Category: Microsoft news

Microsoft news, features, events, and press materials

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Watch Communications and Microsoft announce partnership to bring broadband internet to Indiana, Ohio and Illinois

Deployment of technologies, including TV white spaces, is expected to cover more than four million people in the region, including 815,000 people in rural areas currently without access to broadband

REDMOND, Wash. — July 9, 2019 — On Tuesday, Watch Communications and Microsoft Corp. announced an agreement aimed at closing the broadband gap, and the rural digital divide in particular, in the states of Indiana, Ohio and Illinois. The partnership is part of the Microsoft Airband Initiative, which is focused on extending broadband access to three million people in rural America by July 2022.

The FCC reports that more than 21 million Americans lack broadband access. According to Microsoft data, 162 million people across the United States are not using the internet at broadband speeds, including approximately 17 million people in Indiana, Ohio and Illinois. Watch Communications will deploy a variety of broadband connectivity technologies to bring these areas under coverage, with an emphasis on wireless technologies leveraging TV white spaces (e.g., unused TV frequencies) in lower population density or terrain-challenged areas to achieve improved coverage. The areas expected to benefit include 50 counties in Indiana, 22 counties in Illinois, and most counties in Ohio.

“Every person deserves the same opportunity. But too often and in too many places, these opportunities are limited by where people live and their access to reliable and affordable broadband access,” said Shelley McKinley, general manager, Technology and Corporate Responsibility, Microsoft. “Microsoft is working across the country to close this gap. We’re partnering with Watch Communications to improve broadband access in Indiana, Illinois and Ohio and build on the incredible work being done by state and local leaders on this issue on behalf of their citizens.”

“Public-private partnerships, collaboration and understanding local initiatives are key to enabling connectivity success. Providing rural broadband can be difficult, so working as a team to solve the digital divide requires partners. We are excited to partner with Microsoft on this initiative,” said Greg Jarman, chief operating officer, Watch Communications.

Improved connectivity will bolster economic, educational and telehealth opportunities for everyone in the region, and could be particularly impactful for this region’s farmers. Together, Indiana, Illinois and Ohio account for more than $38.5 billion in agricultural value, with all three ranking in the top 16 states by agricultural output, according to the USDA. With broadband access, farmers can take advantage of advanced technologies such as precision agriculture which can help better monitor crops and increase yields.

In addition, Watch Communications and Microsoft will work together to ensure that once connectivity is available, people know how to use it and can get the training needed to fully participate in the digital economy, access educational opportunities and access telemedicine.

***

State by State View

Indiana

This is Microsoft’s first Airband Initiative deployment in Indiana. The need for improved connectivity is acute — the FCC broadband mapping report shows that more than 673,000 people in Indiana do not have access to broadband, and Microsoft data suggests that more than 4.3 million people are not using the internet at broadband speeds in the state. The partnership between Watch Communications and Microsoft is expected to cover more than 1 million Hoosiers, more than 440,000 of whom are people in rural areas that are currently unserved.

Watch Communications was a recent award winner of funds from the FCC to extend broadband services in Indiana. As a result, Watch Communications has been working with Indiana counties to develop the deployment approach that best meets the needs of the local communities. In addition to broadband, Watch Communications has been working to use its network to design an IoT network to serve Indiana businesses.

This also builds on Microsoft’s presence in Indiana. Last October, Microsoft and the Markle Foundation announced the launch of Skillful Indiana, focused on bringing investment, training, tools, and innovative methods to support workforce development in the state. In addition, the Hope FFA chapter in Indiana was recently awarded Microsoft FarmBeats Student Kits, which will help FFA students develop essential digital skills for precision agriculture and IoT technologies.

Ohio

Watch Communications was a recent award winner of funds from the FCC to extend broadband services in Ohio. As a result, Watch Communications has been working with Ohio counties to develop the deployment approach that best meets the needs of the local communities.

“You can’t be a part of the modern economy or education system without access to high-speed internet, and we are taking steps in Ohio to extend broadband to those who are underserved across the state,” said Lt. Governor Jon Husted. “Thank you to Microsoft for being among the leaders on this and for being willing to consider innovative solutions to help extend opportunity to people in Ohio who need it.”

This is Microsoft’s second Airband Initiative deployment in Ohio, following an August 2018 agreement between Microsoft and Agile Networks. The need for improved connectivity is acute — the FCC broadband mapping report shows that more than 621,000 people in Ohio do not have access to broadband, while Microsoft data suggests that more than 6.9 million people are not using the internet at broadband speeds in the state. The partnership between Watch Communications and Microsoft is expected to cover approximately 2.5 million people, more than 288,000 of whom are people in rural areas that are currently unserved.

