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 Computational Challenges of Genome Wide Association Studies.

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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. Trident's graphical workflow authoring, reusable data transforms, and support for provenance -- the ability to reliably track and reproduce all the analytic steps leading to a scientific result -- is being used by astronomers too, and is expected to find its way into many other disciplines as well.

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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 help governments meet the diverse set of enterprise challenges they face.

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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 2008 Space Elevator Conference held at the Microsoft Conference Center in Redmond. In this interview he discusses the concept of the space elevator, and the status of current efforts to bring it to life.

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