Category: Microsoft news

Microsoft news, features, events, and press materials

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Video: How social workers in Australia are making families and medicine safer

When people need help from the Department of Health and Human Services in Victoria, Australia, they are often slogging through their toughest days.

Some are grappling with prescription drug abuse. Some are recovering from violence. Some are escaping homelessness.

“The department’s vision is to improve the health and wellbeing of all Victorians,” says Fiona Sparks, assistant director of strategy and design for DHHS. “We have many clients who, at times in their lives, really struggle. Our focus is shifting the trajectory of people’s lives.

“To do that, we need our workforce and our clients to have the very best technology – good tools, good systems – that are secure and that ensure information can be shared easily,” Sparks says.

DHHS executives are relying on Microsoft Azure and Dynamics 365 to fuel an array of new initiatives, including a program to address family violence in Victoria, the most densely populated state in Australia with more than 6 million residents.

That system tracks police responses to domestic assaults, instantly dispersing the information across the government ecosystem and reducing the time needed to get victims help, Sparks says.

“For anyone who’s experienced family violence, it can be traumatizing,” she says. “We want to make that experience much less stressful by ensuring we’ve got information shared across multiple services and that people don’t have to share their story over and over again.”

A pharmacist helps a customer in Victoria
A pharmacist helps a customer in Victoria.

To improve health care, DHHS has launched a program called SafeScript. When physicians and pharmacists dispense medications like opioids, they get real-time alerts if those patients are prescribed drugs by other doctors.

“These medicines are a huge problem in our society and in many countries around the world where people are becoming addicted after medical treatment,” says Steve Hodgkinson, chief information officer for DHHS.

“A doctor or pharmacist needs to know what else is happening with this person in terms of their consumption of these medications,” Hodgkinson says. “The focus of our department is to encourage people to live the life they have the potential to live.”

Posted on by — Leave a comment

‘Power of Zero’ campaign launches, promoting digital civility and positive online behaviors

Earlier this week, Power of Zero, a new global campaign calling for zero violence, zero hate and zero bullying from age zero launched in New York City. Microsoft was on hand to support the lead organization NoBully and to promote civility and positive online behaviors among children, young people and all digital citizens.

The launch, held at UNICEF headquarters, follows nearly two years of research and planning in conjunction with technology companies, nongovernmental organizations and other groups focused on creating a global movement to combat online bullying and harassment. Collaborative efforts began at a global strategy session in London in April 2017.

“There is growing recognition that we have to invest in our youngest children and give them the foundation they need to thrive in this interconnected world,” says Nicholas Carlisle, founder of NoBully and campaign president for Power of Zero. “Power of Zero is about making digital civility – a concept pioneered by Microsoft – global. In this launch phase, we will be able to bring ‘The 12 Powers’ to young children across North America and then extend the campaign with the help of our partners into Southeast Asia, India, Latin America and beyond.”

In partnership with Scholastic, Power of Zero is providing early childhood educators and families with learning resources to help them leverage their “powers for good.” Critical thinking, inclusivity, respect and resilience are four of the 12 powers the program recommends to help children thrive in a digital world.

As part of the launch event, Power of Zero held a panel discussion with representatives of the technology industry, as well as UNICEF. I participated on behalf of Microsoft, along with representatives from AT&T, Facebook and Hasbro, all of which are also members of Power of Zero’s steering committee. The panel was moderated by Dr. Lewis Bernstein, a longtime research and education executive from Sesame Workshop.

We discussed the risks and opportunities that children and young people face online daily, as well as the need to instill values in young people at the earliest of ages. Some key themes that emerged included the need for parents and trusted adults to be involved, early and often, in children’s online activities; that children and teens needed to be equipped – skills-wise and attitudinally – to deal with online issues like fake news, misinformation, bullying and fraud, and the belief that a true, multistakeholder effort like Power of Zero has a strong chance of breaking through and inspiring adults to invest and assist children with their online growth and development.

Microsoft’s latest research, released Feb. 5, shows that now more than ever, teens are turning to parents and other adults, including teachers, coaches and counselors for help with online issues. This finding needs to stand as a testament that kids need help navigating the online world. What a better way to help arm them than with resources like those developed by Power of Zero.

Digital civility underpins Power of Zero

Microsoft was eager to join the Power of Zero collaboration and to support the campaign for two primary reasons. First, it fills a gap by targeting as its peak demographic children who are basically online as soon as they’re able to hold a cellphone. The debate is wide open as to whether such early online activity is advisable, but there can be no debate that it is, in fact, happening. Second, Power of Zero closely aligns to our own global campaign now entering its fourth year. At Microsoft, we seek to create a “human platform” to foster digital civility, online interactions among all people that are rooted in respect, inclusivity and kindness.

