On January 29, 2020, we announced the launch of AI for Health, an initiative to advance the health of people and communities around the world. This five-year commitment was created to empower nonprofits, researchers and organizations with AI and data science tools.
Since then, the world has changed. As of the time of writing, the COVID-19 virus has infected more than 1.4 million people around the world. The crisis has made it painfully clear that health transcends every border, impacting every person on the planet.
Given the urgency, we are mobilizing our AI for Health initiative to focus on helping those on the front lines of research of COVID-19. We’re focusing our efforts in five specific areas where we think data, analysis and the skills of our data scientists can have the biggest impact. And we’re immediately dedicating $20 million to this specific effort.
This is part of Microsoft’s larger commitment toward fighting COVID-19, as we are working to support remote education and empower students around the world, enabling businesses to work from home, securing needed medical supplies and supporting local communities. We hope this added commitment empowers researchers and organizations to solve this crisis.
The work to fight COVID-19 is already underway. A handful of key partnerships include:
• The COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium, a private-public effort spearheaded by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, for which Microsoft is providing researchers access to the world’s most powerful computing resources, which can significantly speed the pace of scientific discovery in the fight to stop the virus. Around the world, Microsoft’s research scientists, spanning computer science, biology, medicine and public health, are collaborating on projects in the consortium
• The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), a global health research organization at the University of Washington School of Medicine, is releasing a set of COVID-19 data visualizations and forecasts that the White House, FEMA, governors and hospital administrators have started using to mobilize resources
• The Washington State Department of Health is working on a new dashboard that aims to increase timeliness, accuracy and speed of data reporting to the public. The dashboard relies on data reported by local health jurisdictions, healthcare facilities and labs
• Folding@home, a global organization that uses distributed computing is researching COVID-19 proteins that could help with designing therapeutics
• The Sepsis Center of Research Excellence (SCORE-UW), part of the University of Washington’s Department of Medicine, is a global collaboration between a network of hospitals, industry, blood banks, universities and funding partners. Using clinical data, radiologic imaging and other patient biomarker responses, SCORE-UW is developing novel algorithms to predict, and improve, healthcare and socioeconomic outcomes of COVID-19 positive patients
• Take, the Brazilian leader in chatbots and the smart contacts market, developed a bot to bring official and credible information to the public and connect potential patients to medical teams to avoid overloading Brazilian hospitals
AI for Health COVID-19 focus areas
Given the global scale of the pandemic, technology will play a critical role in nearly every facet of addressing COVID-19, from using AI to crunch massive datasets to analyzing disease vectors and identifying treatment impacts. We will collaborate with nonprofits, governments and academic researchers on solutions, and bring our experience to the table, providing access to Microsoft AI, technical experts, data scientists and other resources.
Our efforts to support COVID-19-related research efforts will focus on five areas:
• Data and insights to inform for people’s safety and economic impacts
• Treatment and diagnostics, enabling research to further the development of vaccines, diagnostics and therapeutics
• Allocation of resources, including recommendations on the allocation of limited assets, such as hospital space and medical supplies
• Dissemination of accurate information to minimize misinformation sharing
• Scientific research to study and understand COVID-19.
My colleague Eric Horvitz, Microsoft’s Chief Scientific Officer, sums it up nicely, “Data and computation will help light the path to mitigating the pandemic. We’re passionate about aiming our computing resources and expertise at empowering those with the most promising directions, including efforts in biomedicine, logistics, epidemiology and public health.”
Understanding and tracking our progress against COVID-19
We want the world to better understand COVID-19. As such, we have developed a set of interactive visualizations, available below, so everyone has full transparency into the scope of the problem and the progress we are making together to heal the world. We will continue to update and refine this visualization with new data and insights.
COVID-19 is a global problem and finding a solution will take all our efforts. We are humbled and honored to work with researchers across the globe and support them with this additional dedicated support from AI for Health.
As I write this, millions of people around the world are adjusting to full-time remote work and learning. Working remotely full-time can challenge us as humans because we are hardwired for connection. Here at Microsoft, we did a study a couple years back that asked 14,000 people in seven countries to name the form of communication that makes them happiest. No surprise, in-person meetings ranked number one over email, chat, or texting across all generations. In a moment where meeting face-to-face is impossible, how do we continue to connect to one another?
Over the past weeks, we’ve been inspired by the ways our customers are connecting during meetings in Microsoft Teams. We’ve seen bosses show up to meetings as virtual potato heads and team stand-ups turn delightfully silly. From teams of workers sharing shift updates to students and teachers connecting in virtual classrooms and CEOs conducting town hall Q&As with thousands of employees, we’re all finding new ways to come together when we have to work and learn apart.
This idea is reflected in the sheer number of meetings happening in Microsoft Teams each day. We’ve seen a new daily record of 2.7 billion meeting minutes in one day,1 a 200 percent increase from 900 million on March 16. And as students and teachers turn to Teams for distance learning, there are 183,000 tenants in 175 countries using Teams for Education.2
To explore changing trends in remote work and learning further, today we’re releasing the first report from our new Work Trend Index. Through ongoing research, we will explore how work is changing via surveys and interviews, and by looking at trends in the way people interact with our productivity tools.
This first report explores how people are learning to connect as a team when they need to work apart. Our goal in sharing these insights is twofold. First, while safeguarding personal and organizational data, we want to help our customers learn from the bright spots and plan for the future. Second, we aim to use these insights to guide innovation in our products so that we can continue to build the best possible experiences.
Key findings
As the world works in Microsoft 365, searches in Bing, and connects on LinkedIn, it creates trillions of signals—like emails, meetings, searches, and posts—that form the Microsoft Graph, one of the largest graphs of human interactions at work in the world. Trends in this data provide a unique view into the world’s productivity patterns.
Microsoft takes privacy seriously. We remove all personal data and organization-identifying data, such as company name, from the data before using it to produce reports. We never use customer content such as information within an email, chat, document or meeting to produce reports. Our goal is to discover and share broad workplace trends from aggregated data from the Microsoft Graph.