This also builds on Microsoft’s presence in Ohio. Microsoft’s TEALS program is helping to deliver computer science education to Ohio students. In addition, the Arcadia FFA chapter and Triad-OHP FFA chapter in Ohio were recently awarded Microsoft FarmBeats Student Kits, which will help FFA students develop essential digital skills for precision agriculture and IoT technologies.

Illinois

This is Microsoft’s second Airband Initiative deployment in Illinois, the first being a September 2018 agreement between Microsoft and Network Business Systems to bring broadband internet to people in Illinois, Iowa and South Dakota. The need for improved connectivity is acute — the FCC broadband mapping report shows that more than 680,000 people in Illinois do not have access to broadband, while Microsoft data suggests that more than 6.6 million people are not using the internet at broadband speeds in the state. The partnership between Watch Communications and Microsoft is expected to cover more than 275,000 people, more than 80,000 of whom are people in rural areas that are currently unserved.

About Watch Communications

Founded in 1992, Watch Communications is an Internet Service Provider (ISP) using a combination of fixed wireless and fiber technologies to serve residential and business customers throughout Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. Watch Communications began as a wireless cable TV provider and expanded service offerings in 1998 to include Internet. Since its creation, Watch Communications has focused on unserved and underserved small and rural markets.

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.

For more information, press only:

Microsoft Media Relations, WE Communications for Microsoft, (425) 638-7777, rrt@we-worldwide.com

Lindsey Gardner, Watch Communications Media Requests, (419) 999-2824, media@watchcomm.net

Note to editors: For more information, news and perspectives from Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft News Center at http://news.microsoft.com. Web links, telephone numbers and titles were correct at time of publication, but may have changed. For additional assistance, journalists and analysts may contact Microsoft’s Rapid Response Team or other appropriate contacts listed at http://news.microsoft.com/microsoft-public-relations-contacts.

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July 2019 Xbox Update delivers new features for Xbox Game Pass, plus Xbox Skill for Alexa

Summer is here which means sunshine, cookouts and of course, gaming with friends after a long day outside. Team Xbox has been busy cooking up new features for the July 2019 Xbox Update, which begins rolling out today. This update includes a new way to interact with Xbox Game Pass, additional countries for the Xbox Skill for Alexa, and new Xbox Skill for Alexa voice commands. Here’s a rundown of what’s new:

New features for Xbox Game Pass

Xbox Game Pass offers a curated library of over 100 high-quality games on PC and console, available to download and play at full fidelity for one low-monthly price. Today, we’re rolling a new way to manage your Xbox Game Pass collection.

  • Play later – Play later enables you to make a list of games from the Xbox Game Pass catalog for you to come back to on your time, making it even easier to find your next game. Manage your collection from your Xbox console or the Game Pass mobile app and download your games when you’re ready.

Xbox Skill for Alexa – More countries and new voice commands

Last fall, we expanded voice control support by introducing the Xbox Skill for Alexa, which enables you to navigate and interact with Xbox One using voice commands through your Alexa-enabled devices. Today we are adding more supported countries and new Alexa voice commands to see what’s happening on Xbox Game Pass and check in with your Xbox Live friends.

  • More countries – We heard our fans around the world loud and clear that they wanted Xbox Skill for Alexa support in their country. Today, we are excited to be adding support for customers in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, and Spain. Click here to learn how to set up the Xbox Skill for Alexa.
  • New Alexa voice commands for Xbox Game Pass and more – Have you always wanted to be able to use your voice to find out the latest games in Xbox Game Pass? Good news, so have we! The July 2019 Xbox Update introduces the ability to find out what’s new to Xbox Game Pass, what the popular games are, what’s leaving the catalog, and more; simply by asking Alexa. Try saying, “Alexa, ask Xbox what’s new on Game Pass?”Want to stay up-to-date with what your friends are doing on Xbox? You can ask Alexa who’s online, what your friends are playing, and more. Try saying, “Alexa, ask Xbox what are my friends playing?”

    Finally, you are now able to start pairing your controller with your Xbox from the convenience of your couch. Just say, “Alexa, ask Xbox to pair my controller.” to put your console into pairing mode!

    For a full list of what you can say, check out this link.

These updates are based on feedback from our Xbox Insiders who have helped to shape these features. A huge thank you to all our Xbox Insiders for your valuable input and continued participation. If you’d like to help define the future of Xbox and get access to early features, download the Xbox Insider Hub app on your Xbox One or Windows 10 PC today and share your ideas at the Xbox Ideas Hub. You can also visit the Xbox Insider Blog here for the latest release notes and to learn more. Enjoy the July Update and happy gaming!

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Azure Data Box Heavy now generally available

Our customers continue to use the Azure Data Box family to move massive amounts of data into Azure. One of the regular requests that we receive is for a larger capacity option that retains the simplicity, security, and speed of the original Data Box. Last year at Ignite, we announced a new addition to the Data Box family that did just that – a preview of the petabyte-scale Data Box Heavy

With thanks to those customers who provided feedback during the preview phase, I’m excited to announce that Azure Data Box Heavy has reached general availability in the US and EU!

How Data Box Heavy works

Azure Data Box HeavyIn many ways, Data Box Heavy is just like the original Data Box. You can order Data Box Heavy directly from the Azure portal, and copy data to Data Box Heavy using standard files or object protocols. Data is automatically secured on the appliance using AES 256-bit encryption. After your data is transferred to Azure, the appliance is wiped clean according to National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) standards.

But Data Box Heavy is also designed for a much larger scale than the original Data Box. Data Box Heavy’s one petabyte of raw capacity and multiple 40 Gbps connectors mean that a datacenter’s worth of data can be moved into Azure in just a few weeks.

Data Box Heavy

  • 1 PB per order
  • 770 TB usable capacity per order
  • Supports Block Blobs, Page Blobs, Azure Files, and Managed Disk
  • Copy to 10 storage accounts
  • 4 x RJ45 10/1 Gbps, 4 x QSFP 10/40 Gbps Ethernet
  • Copy data using standard NAS protocols (SMB/CIFS, NFS, Azure Blob Storage)

Data Box

  • 100 TB per order
  • 80 TB usable capacity per order
  • Supports Block Blobs, Page Blobs, Azure Files, and Managed Disk
  • Copy to 10 storage accounts
  • 2 x RJ45 10/1 Gbps, 2 x SFP+ 10 Gbps Ethernet
  • Copy data using standard NAS protocols (SMB/CIFS, NFS, Azure Blob Storage)

Data Box Disk

  • 40 TB per order/8 TB per disk
  • 35 TB usable capacity per order
  • Supports Block Blobs, Page Blobs, Azure Files, and Managed Disk
  • Copy to 10 storage accounts
  • USB 3.1, SATA II or III
  • Copy data using standard NAS protocols (SMB/CIFS, NFS, Azure Blob Storage)

Expanded regional availability

We’re also expanding regional availability for Data Box and Data Box Disk.

Data Box Heavy US, EU
Data Box US, EU, Japan, Canada, and Australia
Data Box Disk US, EU, Japan, Canada, Australia, Korea, Southeast Asia, and US Government

Sign up today

Here’s how you can get started with Data Box Heavy:

We’ll be at Microsoft Inspire again this year, so stop by our booth to say hello to the team!

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All the details for ‘Gears of War’ at this week’s San Diego Comic-Con

With Gears Pop! and Gears 5 releasing this year, join the developers and minds behind the Gears of War Universe as they discuss the past, present, and future of this storied franchise at San Diego Comic-Con on Thursday, July 18th from 1:00 p.m. PST – 2:00 p.m. PST in Room 5AB. Studio Head Rod Fergusson (The Coalition) along with editor Steve Saffel (Gears of War: Ascendance, Titan Books), author Jason M. Hough (Gears of War: Ascendance, Titan Books), editor Chase Marotz (Gears of War: Hivebusters, IDW Publishing), and author Arthur Gies (Gears of War: Retrospective, Udon Entertainment) share their views on the Gears Franchise. The panelists will discuss their approach to storytelling and go in-depth on the characters and stories behind IDW’s brand-new Hivebusters comic book series and Titan’s upcoming Ascendance novel. Moderated by Gears’ Franchise Narrative Lead Bonnie Jean Mah (The Coalition), this panel will give fans new insight into what’s to come from one of the biggest sagas in gaming. Join the Q&A for a chance to win special giveaway items during the panel!

Then join select panelists in the exhibit hall for signings and purchase a limited advance copy of Gears of War: Ascendance, the newly released Gears of War: Retrospective,and Hivebusters Issue #1.

Gears of War Signing Schedule:

  • Gears of War: Retrospective at Udon Booth 4529 @ 2:30-3:30 PM
    • Author Arthur Gies, Rod Fergusson

  • Gears of War: Ascendance book signing with at Titan Booth 5537 @ 4:00-5:00 PM
    • Author Jason Hough, Rod Fergusson, and Bonnie Jean Mah

  • Gears of War: Hivebusters at IDW Booth 2729 @ #2729 6-7 PM
    • Rod Fergusson and Bonnie Jean Mah

Collect all Gears of War published works on Gearsofwar.com

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New Desktop Analytics feature helps organizations keep PCs up to date

Based on our work with consumers and organizations of all sizes, across more than 800 million Windows devices, we’ve learned that it’s easier to deploy Windows 10 when using the powerful intelligence of the cloud and machine learning. Since the Windows 10 April 2018 Update release, we’ve leveraged artificial intelligence (AI) at scale to improve the quality and reliability of our release rollouts. And along the way, we’ve learned the best ways to help ensure devices have a positive update experience.