Along with other campaigns and online safety activities, our digital civility work builds on some of our earlier efforts to prevent and fight back against online bullying and harassment. We’ve been committed to combatting cyberbullying for more than a dozen years, conducting research in 25 countries, creating tools and resources to help parents and others identify and address online bullying incidents, and we’ve participated in international conferences and events designed to raise awareness and share best practices among key stakeholders.

Learn more

When faced with online bullying, we encourage young people to talk to adults, and we call on adults to listen, suspend judgment and plan any response or action plan together. We also ask adults to remember to model civil and respectful behaviors both in person and online.

To learn more, visit the Power of Zero and NoBully websites, and consult these Microsoft resources: fact sheet, second fact sheet, presentation deck, research paper. For more on online safety generally, visit our website and resources page. And, for regular news and information, connect with us on Facebook and Twitter.

Tags: ,

Posted on by — Leave a comment

New Microsoft 365 and business applications technologies enable government to modernize for the mission

Our government agencies have a unique opportunity to deliver massive impact on the lives of U.S. citizens – an impact that can be accelerated and emboldened by technology innovation. However, these same agencies are challenged to modernize and keep pace with the changing technology landscape, while simultaneously reducing costs, protecting data and meeting stringent compliance regulations. To ensure the government can achieve its critical, mission-driven work, and improve citizen services, hundreds of CIOs and top decision-makers from federal, state and local government agencies are turning to secure cloud infrastructure, which can seamlessly enable operations efficiencies, and provide services that are faster, more reliable and more secure.

Government is taking a Cloud Smart approach

Right now, we’re seeing the evolution across U.S. government from a Cloud First approach – with an emphasis on just getting everything in the cloud – to a Cloud Smart approach – with a focus on embracing modern capabilities and equipping agencies with the technology tools needed in accordance with their mission needs. The recently revised Federal Cloud Computing Strategy is the first cloud policy update in seven years. We believe it constitutes more than labelling and is the right way forward to make the most of the incredible possibilities of cloud in advancing agencies’ missions. In recent years, commercial technology has increasingly found a foothold in the government market and Cloud Smart embraces best practices from both the federal government and the private sector. Cloud Smart is about equipping agencies with the tools, knowledge and flexibilities they need to not only move to cloud, but to fully embrace the potential of its many value-added capabilities such as Platform-as-a Service (PaaS) and Artificial Intelligence.

Securely enabling the mission end to end

All government cloud offerings are not the same, and Microsoft is committed to supporting the needs of government across all branches and levels enabling them with capabilities that support the advancement of their mission from end to end. We’ve built the most trusted, comprehensive cloud for government which includes Azure Government, Microsoft 365 Government, and Dynamics 365 Government.

Government organizations across the United States increasingly are turning to our powerful cloud offerings to modernize – becoming more productive, collaborative and efficient all while protecting sensitive data and privacy. Microsoft is delivering them the right capabilities where they are needed, when they are needed as the sole provider with offerings that span infrastructure, platform and software capabilities and services (IaaS, PaaS and SaaS) designed to meet government’s unique compliance needs.

To make it easier for agencies to efficiently modernize quickly and accelerate the speed in which they achieve a return on their cloud investments, Microsoft has worked with our government customers to achieve the most certifications of any cloud provider with more than 91 compliance certifications supported at every level of government to help them achieve their necessary requirements. We also invest $1 billion dollars per year on security and much of that goes to ensuring we deliver our customers the most trusted cloud platform.

Today, we’re announcing several advances across our landscape of comprehensive government cloud solutions, demonstrating our commitment to the unique needs of our customers and further differentiating our offerings:

Microsoft Teams is now available across all government cloud environments

Since launching Microsoft 365 Government last year, we’ve continually made investments to empower government with the newest tools for mobile productivity and secure collaboration, bringing together the best of Office 365, Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS), and Windows 10 to meet agencies’ complex compliance and security requirements.

Today, we’re announcing Microsoft Teams, a product core to our vision for delivering intelligent and modern collaboration and communications, is now available in our Government Community Cloud (GCC) High and Department of Defense (DoD) environments exclusively for the U.S. government and its partners. This means Teams is now available across all our government cloud environments including GCC.

Microsoft Teams’ chat-based workspace enables teams of government professionals to be more productive by giving them a single and secure location that brings together everything they need including chats, meetings, calls, files, and tools. Integrated access through this hub for teamwork across multiple Office 365 services enables agencies to leverage their current investments and improves collaboration by providing central file sharing, co-authoring and many more functions making it possible for government customers to better deliver against their mission.

Introducing Microsoft Power Platform and Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement for Government

Today we’re also announcing the availability of both Microsoft Power Platform (March 2019) and Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (April 2019) for government professionals. These two new products will enable government to unlock new capabilities and features in three core areas: new business applications; new intelligent capabilities infused throughout; and transformational new application platform capabilities.

