next project in micro soft                    Welcome to the fourth episode of the Next at Microsoft podcast series. In this edition,AccuWeather Vice President Jon Porter and Drew Purves, a Microsoft researcher, talk about the power of big data analytics to make predictions about things like  weather, climate change and food security.

So yeah, nothing deep here – just the future of life on earth!

Drew, head of the Computational Ecology and Environmental Science Group (CEES) at Microsoft Research Cambridge, helps develop predictive models of ecological systems, by inventing and applying new models and new scientific software tools. Jon puts his dual backgrounds in meteorology and IT to work with AccuWeather, which provides personalized predictions that have profound impact on daily lives, as well as during emergencies. It gives people the information they need to make decisions on the fly.

We talk about how far predictive technologies have come over the past decade – such as the ability to deliver up-to-the-minute weather alerts to people who aren’t used to even daily forecasts in certain areas of the world, to developing crop strategies and more efficient agricultural processes that can resist the debilitating effects of droughts.