Today, we’re making these same learnings available to organizations through the public preview of Desktop Analytics, which is available now. Desktop Analytics provides the insight and automation you need to efficiently get current and stay current. Desktop Analytics is a cloud-connected service that integrates with System Center Configuration Manager and will integrate with Microsoft Intune in the near future. With Desktop Analytics, it’s easier to deploy with confidence and keep your PCs up to date with the latest Windows 10 capabilities your employees need.

“With Desktop Analytics, we’re able to automate our pilot plans to ensure all application and hardware scenarios can be tested and validated prior to upgrading to the latest release of Windows 10.”
—Jason Myers, End User Senior Lead, Mars

This service provides intelligence that helps you make more informed decisions about the update readiness of your Windows clients. In combination with Configuration Manager, Desktop Analytics is designed to create an inventory of the Windows apps running in your organization and then assess app compatibility with the latest feature updates of Windows 10. By combining data from your own organization with data aggregated from millions of devices connected to our cloud services, you can take the guess work out of testing these apps and instead focus your attention on key blockers. Historically, getting a view of the compatibility of your apps with new Windows releases was a time-consuming and tedious process of human testing—but now this can be automated through the intelligence of what we learn at cloud scale.

Desktop Analytics brings you data-driven recommendations that allow you to quickly and easily run successful pilots that represent your entire application and driver estate. You can then use the health signals of your pilots to evaluate the readiness of your assets and implement an optimized production deployment plan with Configuration Manager.

As Jared Spataro, Corporate Vice President for Microsoft 365, explained last September, Desktop Analytics is the evolution of Windows Analytics, adding deeper integration with Configuration Manager and providing a ring-based approach to deployment using health signals.

To learn more and get started with the public preview, read our Desktop Analytics article. For additional resources, check out the new Desktop Analytics community and read more details on Tech Community.

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From predicting performance to preventing injuries: How machine learning is unlocking the secrets of human movement

Launched in 2006, P3 is the first facility to apply a more data-driven approach to understanding how elite competitors move. It uses advanced sports-science strategies to assess and train athletes in ways that will revolutionize pro sports – and, eventually, the bodies and abilities of weekend warriors, Elliott says.

“We are challenging them and measuring them. But we’re not interested in how high they jump or how fast they accelerate,” Elliott says. “We’re interested in the mechanics of how they jump, how they accelerate and decelerate. It’s helping us unlock the secrets of human movement.”

Working directly with players and their agents or families, P3 has evaluated members of the past six NBA draft classes, amassing a database of more than 600 current and former NBA athletes.

An athlete jumps in a gym, reaching for the ceiling with her right hand.
Volleyball player Cassandra Strickland leaps at P3.

Some of P3’s clients include NBA stars Luka Doncic and Zach LaVine plus athletes from the NFL, Major League Baseball, international soccer, track and field and more.

Many of those NBA clients, like Philadelphia 76ers guard Josh Richardson, return to P3 each summer for re-testing to pinpoint whether their movement patterns have gained asymmetries that could cause injury, or to reconfirm the health of physical systems they use to leap, land, stop and start, fueling their on-court edge.

“This is my fifth off-season now at P3,” Richardson says. “When I started with them during my NBA draft preparation, I immediately saw that their approach was different and that it could help me have the best chance to improve my athleticism. Every off-season I get to see exactly where I am physically compared to where I was before – and compared to other NBA players.

“They are able to help me identify where I might be at risk of injury and where I can improve physically. It’s important for me to know that the training I am doing is specific to my unique needs,” Richardson says.

To collect all that granular data, P3 outfitted its lab with a high-speed camera system manufactured by Simi Reality Motion Systems GmbH, a German company from the ZF Group and a Microsoft partner.

Simi offers markerless, motion-capture software that removes the need for athletes to wear tracking sensors while they play or train. Simi also works with seven Major League Baseball clubs, deploying high-speed camera systems to those stadiums to record every pitch during every game since the 2017 season.

Simi’s software digitizes the pitchers’ arm angles and related body movements, spanning 42 different joint centers across 24,000 pitches thrown per team per season. That produces hundreds of billions of data points that are uploaded and processed on Microsoft Azure, enabling teams to create in-depth biomechanical analyses for the players, says Pascal Russ, Simi’s CEO.

A laptop screen shows a player in mid-stride on a track and the movement data he is producing.
An athlete’s workout at P3 produces data on his body angles and movements.

“The first team that deploys this effectively on the field to pick lineups or to see which pitch angles worked well against which batters is going to see a huge separation between them and the other teams not using this,” Russ says.

“It’s freakishly accurate.”

While Russ foresees this technology eventually remaking baseball, such seismic shifts already are occurring in the NBA through P3’s player assessments, says Benedikt Jocham, Simi’s U.S. chief operations officer.

