{"id":4343,"date":"2016-01-29T10:40:38","date_gmt":"2016-01-29T18:40:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/msr_er\/?p=4343"},"modified":"2016-08-17T16:29:39","modified_gmt":"2016-08-17T23:29:39","slug":"bringing-together-history-and-data-science-with-microsoft-azure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/blog\/bringing-together-history-and-data-science-with-microsoft-azure\/","title":{"rendered":"Bringing together history and data science with Microsoft Azure"},"content":{"rendered":"
By Winnie Cui, Senior Research Program Manager, Microsoft Research Asia<\/em><\/p>\n Andrea Nanetti is a historian and associate professor at the School of Art, Design and Media at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. Some might think that, as a historian, he\u2019d be an unlikely attendee at a data science presentation. However, when Nenatti learned about a talk given by Dr. Hsiao-Wuen Hon<\/a>, from Microsoft Research Asia, he knew it could apply to his unique needs.<\/p>\n Forming a collaboration<\/strong><\/p>\n In computer science, accounting for user experience is a crucial part to designing any program. Take search engines, for example. Today, entering any phrase into a search engine would return innumerable results. But, while the volume of results is impressive, the information could be somewhat fractured, repetitive or overlapping.<\/p>\n The capabilities of today\u2019s search engines just aren\u2019t intelligent enough to meet the needs of their human users. Ideally, a search engine would organize the information into a coherent, or nearly coherent story, and even provide narrative elements like who, what, when, where, why, and how.<\/p>\n To create a more intelligent and human optimized search, Nanetti and his colleague, Professor Siew An Cheong, partnered with Dr. Chin-Yew Lin<\/a>, a computer scientist on Knowledge and Data Mining and data scientist from Microsoft Research Asia (Beijing), and\u00a0Kristin Tolle<\/a>, Director of Data Science from Microsoft Research Redmond.<\/p>\n\n
\u201cAs a historian, I deal with ever-growing pieces of information and data every day. It\u2019s been a challenging task for historians to compose coherent stories in an efficient way using all <\/em>available data. The talk really excited me, as I realized not only computer scientists could help me, but I should be able to help solve their problems as well by using historical sciences.\u201d \u2014Andrea Nanetti.<\/em><\/h5>\n<\/blockquote>\n