.[more ]

The WorldWide Telescope was first shown to the public at TED 2008, in a joint presentation by project leader Curtis Wong, manager of Next Media Research for Microsoft, and Roy Gould, a science educator with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. In this interview they discuss how -- and why -- the WorldWide Telescope combines many sources of astronomical data and imagery to create a seamless view of the night sky.[more ]