“We provide the software solution that can quantify the movement and analyze, for example, how much pressure and torque a person is putting on various body parts,” Jocham says. “P3 adds the magic sauce. They are wizards at figuring out what it all means and making sense out of it for athletes.”

After the cameras record a player’s movements in the P3 lab, those datasets are loaded into Azure where machine-learning algorithms reveal how that player’s physical systems are most related to other NBA players who were similarly assessed. The algorithm then assigns that player into one of several clusters or branches that predict how their basketball career may unfold, Elliott says.

One branch, for example, contains athletes who had a brief NBA experience and never became significant players. Another branch encompasses players who were impactful during their first three or four seasons then sustained serious injuries that depleted their skills. In still another branch, players share rare combinations of length, power and force that fed elite careers – and they remained healthy.

“The human eye is good at measuring size and maybe estimating weight, and very bad at comparing athletes’ physical systems and movement symmetries to one another,” Elliot says. “But we can measure those things in the lab and the machine tells us how young athletes are most alike.

“It’s a solid foothold into an area of sports science that has been out of sight until now,” he says.

An athlete looks at a big screen projection of his workout and the data is produced while a coach talks with him.
Cleveland Indians prospect Will Benson scans his workout data with P3 biomechanist Ben Johnson.

The data is also helping to shatter long-held theories that successful NBA players who, at first glance, lack the size, jumping ability or quickness of traditional stars are merely compensating by tapping unmeasurable intangibles such as “intuition” or “IQ” or “heart.”

“That’s how people once would have defined (2017-18 NBA most valuable player) James Harden, as somebody who just has this super-high basketball IQ,” Elliott says. “Maybe he does. But he also has a better stopping or braking system than anybody we’ve ever assessed in the NBA.

“That creates competitive advantages,” he adds. “There’s Newtonian physics behind these advantages.”

Case in point: Dallas Mavericks rookie Luka Doncic. In its pre-draft assessment of Doncic one year ago, P3 identified that same hidden performance metric – the elite ability to stop quickly. P3 knew, before his NBA Draft, that Doncic and Harden were in the same player branch. Doncic posted a stunning first pro season.

An athlete is shown moving sideways on an indoor track.
Aaron Gordon training on the P3 indoor track.

The insights also help athletes avoid injuries by adopting new training techniques to change unhealthy movement patterns revealed in the data, says Elliott, who previously served as the first director of sports science in MLB (for the Seattle Mariners) and as the first director of sports science in the NFL (for the New England Patriots).

Every NBA player or draft prospect assessed by P3 receives a report that highlights their injury risks and compares them to league peers based on performance.

“Athletes come to us because they trust us to take better care of their bodies than would happen anywhere else,” Elliott says. “Traditionally, and still today, when these bad things happen to players, everyone says, ‘Oh, that was a freak injury.’ I’m just telling you that the machine learning models predict a whole lot of these.

“I can’t imagine a world where out of nowhere you suffer, say, a right tibial stress fracture – not your left one, not your femur, it’s your tibia, out of nowhere,” he adds. “Without a doubt, these are not random events. Sports science just has not been very good about identifying them.”

Eventually, this same information may become available to amateur athletes and everyone else, Elliott says. The same technologies could predict, for example, that a weekend warrior has too much force going through the left leg while jumping or landing plus a tiny but unhealthy rotation of the left knee and femur, causing too much friction, and, eventually, an erosion of the left knee cartilage.

“What if you identified that when you were 30 or 20, instead of learning when you’re 50 that your cartilage is gone? That really is the future,” Elliott says.

“The power of machine learning and (Microsoft) Artificial Intelligence are going to help us unlock these secrets in ways that have never existed. We’re already doing it but it’s only in the early days of what I think is going to be a revolution in this space,” he says. “It’s coming. It’s definitely coming.

Top photo: Stanley Johnson, a forward with the NBA’s New Orleans Pelicans, moves laterally inside an exercise band at the P3 lab. (All photos courtesy of P3.)

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Microsoft and Providence St. Joseph Health announce strategic alliance to accelerate the future of care delivery

Providence St. Joseph Health, in partnership with Microsoft, will develop and deploy new health care technologies that will harness the power of Microsoft Azure and AI with clinical expertise to transform the care experience

RENTON, Wash., and REDMOND, Wash., July 8, 2019 – Microsoft Corp. and Providence St. Joseph Health today announced a multi-year strategic alliance to accelerate the digital transformation of health care. The alliance will combine the power of Microsoft’s cloud, artificial intelligence (AI), research capabilities, and collaboration tools with the clinical expertise and care environments of Providence St. Joseph Health, one of the largest health systems in the country.

The two organizations will develop a portfolio of integrated solutions designed to improve health outcomes and reduce the total cost of care by combining technologies from Microsoft with Providence St. Joseph Health’s data and clinical expertise. The alliance will accelerate the health care industry’s adoption of the cloud and enable data-driven clinical and operational decision-making by leveraging Microsoft Azure, and industry interoperability standards like FHIR, to integrate siloed data sources in a cloud environment that enables security and compliance.

