Microsoft Research

Just released: Science@Microsoft – The Fourth Paradigm in Practice Book

“This collection of Science@Microsoft vignettes illustrates some of the progress that has been made in a number of disciplines and describes the technologies that have been deployed to gain these new insights.”

The volume lists tools for scientific research and includes NodeXL:

NodeXL is a powerful and easy-to-use interactive network visualization and analysis tool that uses Microsoft Excel for representing generic graph data, performing advanced network analysis, and visual exploration of networks. NodeXL supports multiple social network data providers that import graph data (nodes and edge lists) into Excel. The import features of NodeXL explore social media by pulling data from personal email indexes on the desktop, Twitter, Flicker, YouTube, Facebook, and web hyperlinks.

NodeXL allows non-programmers to generate useful network statistics and metrics quickly and create visualizations of network graphs. Filtering and display attributes can be used to highlight important structures in the network.

Faculty Summit

The 2010 Microsoft Research Faculty Summit was held July 12 and 13 in Redmond, Washington. Among the many panels and discussions related to the state of computer science the NodeXL team had several representatives talking about the ways network science education can be expanded using an easy to use application for network analysis built on Excel.

Jimmy Lin from the University of Maryland also attended to speak about programming in the cloud.

Here is the abstract for the NodeXL talk:

NodeXL – Social Network Analysis in Excel—Natasa Milic Frayling, Microsoft Research; Ben Shneiderman, University of Maryland; Marc Smith, Connected Action

Businesses, entrepreneurs, individuals, and government agencies alike are looking to social network analysis (SNA) tools for insight into trends, connections, and fluctuations in social media. Microsoft’s NodeXL is a free, open-source SNA plug-in for use with Excel. It provides instant graphical representation of relationships of complex networked data. But it goes further than other SNA tools—NodeXL was developed by a multidisciplinary team of experts that bring together information studies, computer science, sociology, human-computer interaction, and over 20 years of visual analytic theory and information visualization into a simple tool anyone can use. This makes NodeXL of interest not only to end-users but also to researchers and students studying visual and network analytics and their application in the real world. NodeXL has the unique feature that it imports networks from Outlook email, Twitter, flickr, YouTube, WWW, and other sources, plus it offers a rich set of metrics, layouts, and clustering algorithms. This talk will describe NodeXL and our efforts to start the Social Media Research Foundation.

Some photos from the event: