Project Trident, Microsoft’s Gift to the Scientific Community

Project Trident is a  new scientific tool kit by Microsoft that aims to revolutionize the way academia deals with the increasing onslaught of experiment data. In the past, as well as today, a scientist would design an experiment, collect the data, analyze the data using some sort of programming, and review the results. The big hang up in all of this was the programming involved to bring the experiment to life: a programmer was brought in to make one-off programs for a specific experiment. Any changes to the experiment would require the programmer to make revisions. If another scientist wanted to perform the experiment elsewhere, there would be another programmer involved to write the experiment code. This became an ever-increasing problem of inefficiencies and wasted time. Microsoft to the rescue.Borrowing an idea from industry and computer science, the software giant has introduced an idea based around an existing concept: workflow. Without getting into a detailed explanation (ask in the comments if you want me to), we can say that workflow is the organization of work and the ability to visualize the working process. In software engineering, it can allow for minute changes to be made without destroying hours of productivity. A programmer is still required for the initial programming and set-up, but a scientist who is relatively tech-savvy would now be able to make small changes to the processing and flow of information in minutes. This is done by developing a GUI for the program that analyzes experimental data. Think of it as a flow chart that has some serious programming behind the boxes. This might sound so obvious, so why wasn’t it done before? Why did Microsoft have to be the company to push this out?

The answer, dear readers, is interoperability! Without the ability to work on several machines, the idea of workflow was nice in theory. Yet it still didn’t change the fact that scientist were at the mercy of their programmers. So Microsoft did what it does best: provide a common language, a common set of tools, and a common workspace for experiments to take place.

Often, it takes the industry leader to make a standard. Who better than Microsoft, the industry leader in many fields of software, to tackle this project head-on? Project Trident is based on .Net, Windows Workflow Foundation, and Silverlight (for those that want to run workflows remotely). The tool also has the ability to output into a myriad of other Microsoft software, including Excel and Word.

What does this mean for you and me? Absolutely nothing. What does this mean for the scientific community – the people for whom this is designed for? To them, it means the world! Now, scientists the world over have the ability to run experiments with little to no interaction from a programming expert after the initial set up. With a common foundation, scientists the world over can recreate experiments using the same software and redesign experiments for use with other settings. In its press release, Microsoft highlighted an experiment designed for mice that, with very little modification to the workflow, has the ability to run on humans. With one fell swoop, Microsoft has given the scientific community a much-needed set of tools, for free. The only question now is, will the scientific community use them?