Providence St. Joseph Health logoProvidence St. Joseph Health will deploy next-generation solutions and emerging technologies from Microsoft and its partners at a Providence St. Joseph Health-affiliated hospital facility in Seattle, Wash., near Microsoft’s Redmond headquarters. This site will enable modern clinical and operational experiences for both patients and providers. The goal will be to scale these innovations across the entire Providence St. Joseph Health system, in a transformation that will bring innovative and necessary solutions to more communities.

“Providence St. Joseph Health has been on a journey to transform health care and achieve a vision of health for a better world. We’re excited to accelerate that journey by collaborating with Microsoft. Together, we’ll support doctors, nurses and all caregivers by equipping them with innovative tools and technology that make it easier to do the vitally important work of improving lives,” said Rod Hochman, M.D., president and CEO of Providence St. Joseph Health.
Microsoft logo

“Our alliance with Providence St. Joseph Health brings together the expertise of one of the largest and most comprehensive health systems in the country with the power of Azure, Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365,” said Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. “Our ambition is to accelerate Providence St. Joseph Health’s digital transformation and to build new innovations together that are designed to improve health care delivery and outcomes.”

As part of the strategic alliance, Providence St. Joseph Health will use Microsoft Azure as its preferred cloud platform and standardize productivity and collaboration tools for its 119,000 caregivers on Microsoft 365, and will continue to improve and support patient engagement using technologies including Dynamics 365. Providence St. Joseph Health doctors and nurses will use Microsoft Teams, which is part of the Microsoft 365 platform, for more secure communication and collaboration, enabling them to bring together chat, video meetings and conferencing, and line-of-business applications into a single hub.

About Providence St. Joseph Health
Providence St. Joseph Health is a national, not-for-profit Catholic health system comprising a diverse family of organizations and driven by a belief that health is a human right. With 51 hospitals, 829 physician clinics, senior services, supportive housing and many other health and educational services, the health system and its partners employ more than 119,000 caregivers serving communities across seven states – Alaska, California, Montana, New Mexico, Oregon, Texas and Washington with system offices based in Renton, Wash., and Irvine, Calif.

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.

Media Contacts:
Elizabeth Brophy, Providence St. Joseph Health, Elizabeth.Brophy@Providence.org
Microsoft Media Relations, WE Communications for Microsoft, rrt@we-worldwide.com

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GeekWire: Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott sees ‘mind-blowing’ potential for AI, the cloud, 5G and devices

Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott at the GeekWire Cloud Summit in Bellevue, Wash. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)

Kevin Scott is the chief technology officer for Microsoft, a company that built its business on software, but he also appreciates hardware and devices. In fact, he has been building his own machine shop and hardware lab as a personal hobby in his spare time, looking to demonstrate the potential of combining hardware with the latest software and cloud technologies.

One of his upcoming projects, for example, is a vacuum-siphon coffee machine with a vision and speech interface.

“No buttons,” he said. “The user interface will be all AI.”

Sorry, coffee lovers, but it’s not an upcoming Microsoft product.

“For the love of God, don’t tell Satya I’m doing this,” Scott joked, referring to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

However, the project does reflect a broader trend that Scott, Nadella and Microsoft believe will drive new waves of innovation in the years ahead: the confluence of machine learning, artificial intelligence, 5G mobile broadband, cloud technologies and a growing number of sensors and IoT devices around the world.

“You’ve got all of this opportunity for places where you can interface with the physical world,” Scott said. “It’s just where business opportunity is going to live.”

That was one of the takeaways from Scott’s talk at the GeekWire Cloud Summit. The Microsoft CTO was previously vice president of engineering and operations at LinkedIn, led engineering and operations at mobile advertising company AdMob, and worked two stints at Google, starting as a senior engineering manager in 2005. He’s also the host of the podcast Behind the Tech and is involved in diversity initiatives both inside and outside the company.

Listen to our conversation with Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott in the podcast above, watch the video below, or subscribe in your favorite podcast app. Continue reading for edited highlights.

The confluence of trends that he’s watching closely today: There are a bunch of things that are really important right now where you have a convergence of a bunch of technological trends. We have the end of Moore’s Law rapidly approaching. The important thing that’s already gone is Dennard scaling, which says that you can put more transistors onto a chip and actually power them without burning your dyes up. We’re already at the point where the density improvements we get in silicon aren’t as usable as they were when Dennard scaling was actually working.

That’s coming at the same time that we have these AI workloads — even what’s happened over the past six to nine months has just been mind-boggling. We’re in this mode where the quality of the results that you can compute with the most ambitious flavors of these machine learning systems, whether it’s simulation-based reinforcement learning or pure unsupervised learning, is entirely a proportion of how much compute you can throw at them. You have this new workload that is hungry for compute in ways that nothing ever has been before. That is a really interesting set of factors. It has implications for how we build next generation compute and networks and software stacks. What you’re going to be able to do with all of this AI is just mind-blowing in ways that are hard to predict.