People are finding a human connection through video
Researchers like Dr. Fiona Kerr have found that eye contact and physical connection with another human increases dopamine and decreases the stress hormone cortisol. Her research shows that you can even physically calm someone down simply by looking them in the eye. So as the world works remotely, it is no surprise people are turning on video in Teams meetings two times more3than before many of us began working from home full-time. We’ve also seen total video calls in Teams grow by over 1,000 percent in the month of March.4
As we looked at countries with the most active Teams users, we saw people in Norway and the Netherlands turn on video most, with about 60 percent of calls including video. People in Australia use video in meetings 57 percent of the time, Italy 53 percent, Chile 52 percent, Switzerland 51 percent, and Spain 49 percent. Meanwhile people in the U.K., Canada, and Sweden use video 47 percent of the time and people in Mexico and the U.S. use it 41 percent and 38 percent respectively.
Who doesn’t use video as much and why? People in India use video in 22 percent of meetings, Singapore 26 percent, South Africa 36 percent, France 37 percent, and Japan 39 percent. This may be attributed in part to less access to devices and stable internet in some regions such as India and South Africa.
We’ve been inspired by the ways our customers are using video to connect during this time. For example, The 2nd Affiliated Hospital of Wenzhou Medical University, the largest hospital in Wenzhou, China, deployed Microsoft Teams to enable healthcare staff inside the quarantined section of the hospital to communicate with non-quarantined staff, allowing for secure coordination of patient care while ensuring the health and safety of their workforce.
While there is no true replacement for in-person collaboration, we’re working harder than ever to quickly innovate to decrease pain points, increase human connection, and make work a bit more fun.
Custom backgrounds, which allow you to replace your background in Teams meetings with a fresh and bright home office, for example, is now generally available in Teams. This feature builds upon background blur, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to blur the environment behind you. In the future, we will also include the ability to upload your own custom images.
To make video calls more inclusive, the raise hand feature we announced last month is rolling out globally this month. It lets meeting participants indicate they have something to say during a meeting by clicking on a hand-raise icon in the meeting control bar.
Today, we are releasing the ability for meeting organizers to end a meeting for all participants with the click of a button. Meeting organizers can now find an option to “end meeting” in the meeting control bar options.
Meeting organizers, especially teachers, often need to know who joined their Teams meetings. This month, you will be able to download a participant report, found in the participant list, that includes join and leave times for participants.
Later this year, we will bring real-time noise suppression, which uses AI to reduce distracting background noise such as loud typing or a barking dog in Teams meetings.
People are using video to connect in new ways
As companies adapt to full-time remote work, we’re seeing more leaders use virtual town halls to connect employees on a large-scale basis. Large conferences and events are also moving online. We’re also seeing more people take advantage of the ability to record Teams meetings—such as a teacher recording a lesson for students or a worker recording a meeting for an invited colleague to view later.
Microsoft Stream is the service that powers live events and meeting recordings in Teams. As a result of customers moving events online, the number ofStreamvideos in Teams per week has increased over five times in the last month with hundreds of hours of video uploaded per minute.5
Nuance, which uses AI to solve some of the world’s toughest problems in healthcare, financial services, telecommunications, government, and retail, turned their global R&D conference—planned to take place in Montreal—virtual in a matter of days. Organizers connected hundreds of attendees with a Teams channel and PDF agenda that linked to each Teams event session. Last year Nuance spent approximately $700,000 on the conference and this year the cost was close to zero, with no carbon impact from global travel.
People are embracing a more flexible work schedule
Productivity is different for everyone. The so-called larks of the world are more productive in the morning, while night owls are more creative and focused in the evening. Our data shows that a more flexible workday created by remote work is allowing people to work when it’s best for them.
From March 1–31, the average time between a person’s first use of Teams and last use of Teams each day increased by over one hour. This data doesn’t necessarily mean people are working more hours per day, rather that they are breaking up the day in a way that works for their personal productivity or makes space for obligations outside of work.
Countries and industries most impacted are turning to mobile to connect with their team
As organizations aim to continue operations, we’ve seen a considerable increase in Teams usage on mobile devices such as a phone or tablet. The number of weekly Teams mobile users grew more than 300 percent from early February to March 31. Some of our largest usage increases have been from customers in industries most impacted by the outbreak. With 183,000 tenants in 175 countries using Teams for Education, we’ve seen large increases in usage of Teams on mobile devices from customers in Higher Education and Primary and Secondary Education (K-12). We’ve also seen a notable increase from customers in Government-related industries.
When you consider this from a capacity perspective, it’s not just about the number of new users, but the amount they are using it each week—what we refer to as engagement. Engagement in Teams on mobile devices has increased exponentially in several regions most impacted by the crisis including Netherlands, Italy, Spain and France.
One example of a school transitioning to remote learning is Durham University in North East England. Classes had to move online and staff needed to work remotely so that the university could continue to serve its students, academics, and professional services during the outbreak. To respond effectively to the developing crisis, Durham University scaled up its use of Microsoft Teams to add to its online learning toolset, maintain community, and make it possible to collaborate and communicate remotely and securely on the device that works best for their students and staff.
This moment will change the way we work and connect with each other forever
Trends in the data and conversations with our customers show us the world is realizing we can effectively connect across distances in a way some never thought possible before. For example, despite some employees returning to work, there are still more than two times the number new Teams users each dayin China compared to end of January.6 The number of daily active Teams users in China also continues to grow week over week. We can also learn from customers who are showing it’s possible to continue their mission while forced to work apart.
For instance, Mercy Housing, a non-profit committed to creating affordable housing options, implemented technology, including Microsoft Teams, to maintain continuity in the face of COVID-19. “The capability to conduct virtual meetings and collaborate on documents in a single place has been instrumental as many of our 1,600 employees shifted to remote work practically overnight. In some cases, our resident services staff is exploring the use of Teams video meetings to maintain a human connection with our residents, which is so important to supporting mental and emotional well-being in a time like this. This remote teamwork has allowed us to help our 45,000 vulnerable residents stay in their homes,” accounted Gunnar Tande, CIO and Senior Vice President, Technology & Strategy, Mercy Housing.
Even in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, The Salvation Army is continuing efforts to address the needs of those they serve, including housing the homeless and feeding the hungry. Tim Schaal, Information Technology Director for The Salvation Army United States Western Territory, noted that despite the swift transition to remote work for thousands of employees, “Microsoft Teams allowed us to continue providing critical assistance in cities and towns, big and small, throughout the thirteen western states.”
