University of Kansas Gets $850k from Microsoft for Environmental Research World
The University of Kansas Biodiversity Research Center has received an $850,000 grant from the European Science Initiative of Microsoft Research Inc. to study biodiversity changes in complex environments with a focus on Mexico's cloud forest. In partnership with the national biodiversity commission in Mexico, the project will analyze the data, but it is also taking a meta approach to examine how to best combine a broad set of complex data for analysis. One answer is to design a virtual world to test the researchers' predictions. "The virtual world will give us ways to test tools we have been developing for 10 years," said Jorge Soberón, lead investigator for the project and senior scientist at KU's Biodiversity Institute. "We want to create a very complex simulation, not just a beautiful envelope with nothing inside."
It's not clear what platform the world will be built on. And it sounds like it might be more of a simulator than a world to begin with, but it's a direction that Microsoft has some interest in.
In October the company integrated Microsoft Virtual Earth with the Thetus Corporation's knowledge management software. The goal there was similar to that of the KU researchers, but with a bent towards intelligence. Thetus hoped that adding a geospatial component to its semantic knowledge processing systems would make it easier to perform quick, thorough situation analyses.
The broader Intelligence Community is examining similar projects. So, biodiversity today, CIA tomorrow?
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