Then you also have this other really interesting thing where IoT and sensing are accelerating because actually Moore’s Law is still working there. Most of these low cost micro-controllers and microprocessors are still on older process technologies. We’ve got another couple or three doublings of price-performance coming, and so more and more of the world is going to get instrumented and you’re going to be able to take these data-enriched AI powered feedback loops that have built the consumer internet, for instance, and that’s going to migrate into all sorts of things like industrial controls and home automation.

Unsupervised learning and reinforcement learning probably sounds far off in the distance and some of the stuff about IoT probably sounds like it’s far off in the distance. The insight that I have is, don’t think of it as far off in the distance. Especially on the machine learning front, that needs to be a part of every company and every developer’s toolkit. Progress is happening so quickly that if you wait too long, you’re going to be in this position where you’re scrambling to catch up.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLV28km6L58?feature=oembed&w=630&h=354]

The state of machine learning and artificial intelligence: The thing that’s really changed across the entire AI community over the past six months is there have been a couple of astounding breakthroughs in unsupervised learning for natural language processing, natural language understanding. We have figured out a new way to build models that build some sort of conceptual notion of what natural language looks like, and from that, you can build a bunch of very specific applications that are higher performing and it’s much lower cost to adapt the general model to a use case and the use cases are all over the place, from question answering to document summarization, to search, to literally there are a dozen or more things that folks are looking at right now and so we are just starting to see these things sort of trickle out into the product portfolio.

Practical applications of artificial intelligence: AI is not a product. It is a technology that you use to build products. We have a different and better way now to build the features of a whole bunch of products and so the way it will show up is not in some sort of Big Bang thing. It’s going to be that a bunch of the features of a whole lot of products are going to get better in material ways and some of it is, you’re just not going to be aware what’s going on. Content moderation on the Xbox platform, for instance, has got a whole bunch of this tech in it and it’s being used to try to prevent bullying and bad behavior on the platform and to protect kids, for instance. It’s just much easier to scale those systems when they’re powered by AI and enhanced by human beings.

The intersection of software and hardware: The interface between software and the physical world is extremely interesting. The real world is not governed by rules that are as logical and straightforward as the rules that we have for software systems. That’s not to diminish how complex software actually is, but machine learning gives us a bunch of powerful new tools and techniques to deal with that complicated, messy, interface. You can’t expect an average tinkerer to sit around and understand these nonlinear partial differential equations that characterize a physical system, whereas you may be able to give them a set of tools like a machine learning system that can give them enough control over that physical thing that they can do something interesting with it. You’ve got all of this opportunity for places where you can interface with the physical world. I think it’s just where business opportunity is going to live.

A visualization of Kevin Scott’s GeekWire Cloud Summit talk by Guillaume Wiatr of MetaHelm.

The potential of mobile broadband: What 5G does is it makes the edge platforms even more interesting. You get lower latency and higher throughput. You still will have to have different solutions for rural areas because the 5G technologies require higher densities of towers than we even have right now with 4G, but there are solutions. 5G presents this opportunity for us to really think about the architecture of these edge applications in different ways. For instance, one of the things that we see already emerging is these computer vision models. On a constrained compute edge device, you’ll be able to run one level of inference. You can do generic event detection, for instance, on the edge and then refer those interesting events back up to the cloud to do a heavyweight inference to actually classify an object or whatnot. 5G just lets you draw those lines differently, and you can build much more interesting applications.

The state of privacy in tech: I was lucky enough to be an engineer and I think many engineers are very aware of what’s going on inside of all of these systems and have very strong opinions about privacy and security in the first place. I’ve always thought that it’s extraordinarily important at AdMob and I was an early Google employee. We took all of these things deadly, deadly seriously, just in terms of access controls and whatnot. But if anything, it gets more and more important every day. AdMob was 2007-2010. Nine years later, the world of data that is residing in clouds is many orders of magnitude larger, and presents this very interesting challenge for folks. The digital world has become more complex. The footprint you’re leaving as you use digital services has grown much larger as we spend more time online, and so I think the onus is on all technology companies, large and small, that are handling people’s data. You’ve got some regulatory things that you have to comply with, like GDPR. I think more of those regulations are coming and I think that’s a good thing for consumers.We as an industry need to go above and beyond because we have early line of sight on what the trends are with privacy and security as well.