We are so glad to see that our technology is helping these organizations continue their important work. At Microsoft, our mission is to empower every individual and every organization on the planet to achieve more. And at a moment like this, when we are all adjusting to a new normal, it’s never felt more important to help connect more people and keep more organizations up and running with secure tools. Although the way we work has changed, our customers show us every day that our drive to connect to one another is so often stronger than the circumstances that keep us apart.
12.7 billion meeting minutes experienced in Teams on March 31, 2020. 2Tenants often represent school districts with dozens or hundreds of schools. 3Proportion of weekly calls and meetings with video grew from 21 percent to 43 percent, March 2–March 31. 4Data reflects increase in total weekly video calls in Teams from March 2–March 31. 5Data reflects weekly hours of videos being sent from March 1–March 28. 6Data reflects increase from last week in January to third week in March.
Ready or not, much of the world was thrust into working from home, which means more people and devices are now accessing sensitive corporate data across home networks. Defenders are working round the clock to secure endpoints and ensure the fidelity of not only those endpoints, but also identities, email, and applications, as people are using whatever device they need to get work done. This isn’t something anyone, including our security professionals, were given time to prepare for, yet many customers have been thrust into a new environment and challenged to respond quickly. Microsoft is here to help lighten the load on defenders, offer guidance on what to prioritize to keep your workforce secure, and share resources about the built-in protections of our products.
Attackers are capitalizing on fear. We’re watching them. We’re pushing back.
Our inboxes, mobile alerts, TVs, and news updates are all COVID-19, all the time. It’s overwhelming and attackers know it. They know many are clicking without looking because stress levels are high and they’re taking advantage of that. That’s why we’re seeing an increase in the success of phishing and social engineering attacks. Attackers don’t suddenly have more resources they’re diverting towards tricking users; instead they’re pivoting their existing infrastructure, like ransomware, phishing, and other malware delivery tools, to include COVID-19 keywords that get us to click. Once we click, they can infiltrate our inboxes, steal our credentials, share more malicious links with coworkers across collaboration tools, and lie in wait to steal information that will give them the biggest payout. This is where intelligent solutions that can monitor for malicious activity across – that’s the key word – emails, identities, endpoints, and applications with built-in automation to proactively protect, detect, respond to, and prevent these types of attacks from being successful will help us fight this battle against opportunistic attackers.
Our threat intelligence teams at Microsoft are actively monitoring and responding to this shift in focus. Our data shows that these COVID-19 themed threats are retreads of existing attacks that have been slightly altered to tie to this pandemic. This means we’re seeing a changing of lures, not a surge in attacks. Our intelligence shows that these attacks are settling into a rhythm that is the normal ebb and flow of the threat environment:
Every country in the world has seen at least one COVID-19 themed attack (see map below). The volume of successful attacks in outbreak-hit countries is increasing, as fear and the desire for information grows. Our telemetry shows that China, the United States, and Russia have been hit the hardest.
The trendy and pervasive Trickbot and Emotet malware families are very active and rebranding their lures to take advantage of the outbreak. We have observed 76 threat variants to date globally using COVID-19 themed lures (map below).
Microsoft tracks thousands of email phishing campaigns that cover millions of malicious messages every week. Phishing campaigns are more than just one targeted email at one targeted user. They include potentially hundreds or thousands of malicious emails targeting hundreds or thousands of users, which is why they can be so effective. Of the millions of targeted messages we see each day, roughly 60,000 include COVID-19 related malicious attachments or malicious URLs.
While that number sounds very large, it’s important to note that that is less than two percent of the total volume of threats we actively track and protect against daily, which reinforces that the overall volume of threats is not increasing but attackers are shifting their techniques to capitalize on fear. Attackers are impersonating established entities like the World Health Organization (WHO), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Department of Health to get into inboxes. Here’s an example of what just one of these malicious emails looks like now compared to before the COVID-19 crisis:
In a single day, SmartScreen sees and processes more than 18,000 malicious COVID-19-themed URLs and IP addresses. This again shows us that attackers are getting more aggressive and agile in the delivery of their attacks – using the same delivery methods, but swapping out the malicious URLs on a more frequent basis in an effort to evade machine learning protections.
Microsoft Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection prevented a big phishing campaign that used a fake Office 365 sign-in page to capture credentials. Roughly 2,300 unique HTML attachments posing as COVID-19 financial compensation information were caught in 24 hours in this one campaign. We expect to see more campaigns that utilize the economic fear from lost income, as governments widen the mandatory shutdown of their economies and stimulus funds begin to be issued in the U.S.
Several advanced persistent threat and nation-state actors have been observed targeting healthcare organizations and using COVID-19-themed lures in their campaigns. We continue to identify, track, and build proactive protections against these threats in all of our security products. When customers are affected by these attacks, Microsoft notifies the customer directly to help speed up investigations. We also report malicious COVID-19-themed domains and URLs to the proper authorities so that they can be taken down, and where possible, the individuals behind them prosecuted.
Relative impact of COVID-19 themed attacks across the world by file count (as of April 7, 2020)
From endpoints and identities to the cloud, we have you covered
While phishing email is a common attack vector, it’s only one of the many points of entry for attackers. Defenders need a much broader view and solutions for remediation than visibility into just one entry method. An attacker’s primary goal is to gain entry and expand across domains so they can persist in an organization and lie in wait to steal or encrypt as much sensitive information as they can to reap the biggest payout. Defenders require visibility across each of these domains and automated correlation across emails, identities, endpoints, and cloud applications to see the full scope of compromise. Only with this view can defenders adequately remediate affected assets, apply Conditional Access, and prevent the same or similar attacks from being successful again.
During this trying time, we want to remind our customers what protections you have built into our products and offer guidance for what to prioritize:
Protect endpoints with Microsoft Defender ATP, which covers licensed users for up to five concurrent devices that can be easily onboarded at any time. Microsoft Defender ATP monitors threats from across platforms, including macOS. Our tech community post includes additional guidance, best practices, onboarding, and licensing information.
Enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) and Conditional Access through Azure Active Directory to protect identities. This is more important than ever to mitigate credential compromise as users work from home. We recommend connecting all apps to Azure AD for single sign-on – from SaaS to on-premises apps; enabling MFA and applying Conditional Access policies; and extending secure access to contractors and partners. Microsoft also offers a free Azure AD service for single sign-on, including MFA using the Microsoft Authenticator app.
Safeguard inboxes and email accounts with Office 365 ATP, Microsoft’s cloud-based email filtering service, which shields against phishing and malware, including features to safeguard your organization from messaging-policy violations, targeted attacks, zero-days, and malicious URLs. Intelligent recommendations from Security Policy Advisor can help reduce macro attack surface, and the Office Cloud Policy Service can help you implement security baselines.
Microsoft Cloud App Security can help protect against shadow IT and unsanctioned app usage, identify and remediate cloud-native attacks, and control how data travels across cloud apps from Microsoft or third-party applications.
Microsoft Threat Protection correlates signals from across each of these domains using Azure ATP, Microsoft Defender ATP, Office 365 ATP, and Microsoft Cloud App Security, to understand the entire attack chain to help defenders prioritize which threats are most critical to address and to auto-heal affected user identities, email inboxes, endpoints, and cloud apps back to a safe state. Our threat intelligence combines signals from not just one attack vector like email phishing, but from across emails, identities, endpoints, and cloud apps to understand how the threat landscape is changing and build that intelligence into our products to prevent attack sprawl and persistence. The built-in, automated remediation capabilities across these solutions can also help reduce the manual workload on defenders that comes from the multitude of new devices and connections.
Azure Sentinel is a cloud-native SIEM that brings together insights from Microsoft Threat Protection and Azure Security Center, along with the whole world of third-party and custom application logs to help security teams gain visibility, triage, and investigate threats across their enterprise. As with all Microsoft Security products, Azure Sentinel customers benefit from Microsoft threat intelligence to detect and hunt for attacks. Azure Sentinel makes it easy to add new data sources and scale existing ones with built-in workbooks, hunting queries, and analytics to help teams identify, prioritize, and respond to threats. We recently shared a threat hunting notebook developed to hunt for COVID-19 related threats in Azure Sentinel.
Cloud-delivered protections are a critical part of staying up to date with the latest security updates and patches. If you don’t already have them turned on, we highly recommend it. We also offer advanced hunting through both Microsoft Threat Protection and Azure Sentinel.
We’ll keep sharing and protecting – stay tuned, stay safe
Remember that we at Microsoft are 3,500 defenders strong. We’re very actively monitoring the threat landscape, we’re here to help: we’re providing resources, guidance, and for dire cases we have support available from services like the Microsoft Detection and Response (DART) team to help investigate and remediate.
All of our guidance related to COVID-19 is and will be posted here. We will continue to share updates across channels to keep you informed. Please stay safe, stay connected, stay informed.
THANK YOU to our defenders who are working tirelessly to keep us secure and connected during this pandemic.
-Rob and all of us from across Microsoft security
To stay up to date with verified information on the COVID-19 crisis, the following sites are available:
As the coronavirus pandemic began spreading across Europe earlier this year, the number of calls to Emergency Medical Services Copenhagen quickly ramped up.
The organization, which provides emergency care for about one-third of Denmark’s population, saw calls to its emergency lines almost double after the outbreak began, with around 2,000 calls coming in daily by early March from worried people who were showing symptoms of COVID-19 or had questions about the disease.
The organization opened a second call center to handle the inquiries, but that wasn’t enough.
“We realized that many people had the same general questions,” says CEO and medical doctor Freddy Lippert. “A virtual assistant seemed like a great option to decrease the load on the workforce. Not only can it handle much more volume than the call center, it can run a symptom checker and identify high-risk patients according to medical protocols in the same way medical staff would, directing those in need to a ‘warm handover’ with a human.”
Freddy Lippert, CEO of Emergency Medical Services Copenhagen.
Emergency Medical Services Copenhagen is now among health care organizations in Europe and beyond using Microsoft’s Healthcare Bot service to help screen people for potential coronavirus infection and treatment. Powered by Microsoft Azure, the service uses artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing technology to help organizations create their own bots — in which the data is owned and solely accessible by the organization — to respond to inquiries and free up doctors, nurses and other health care professionals so they can provide critical care to patients who need it.
Microsoft’s Healthcare Bot service has been used by health care organizations for more than a year and was originally designed to support common virtual health assistant scenarios. But as the coronavirus pandemic took hold, threatening to overwhelm health care systems worldwide, organizations in the U.S., Europe and the Middle East have been using the tool to help screen patients for potential COVID-19 infection.
Since March, health organizations have created 1,230 COVID-19 self-assessment bots based on the Microsoft Healthcare bot service, reaching 18 million individuals and serving more than 160 million messages.
“The coronavirus pandemic is putting unprecedented demands on health care systems and workers globally,” says Hadas Bitran, group manager of Microsoft Healthcare and head of the Healthcare Bot team.
“Bots can help alleviate some of that pressure by addressing queries from patients and helping them with information about possible next steps if they have symptoms of COVID-19.”
Using the Microsoft Healthcare Bot service, Emergency Medical Service Copenhagen created and launched its COVID-19 bot in mid-March in less than two days. The bot answered 30,000 calls the first day, Lippert says, lowering the number of inquiries to Denmark’s emergency number and reducing demand on healthcare workers.
“It was a great service for those who used the bot and it allows us to focus on patients that really need help,” Lippert says. “We saw the immediate effect.”
The bot was considered so successful that it was quickly rolled out nationwide. Stephanie Lose, president of the Danish Regions, says the tool will help relieve the burden on emergency lines throughout the country and ensure callers in most need of help can be assisted sooner.
“I am proud that, at a critical time during the COVID-19 epidemic, we have succeeded in scaling a solution from one region to the whole country,” she says.
Spallanzani Hospital in Rome, which treated Europe’s first two confirmed coronavirus cases, used Microsoft’s solution to develop its own bot.
Italy, which was among the countries hit earliest and hardest by the pandemic, has also set up its own COVID-19 bot. Rome’s Spallanzani Hospital, which treated Europe’s first two confirmed coronavirus cases in late January, used Microsoft’s solution to develop a bot in a few hours, with the goal of helping meet requests for information that quickly swelled as the number of cases grew.
Gabriele Rinonapoli, the hospital’s IT manager, says while the country remains focused on dealing with an “extreme health crisis,” the bot will likely be used more in future months to help manage treatment for patients with chronic conditions.
“The bot can make it easier for citizens to access information,” he says. “The standardization of information is critical for emergency management, to limit unnecessary access to health care facilities and reduce the workload of public relations offices. Moreover, the analysis of questionnaire replies could create an interesting database to develop new studies.”
Rinonapoli sees potential for bots to be used broadly by health care organizations to collect data that can help to better understand diseases and develop proactive health measures.
“If all health care organizations were provided with these tools, it would be easier to gather real-time, real-world data,” he says.
Helsinki University Hospital created a service named Coronabot.
Helsinki University Hospital in Finland used the Healthcare Bot to create its Coronabot, which asks users questions about symptoms, potential exposure and interactions with people who have the coronavirus and provides information on seeking treatment. Additionally, it offers information on managing anxiety as well as exercises and content created by mental health professionals at the hospital.
In a country of about 5.5 million people, the Coronabot, launched March 16, had logged more than 73,000 visitors and 1.5 million messages by early April, allowing health care workers to focus on sick patients and prepare for a possible uptick in infections if the level of testing increases in Finland.
“In these unprecedented times, it’s so important to provide the right information and to disseminate it openly and publicly,” says Visa Honkanen, director of development at Helsinki University Hospital. “We are lucky that we live in a culture where misinformation has a difficult stand. The bot really played an important role in educating the public.”
Visa Honkanen, director of development at Helsinki University Hospital.
The hospital is now exploring additional scenarios in which the bot might be used — for example, to proactively communicate with patients about scheduled treatments or provide information about procedures.
“This is freeing resources for the team to focus on the (coronavirus) crisis,” Honkanen says.
Microsoft’s solution is also being used at Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, Israel’s largest acute care facility, which created its COVID-19 bot — named Corey — in less than a day. The bot received thousands of inquiries on its first day of operation in late March and has so far served more than 30,000 people and handled some 412,000 messages.
“We were able to reduce the load on the health care system and ensure that caregivers have more time to treat patients,” says Ronni Gamzu, the center’s CEO.
“Other organizations should know that it does not take a tech expert to deploy the bot. It is very easy, fast and intuitive.”
Microsoft is working with health care organizations around the globe to deploy their own versions of the Healthcare Bot and is committed to helping health systems respond to the pandemic.
“We’re grateful to be able to help health care organizations quickly offer their communities and patients a COVID-19 self-assessment bot based on the Microsoft Healthcare Bot service,” Bitran says. “As a technology company, it’s critical for us to provide solutions that can help patients and clinical teams in the fight against this global health crisis.”
Top photo: Workers at Emergency Medical Services Copenhagen. Photo by Akutberedskabet. Photo of Freddy Lippert by Rune Evensen. Photos of Visa Honkanen and Helsinki University Hospital courtesy of HUS. Photo of Spallanzani Hospital courtesy of the hospital.
Today, on our first Inside Xbox episode of 2020, we got a closer look at the single-player campaign in Grounded, the upcoming survival adventure game from our friends at Obsidian Entertainment, revealed the latest Xbox Game Pass titles, discussed the recently revealed Xbox Series X tech, and gave viewers the skinny on the most important things to know about the upcoming Gears Tactics.
There was also plenty of surprise news dropped on today’s show: Typhoon Studios revealed the Journey to the Savage Planet DLC, Hotline Miami Collection is getting a surprise Xbox One release, and we got our very first look at The Last Campfire, an intriguing new title from developer Hello Games.
For a full recap, read on below or watch the replay of Inside Xbox episode above when the VOD is available.
Go Big or Never Go Home in Obsidian Entertainment’s Grounded
Obsidian Entertainment announced upcoming survival adventure game Grounded will enter Xbox Game Preview with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and Steam Early Access on July 28, 2020. As part of today’s announcement, the team also revealed a brand new trailer focusing on the single player experience for Grounded, and a first-ever livestream with Obsidian Entertainment’s Game Director, Adam Brennecke and Social Media Manager, Shyla Schofield, who gave a closer look at the game. For more details, check out the full Grounded Inside Xbox post here.
A Closer Look at Xbox Series X Technologies
A few weeks ago, we took an in-depth look at some of the tech powering the Xbox Series X and got our first look at the new Xbox Wireless Controller. On today’s show, our own Major Nelson had a chance to sit down with Jason Ronald, Director of Product Management on Xbox Series X, to break down some of what was shared about our most powerful console ever. They discussed everything from graphics technology like DirectX raytracing and variable rate shading to audio processing, Quick Resume and storage options. Ronald also highlighted the Xbox Velocity Architecture, including what this entails and what it will enables for games.
The Evolution of Xbox Game Bar Continues
We’re continuing the evolution of Xbox Game Bar, the customizable gaming overlay built into Windows 10 for PC. Starting today, Insiders will have access to apps from partners like Razer, XSplit and Intel directly from Xbox Game Bar through new widgets — no more having to Alt+Tab to separate apps while gaming. We’ve seen incredible interest from PC gaming partners in this fan-requested feature, and we look forward to growing the number of available widgets. For more information on the Xbox Game Bar news announced today, please check out this post.
Announcing More Great Titles Hitting Xbox Game Pass
We’re thrilled to announce that on April 13, Xbox Game Pass will be expanding to Japan and Korea. Xbox Game Pass for PC will launch in beta for gamers in Korea and will be included as part of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate benefits, which is already available for gamers in the region, while all Xbox Game Pass services for console and PC will come to Japan for the first time. We also shared new titles joining the Xbox Game Pass libraries across console and PC, including Alvastia Chronicles, Journey to the Savage Planet, Overcooked! 2, Football Manager 2020, Mistover and Stranger Things 3: The Game. For more details on our Xbox Game Pass news this episode, check out the Xbox Game Pass post here.
Project xCloud Preview Adds More Great Games from EA
We’ve added even more titles to the Project xCloud preview! Beginning today, participants can play three more great games from EA on their Android phones or tablets, including The Sims 4, Unravel Two, and Dragon Age: Inquisition. Additionally, this morning we announced that the Project xCloud preview will be heading to 11 new countries across Western Europe. If you’re interested in joining the Project xCloud preview so you can stream these great games, please visit xbox.com/projectxcloud.
Forza Street Races onto Mobile on May 5
Get your engines ready … Forza Street is coming to your iOS and Android devices on May 5. We’ve received incredible engagement from players during Android pre-registration and are excited to let iOS gamers know they too will hit the streets in just a few weeks. For a limited time, we’ll also be giving out the Founder’s Pack to anyone who plays Forza Street between May 5 and June 5 as a welcoming gift. Pre-register now on Google Play and the Samsung Galaxy Store, and for more information, check out the full Forza Street Wire post here.
Breaking Down Five Things You Need to Know About Gears Tactics
Today, The Coalition celebrated Gears Tactics going gold with a new video highlighting five badass things you need to know before launch and their commitment to a gameplay experience tailored to PC, including new details on a partnership with Intel. Available April 28 on Windows 10 PC, Steam and with Xbox Game Pass for PC (Beta), Gears Tactics has players assume the role of Gabriel “Gabe” Diaz as he recruits, equips, and commands his squad on a mission to hunt down the relentless leader of the Locust army: Ukkon. For more on Gears Tactics, including the latest design collaboration with acclaimed artist Luke Preece, click here.
Set Sail with Sea of Thieves’ Free Ships of Fortune Update
Prospective pirates got a look at the new Sea of Thieves Ships of Fortune update arriving later this month. Ships of Fortune adds new depth to the game’s trading companies, allowing players the option to represent their favorite Trading Companies as emissaries for boosted rewards and exclusive cosmetic items. What’s more, a new and mysterious Company known as The Reaper’s Bones is also making their debut tasking players with pillaging rival ships and taking their Emissary Flags and loot as trophies. For more details on our Sea of Thieves news this episode, check out our full post here.
A New Batch of ID@Xbox Games is Coming to Xbox One
In today’s show, we took a look at a brand-new game called The Last Campfire, a dark fantasy from developer Hello Games that combines a beautiful art style with a wide variety of puzzles to create a wholly unique experience. There was also a new trailer for Atomicrops, an action-packed farming simulator where you must cultivate and defend the last farm in a post-apocalypse wasteland. Finally, it was announced that the action-packed top-down shooter Hotline Miami Collection is not only coming to Xbox One, but is actually available right now. Surprise!
We hope you enjoyed the show, and we’ll see you next time!
Companies also collaborate on sustainability initiatives
New York and Redmond, Wash. – Tuesday, April 7, 2020 – BlackRock and Microsoft Corp. have formed a strategic partnership to host BlackRock’s Aladdin infrastructure on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, bringing enhanced capabilities to BlackRock and its Aladdin clients, which include many of the world’s most sophisticated institutional investors and wealth managers.
By adopting Microsoft Azure, BlackRock will both accelerate innovation on Aladdin through greater computing scale and unlock new capabilities to enhance the client experience. BlackRock will also leverage Microsoft Azure’s network of global data centers and capabilities to meet the localized needs of Aladdin clients, all while maintaining Aladdin’s highest standards for resiliency and security.
“As both a user and a provider of Aladdin, this decision reflects BlackRock’s ongoing commitment to continuous innovation and scalable operating solutions,” said Rob Goldstein, Chief Operating Officer of BlackRock. “Aladdin infrastructure deployed on Microsoft Azure’s cloud platform will provide BlackRock with enhanced capabilities to deliver the best outcomes for our Aladdin clients.”
“By bringing Aladdin to the cloud, Microsoft will support BlackRock in further enhancing its client experience while also enabling continuous innovation in the financial services industry,” said Judson Althoff, executive vice president of Microsoft’s Worldwide Commercial Business. “Together, we will empower an ecosystem of financial services customers running their most critical workloads in the cloud.”
As the financial services industry looks to navigate ever-changing markets, institutions need integrated and scalable platforms to adapt to the growing complexity of managing data, risk management and advanced analytics to deliver innovative solutions to clients. To help support this trend, over time, the Microsoft Azure platform will enable BlackRock to accelerate innovation and collaboration between Aladdin and providers across the financial services ecosystem.
Firms to Collaborate on Sustainable Finance
In line with both firms’ commitment to sustainability, BlackRock and Microsoft will also work together on initiatives that leverage technology to improve and expand sustainability data and analytics. The lack of standardized, high-quality data remains a significant hurdle in understanding the impact of sustainability-related risk on investment portfolios and company performance. Big data, machine learning and AI can all play a critical role in improving access to and the impact and quality of sustainability data.
The two firms will invite collaboration – whether from academics, startups, non-profits or others – on sustainability-related data, analytics and technology. As a first step, the firms will collaborate on challenge grants for organizations that use data and technology to understand and drive sustainability. The firms will also provide technical expertise, leveraging Microsoft’s scale in computing, big data and AI, and BlackRock’s leading investment and portfolio management solutions to support a better understanding of corporate sustainability behavior.
About Aladdin
Aladdin is BlackRock’s end-to-end investment management and operations platform used by institutional investors including asset managers, pension funds, insurers and corporate treasurers. It combines sophisticated risk analytics with comprehensive portfolio management, trading and operations tools on a single, unified platform. Also customized for wealth managers, Aladdin provides a common language across the investment lifecycle and enables a culture of risk transparency among users.
About BlackRock
BlackRock’s purpose is to help more and more people experience financial well-being. As a fiduciary to investors and a leading provider of financial technology, our clients turn to us for the solutions they need when planning for their most important goals. As of December 31, 2019, the firm managed approximately $7.43 trillion in assets on behalf of investors worldwide. For additional information on BlackRock, please visit www.blackrock.com/corporate
About Microsoft
Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
The COVID-19 outbreak is the challenge of a lifetime for government officials, public health workers, and healthcare providers. The pandemic presents immense challenges for doctors and other health workers to screen, diagnose, and care for patients with the disease all while needing to stay healthy themselves. It presents communications, coordination, and logistical burdens for hospitals, public health departments, and government agencies trying to manage the outbreak.
To gain a firsthand view of how COVID-19 is impacting healthcare organizations, we spent some time with Dr. Mike Myint, an infectious diseases specialist and the Physician Executive for Population Health at MultiCare Health System based in Washington State. MultiCare operates seven hospitals with 1,500 employed physicians, 3,000 affiliated physicians and a large clinical network including free-standing emergency departments, urgent care, and virtual care. Below, I’m sharing Dr. Myint’s observations from the interview—he covers everything from the human impact of COVID-19 to the technology his team uses to help combat it. I hope you’ll find his comments as insightful as I did. Over to Dr. Myint.
COVID-19 is unlike any epidemic we’ve seen before. Our patients and communities have a lot of concerns. And in the internet age, there’s a lot of information available. Some of it is good, and some of it is unhelpful. We are very focused on sharing accurate information that helps people stay healthy and ensures that our medical resources are being saved for the people who need them.
This pandemic has affected all of us, and some of the impacts are really hard. For parents, it has been hard to have schools close. Our elderly and at-risk populations are particularly worried, and most of us know someone who falls into that category. Many people in the gig economy and who work in the service industry have lost their incomes. So this is very destabilizing for many people.
From the medical side, the lack of testing has been a real challenge, and it’s only improving slowly. Our healthcare workers are mission-driven people and they come to work every day to help people. We have to focus on keeping our workforce safe, and we are.
In a disaster, we move from care of the individual to maximizing care to the entire population. We have to think about individual health and population health. Our clinicians are very focused on taking care of the patient in front of them, and that continues, but we also have to look at the entire picture, especially during a surge where equipment may be limited. I also worry about the impact of this crisis on people who are dependent on our care, such as dialysis patients.
Coordination and technology to address the crisis
We are using many digital tools, such as teleconferencing, electronic health records, and email. It’s critical that we get the right information and the right messages to the right people, and that’s hard when things are changing daily. The tools are helping, but there is room for improvement.
We are seeing some very positive uses of technology during the COVID-19 pandemic. We can use bots to screen patients and identify the ones who need urgent care. We’ve seen virtual visits with doctors explode—in our system, there is a 1,200 percent increase in virtual visits.
Virtual visits are great because they allow us to continue to treat chronic care patients who have cancer or diabetes, and we can see them safely. And we find that many of our older patients are comfortable with virtual visits because they have smartphones. The video aspect of the visits makes people feel like they are really interacting with their provider.
How we use technology
We are moving so quickly in this crisis that it’s been very helpful to have online communication and collaboration tools. They allow us to co-edit documents, such as personal protective equipment (PPE) use policies. In quieter times, we were able to send drafts back and forth to each other, but we don’t have time for that now. The availability of masks and other PPE equipment changes daily, so our policies need to adapt quickly. Many health workers are not very comfortable with these tools, and it’s hard to get people to start using them in a crisis, so that’s a challenge. Once you get people to use these tools, it is easier to develop, collaborate, and deploy information into the system.
Data usage and systems
I think that the testing delays we’ve seen will come to define the COVID-19 response. For example, it can still take 5–7 days to get a COVID test result, and it often takes time for a result to work through the system to the patient’s bedside. During this time, we may be using PPE that was unnecessary because the patient is negative, and that costs us valuable PPE. More seamless lab results and integration of systems will save us valuable supplies. Interoperability between the different systems would allow the nurses and doctors to see and act on the results more quickly.
The supply chain has been a big challenge for the hospitals. We’ve had to create some tools for predictive modeling using our spreadsheets. We can look at how much PPE we have, and the rate we are going through it, and look at infection rates, and make some predictions on how long our supply will last. We are creating these models from scratch and inventory management systems would really help us.
We have a lot of data, but a lot of it is manual. We need to develop a “smart hospital”—collecting information about beds, equipment, supplies, and workers into one database. We could use that, along with disease modeling and testing information to monitor infection rates, plan for patient surges, and deploy equipment the best way possible. We know that the tools exist for this, but they haven’t been deployed. This could save lives, because we could ensure that ventilators are available where they are needed, and not waiting in hospitals that don’t need them. Using predictive algorithms and machine learning would make a huge difference.
Across systems, all of the data, except test results, is available. We need better ways to visualize it, collaborate at scale, and use the data effectively.
Final thoughts
Most urgently, we need free, readily available access to COVID testing. People need to continue social distancing, and we need to focus on isolating patients who have the disease. Learning from successful countries like Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Korea, we can bend the curve and end this pandemic.
I am hopeful that we will get through this, and we will deal with the economic and other consequences of this pandemic. There will be other epidemics or pandemics, hopefully not as bad as this one, so I hope we take the lessons we are learning today to develop the tools and public health infrastructure to stop them early. We have the data and the tools, and I believe we can use them more effectively to keep people safe.
We are grateful to the government and healthcare professionals on the front lines of COVID-19, and look forward to bringing you more tips, stories, information, and resources in the coming days. If you’d like to learn more about how Microsoft can help empower healthcare organizations to provide the best possible care, this site offers all the details.
Bringing the Project xCloud preview to gamers across Western Europe is a top priority for us. We know gaming is an important way for people to remain connected, particularly during these times of social distancing, but we also recognize how internet bandwidth has been impacted with strain on regional networks as large volumes of people responsibly stay home and go online.
It has been said too many times, but it’s true we are living in unprecedented times due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. Here at Xbox, we look to our products to bring joy and connection at all times and particularly during these weeks and months when we’re asked to stay at home. We know we’re in this together and the support we can provide one another is of critical importance now more than ever.
Phil Spencer has talked often about what he sees as the unique power of games to bring people together, to entertain, to inspire and connect. We all believe that in our current circumstances that’s even more true, and we hope that the freedom to discover and play with Project xCloud brings even more joy and connection.
Project xCloud, which has continued to grow and evolve since preview started last year, is our game-streaming technology allowing players to play console games from the cloud on an Android phone or tablet. As we promised at X019 in November, we’ve had our sights set on expanding the Project xCloud preview this year to more countries.
With that in mind, we continue to evaluate the COVID-19 situation and will begin rolling out the Project xCloud preview across 11 Western European countries when we are confident it is sensible to do so. We will take a measured approach to help conserve internet access, beginning the preview in each market with a limited number of people and adding more participants over time.
