Great article, “Hands-on Computing” in Scientific American this month that covers multi-touch computer screens and how this technology, including Microsoft’s Surface and the iPhone, will change the way we interact with computers and data. There is also a supplemental article explaining how multi-touch screens work.

OK… this is for all of my American friends who still need to figure out a) whether I am Scottish, British or a United Kingdom citizen, b) what NOT to call me!

I went to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) yesterday to see their new exhibition, Design and The Elastic Mind. This exhibition has a vast array of really cool concepts and visualizations that is absolutely fascinating. From “Extreme Visualizations” to “Mapping The Internet” to “Nanofracture”, they did a nice job of presenting how modern design and technology impacts our lives in many different ways. For example, the Nanofracture section demonstrated the advances in nanotechnology in terms of design of modern structures and materials, as well as the modeling of the human brain. They even had a design section of how origami can be used to model everything from DNA to a Fresnel Lens used in space telescopes. There were also various static and dynamic visualizations of global internet traffic & telephony around the world and in/out of New York (see pictures on New York Talk Exchange), as well as a model of all the flights in the sky across North America in a 24hr period. All in all, a very creative and insightful exhibit that beautifully marries design, art, engineering and computational power. Most of the exhibits are online at the URL above.

Finally, the whitepaper we have been writing with BEA and Intel on how the BEA Weblogic Event Server can be leveraged in the front office has been published here and on the Lab49 website. The paper outlines general trends in the CEP market; use cases for the application of CEP; and a reference architecture. This work is based on the fixed income demo Lab49 built with BEA which focused specifically on analytics integration and performance (as well as a cool WPF visualization).

Lab49’s Daniel Chait provides SDTimes’ editor-in-chief David Rubinstein with his views on CEP, HPC, multi-core processing, WPF/Flex, etc, here.  Nice article, David.

The last few months and weeks have been a bit mad with a host of new client projects coming online, and a tidal wave of marketing activities.

On the project front, and despite some dodgy market conditions, we have been continuing to see (and have started) some interesting projects around automated trading: from market simulation environments to real-time pricing to risk management systems. We have also seen more projects on the buy-side where the level of innovation and adoption of the latest technologies is still impressive. In advanced visualization (specifically, WPF/Silverlight), we are starting to see interest across various trading businesses which is very promising going forward. We also continue to be involved in quite a few projects involving grid computing, distributed cache, etc.

On the marketing front, we have been busy publishing new articles, contributed to a number of features in various industry publications and are currently in the process of writing some thought leadership pieces for technology and finance publications. We have also been doing some great sales & marketing activities with some of our technology partners around, including working on some new client opportunities and developing some demos leveraging WPF and CEP platforms. (We will also be starting to talk a bit more openly about our various partnerships)

What’s great about the recent flurry of project and marketing activity has been the balance across high performance computing (grid, cache, etc), Java (J2EE, Spring, opensource), Microsoft (WPF, Silverlight) and other technologies (messaging, market data, visualization, etc), which really helps to show Lab49’s depth and breadth across the technology space. Some highlights from the last few months include:

• A cool new Lab49 WPF Contest to find the best WPF developers in finance - with various sponsors contributing over $15,000 in prizes.
• Luke wrote a special feature”Computation on Demand” for GridToday which discusses the world of virtualization, with specific references to Amazon’s EC2.
• Daniel has been pretty active in giving interviews across the board, and extremely involved in various Microsoft activities, including the new Financial Industry Council, including being a guest on their 2nd podcast
• Matt started his (hopefully regular) column for Dr. Dobb’s: “WPF and the need to visualize CEP/ESP“, with more already in the works.
• Not to be outdone (!), Marc also wrote a great article for GridToday entitled, “Grid in Financial Services: Past, Present and Future“

Lots more news, articles, features, partner updates, etc in the pipeline that I will post as they happen..

Thanks to Marc for highlighting this cool site on interesting visualizations of complex networks. I noticed that some of the work by our friend, W. Bradford Pailey, gets good coverage. Lab49 has worked with Brad in the past on an FX Spot trading application in one of the banks, and he has also presented at one of our internal seminars. He continues to apply his genius to financial services - he worked with Edward Tufte on his Sparklines - and I would love to get my hands on the design for his NYSE Specialist Trading application (now that would make a great WPF demo!)

Two of my favourite pieces of work (art) from Brad include the Strength of Nations and Relationships Amongst Scientific Paradigms

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk  has an interesting twist on AI, whereby computer tasks are farmed out to humans.

Essentially, this is a service taking advantage of the fact that computers are great at processing vast amounts of data and crunching compex algorithms, but are not so good at associative and context-based knowledge processing (for now). In this service, the computer actually requests tasks to be performed by a “server farm” of humans, where the folks performing the tasks get paid for their efforts.

Brad Paley, who is a leading expert on interaction design, gave an interesting talk on Data Visualization at Lab49 recently. Part of his talk discussed the boundaries between computer intelligence/processing and human intelligence. Although computers can indeed process data in a few milliseconds, the human brain has been programmed over millions of years to interpret, associate and comprehend concepts and contexts, and is a lot more powerful than a computer at doing so. Some of Brad’s work includes helping the NYSE re-engineer the specialists’ workstations, and the revolutionary science behind the data visualization interface allows the specialist to process up to 30 times more information that they used to be able to do with the previous system.

So, computers are awesome at doing the volume of data processing, but specialists are still needed to provide context and to drive (and control) the market.