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Tune in July 5 at 8 p.m. PT for Episode 4 of ELEAGUE Gears Summer Series: The Bonds and Betrayals of Brotherhood

Stemming from Xbox’s partnership with ELEAGUE, the six-part docu series focused on the stories and players behind the world of Gears Esports on TBS aired its third episode last week. In Episode 3 of The Bonds & Betrayals of Brotherhood, the series dove into what it takes to be the most successful team in esports history. The episode focused on Gilbert “Xplosive” Rojo’s, the in-game leader of Optic Gaming’s Gears of War team, who has over 17 trophies to his name and a nearly undefeated record of success in the Gears Esports scene. The episode proved the value of strong leadership and consistency, as the rest of the series’ primary professional Gears of War players (Yadiel “Sleepytime” Hildago, Victor “Powerz” Mateo, Justin “Kenny” Kenny, Kyle “Kyle” Mason, and Danny “Identivez” Santillana) revealed what they have learned going up against Gilbert time and time again and what they think makes him so unbeatable.

To continue the Gears Esports journey, be sure to tune-in to the fourth episode airing on TBS today, Friday, July 5, at 8 pm PT/11 pm ET. The docu series will continue to explore each player’s intense connection to the game and each other as they navigate to become the best players in the world on Gears 5 Esports.

In Episode 4 of The Bonds & Betrayals of Brotherhood, fans will get their first taste of the Gears 5 multiplayer mode Escalation 2.0. Through the lens of professional players Justin “Kenny” Kenny and Victor “Powerz” Mateo, Gears 5 multiplayer developers will reveal never before seen Gears 5 gameplay features- setting an exciting stage for the upcoming ELEAGUE Gears 5 Invitational event July 13-14.

In addition to the TBS episodes, ELEAGUE will host Gears 5’s first-ever esports tournament, with new Versus gameplay, from July 13-14 (Saturday to Sunday), live on Twitch and the premium live sports streaming service B/R Live. The ELEAGUE Gears Summer Series tournament will feature eight of the world’s top teams – many of which will star in the TBS series – competing live within The ELEAGUE Arena at Turner Studios in Atlanta. The final two episodes of the TBS programming will showcase the most exciting moments from the live tournament.

To stay updated, follow @EsportsGears on Twitter and visit Gears.gg. Be sure to also check out ELEAGUE’s channels; @ELEAGUETV and www.ELEAGUE.com.

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‘Gears 5’ Versus Multiplayer Tech Test kicks off July 17

At E3, we unveiled a brand new way to fight the Swarm in Gears 5: Escape. We wanted to show how we’re pushing the envelope by doing new things never seen in a Gears game before, and that throughout the summer, we’ll reveal more about Gears 5 ahead of its September 10 release. We said that we’d talk more about the Versus Multiplayer Technical Test in July, and today we’re happy to provide more details on how you can be among the first to play Gears 5 and help create the future of Versus multiplayer.

Multiplayer fans of all types can enjoy these weekend test sessions, as you’ll get to play Escalation (our updated competitive gametype) along with Arcade (a new and approachable multiplayer gametype) and a longtime fan favorite: King of the Hill. For players new to Gears or those that want to practice their skills and learn new mechanics we’ve added our new training mode – Bootcamp. The Tech Test also features a short Tour of Duty, which is a series of challenges for players to earn content – completing all of these challenges unlocks an exclusive Tech Test Banner. Players can also unlock three Versus Weapon Skins by completing some additional challenges. For a closer look at Escalation, be sure to check out the ELEAGUE Invitational next weekend (July 13-14) and stay tuned for additional details about Arcade next week.

Included with your Xbox Game Pass membership or as part of your Gears 5 pre-order (whether as a separate 5×5 code from a participating retailer or bundled in your digital pre-order), the Tech Test will be available to download starting July 17 with online play being active from July 19 (starting at 10 a.m. PDT) through July 21, and then active again on July 26 (at 10 a.m. PDT) through July 29.

As mentioned earlier, starting on July 17 at 10 p.m. PDT, you can search for “Gears 5” to pull up the Technical Test on your Xbox One console or Windows 10 PC. If you’re an Xbox Game Pass member, you will see the Tech Test available to download in your library – same as any of the 100+ great games in the catalog. Note that between the weekend test periods, the Tech Test itself will be available for download, but servers will be offline. We also wanted to remind you that online multiplayer will require Xbox Live Gold on console, and that because this Tech Test is to help test our servers, you might encounter some queueing as you start to play. We hope to make Gears 5 a great online experience for all players and Xbox Game Pass members on launch, and this Tech Test will help.

For players on Windows 10 PC, we have the below chart that outlines minimum and recommended specs for the Tech Test:

Thanks for your support and we look forward to seeing you online starting July 19 ahead of sharing more about Horde and Campaign in the months to come!

Visit www.gears5.com and follow @GearsofWar on Twitter to keep up-to-date with the latest information about Gears of War.

Gears 5 will release on September 10 for Xbox One, Windows 10, and with Xbox Game Pass. Pre-order details here on the Microsoft Store.