Upcoming Project xCloud preview countries:
Belgium
Denmark
Finland
France
Germany
Ireland
Italy
Netherlands
Norway
Spain
Sweden
Today, we’re opening up registration for Android customers in these preview markets and asking players across Western Europe who want to participate in Preview to sign up, then when we’re ready to begin, you’ll receive a notification email with further instructions. We’ll continue to evaluate the situation and will follow up as soon as we can to confirm when selected participants can begin to test the technology and help build the future of game streaming with us. For those interested in joining the Project xCloud preview, please visit www.xbox.com/projectxcloud and register today.
Thank you for your patience at this time. Your participation and feedback is critical as we learn what it means to bring you the very best game streaming platform. We can’t wait to go on this journey with you.
At Microsoft, we’re embracing the “new normal” for how we work and live as the world comes together to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. The health and safety of our employees, interns, and their families is our highest priority, which means shifting in-person experiences online and working together to find creative solutions to new challenges.
For more than 30 years, Microsoft has hosted students from around the world as part of our summer internship program. This year, more than 4,000 students had plans to join us — the largest and most diverse class in our history — taking on roles spanning all our functions. And while we’re incredibly disappointed that we won’t be with them on our campuses, we’re committed to creating a meaningful and fun virtual internship experience for each one of them, and remain eager to absorb their energy and learn from them as we always do.
As we prepare to welcome our incoming interns, we’re working to set them up for a remote experience that will provide a rewarding professional development opportunity as well as meaningful connections. We’re fortunate to have the infrastructure and support needed to deliver a world-class remote internship program through onboarding tools like Microsoft Dynamics 365, and collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams. We also recognize that some individuals may be unable to participate in the virtual internship, so we’re providing an opportunity to defer their internship to next year, if needed.
In short order, the program team will begin hosting remote events that focus on building connections, fostering learning, and empowering interns to achieve their goals and uncover their passions. Participants in the program will connect with one another, build community within their teams, and engage with senior leaders across the company through a variety of virtual events. And we’ll empower our interns to co-create their summer experience with us. In the past, they’ve done everything from hosting their own volunteer projects and sharing TED-style talks to creating a musical.
While this experience is not what anyone expected, we’re embracing this opportunity together with our interns to learn from one another and grow. After all, the power of a growth mindset is that every obstacle is an opportunity to succeed. Adversity often creates some of the biggest leaps in innovation, and I predict that this year’s intern class will not only help us shape our virtual experience, they will have a lasting influence on our program for years to come.
Welcome to our upcoming class of 2020 interns, and thank you in advance for your hard work, creative thinking, and won’t-be-stopped attitude.
Almost overnight, video conferencing has become a big part of our daily life and work. A few weeks in, my team and I at Microsoft have adjusted to the new reality of seeing each other’s homes, complete with dogs, cats, and other family members. Everyone around the world is now working, learning, and connecting with colleagues, friends, and family through the power of technology. From kitchen tables to living room couches, and from home offices doubling as home schools—people are relying on Microsoft Teams to work and learn.
Businesses large and small are depending on Teams for mission-critical work. First responders are using Teams to communicate when lives depend on it. Governments are turning to Teams to move medical supplies to where they are needed most. Doctors and nurses are using it to consult with patients, and researchers are collaborating on it across continents to find a vaccine. And teachers are using Teams to teach students in entirely new ways. Important moments of human connection, achievement, and celebration have all moved online.
Now more than ever, people need to know that their virtual conversations are private and secure. At Microsoft, privacy and security are never an afterthought. It’s our commitment to you—not only during this challenging time, but always. Here’s how we’re working to earn your trust every day with Microsoft Teams.
We provide privacy and security controls for video conferences in Teams
We offer a variety of privacy and security controls to allow you to manage who participates in your meetings and who has access to meeting information.
For example, you decide who from outside your organization can join your meetings directly, and who should wait in the lobby for someone to let them in. You can also remove participants during a meeting, designate “presenters” and “attendees,” and control which meeting participants can present content. And with guest access, you can add people from outside your organization but still retain control over your data. Moderation allows you to control who is and isn’t allowed to post and share content. And advanced artificial intelligence (AI) monitors chats to help prevent negative behaviors like bullying and harassment.
When recording a meeting, all participants are notified when a recording starts, and online participants can access our privacy notice directly. Recordings are only available to the people on the call or people invited to the meeting. And recordings are stored in a controlled repository that is protected by permissions and encryption.
We safeguard your privacy by design
When you use Microsoft Teams, you are entrusting us with one of your most valuable assets—your data and personal information. Our approach to privacy is grounded in our commitment to giving you transparency over the collection, use, and distribution of your data. Far from an afterthought, privacy is deeply ingrained in our company philosophy and how we build products. Here are our privacy commitments to you.
We never use your Teams data to serve you ads.
We do not track participant attention or multi-tasking in Teams meetings.
Your data is deleted after the termination or expiration of your subscription.
We take strong measures to ensure access to your data is restricted and carefully define requirements for responding to government requests for data.
You can access your own customer data at any time and for any reason.
We offer regular transparency reports on the Transparency Hub, detailing how we have responded to third-party requests for data.
We protect your identity and account information
Multi-factor authentication (MFA), a feature turned on by your IT administrator, protects your username and password by requiring you to provide a second form of verification to prove your identity. This simple, two-step verification process is widely used in many consumer applications today, including banking, and protects you from attacks that take advantage of weak or stolen passwords.
We protect your data and defend against cybersecurity threats
As a leader in security, Microsoft processes more than 8 trillion security signals every day and uses them to proactively protect you from security threats. In Teams, we encrypt data in transit and at rest, storing your data in our secure network of datacenters and using Secure Real-time Transport Protocol (SRTP) for video, audio, and desktop sharing.
We meet more than 90 regulatory and industry standards
For more information on the features we’ve built to deliver on these promises, see our detailed post on privacy and security in Microsoft Teams or refer to our Teams product documentation. And to learn more about our approach to security, compliance, and privacy across all our products, including Teams, visit the Microsoft Trust Center.
No matter how you’re using Teams at this extraordinary time to connect with the people that matter most to you for work and in life, we’re committed to continuing to learn and get better each day as we work to help you keep all your conversations private and secure.