Once agencies have the infrastructure for harnessing data, they also need a layer atop that data that enables them to get insights easily. Microsoft Power Platform for Government is a system that will allow them to take three key actions on data: analyze, act, and automate. The system uses Power BI, PowerApps, and Flow working together to help anyone, regardless of technical ability, to make data-driven decisions. Joining Power BI, PowerApps and Flow standalone apps are now generally available for government agencies and their partners in GCC. PowerApps and Flow general availability will also land in Dynamics 365, Microsoft 365 and Office 365 in spring 2019.

We are also offering Dynamics 365 Government Customer Engagement for GCC High. This means agencies can now access customer service, contact centers, correspondence management, grants management, task management, mission planning and even more purpose-built cloud applications than they were able to previously.

New Microsoft 365 Government security and mobile enhancements

Recently we introduced Outlook Mobile for our GCC High and DoD customers. This update means the architecture of Outlook mobile now meets the security and compliance needs of Office 365 U.S. GCC High and DoD customers. Now government employees have advanced capabilities across email, search, and calendar from their mobile devices, so they can focus on what’s important and get more done for their citizens.

Coming soon, government agencies using Office 365 Threat Intelligence in GCC will gain new capabilities that automate investigation and remediation of cyber threats  to help them reduce the burden on their IT security teams and decrease response times. This is the latest addition to comprehensive set of Microsoft 365 Government tools designed to help government protect, detect and respond to cyberattacks.

Continuing our investments in government innovation, security and compliance

Microsoft is helping customers across the full spectrum of government, from the state and local level, to every military branch and all federal cabinet departments. We currently serve nearly 10 million U.S. government cloud professionals across more than 7,000 government entities diligently meeting their unique needs by deliver the highest levels of security and compliance.

Microsoft enables the digital transformation of government by offering effective, modern, enterprise-class cloud capabilities. Our government customers are driven by critical missions, and we are committed to helping them evolve their IT modernization efforts with innovative and trusted cloud, productivity and mobility solutions. As government agencies face a range of new challenges in meeting their missions, we are committed to enabling them to work smarter, with agility and confidence – using technology that can unlock the opportunities ahead. Learn more about how government agencies are using Microsoft cloud technology here.

Tags: , , , ,

Posted on by — Leave a comment

News recap from March 12 episode of Inside Xbox

Today, on our March episode of Inside Xbox, we made a big announcement about one of the world’s most popular games coming to Xbox Game Pass, revealed some major news regarding Halo: The Master Chief Collection, unveiled some of our plans for E3 2019, introduced a gorgeous new controller, shared info on new modes coming to State of Decay 2, and much more. For a full recap, read on below or watch the replay of Inside Xbox episode above when the VOD is available.

Minecraft is Coming Soon to Xbox Game Pass

Beginning April 4, Xbox Game Pass members can join the Minecraft community of millions of players from around the world. Discover limitless ways to play and create anything you can imagine. Plus, with Minecraft´s free content updates, you´ll always find new environments to explore, tools to create, and mobs to meet. Last summer, the Update Aquatic filled Minecraft´s oceans with dolphins, turtles and more, and the upcoming Village & Pillage update will expand the game even further later this spring. With over 100 great games, including Minecraft, there´s never been a better time to be an Xbox Game Pass member and discover your next favorite game. If you haven’t tried Xbox Game Pass, join today and get your first month for $1.

Halo: The Master Chief Collection is Coming to PC and Adding Halo: Reach

On today’s show, the crew was joined by Brian Jarrard from 343 Industries, who shared a couple of pieces of exciting news. First, we announced that Halo: The Master Chief Collection is officially coming to PC! Built specifically for the PC audience, players will be able to experience generation-defining campaigns and iconic multiplayer modes, many for the first time, on Microsoft Store and Steam. On PC, titles within Halo: The Master Chief Collection will be released individually over time to ensure that we are partnering with the community and investing the time into development to create a premier PC experience. We’ll have more to share during the Halo Championship Series Invitational at SXSW on March 15-17. We also announced that we’re bringing Halo: Reach to Halo: The Master Chief Collection for Xbox One and PC! Players will be able to experience this legendary title in stunning 4K/60fps and we’ll have more to share in the future.

Are You Ready for E3 2019?

At Xbox, planning for E3 2019 has kicked into high gear and we couldn’t be more excited for what we have in store for our fans.  As you may have heard, Bonnie Ross head of 343i, recently confirmed we’ll learn more about Halo Infinite at the show.  Our community team is hard at work getting ready for the return of Xbox FanFest, one of our favorite events at E3.  And we’re stoked to announce that in collaboration with AEG and L.A. Live, Microsoft Square will soon be renamed Xbox Plaza and will be a big part of what we have in store for E3 in June.  Cool, right?  We’ll have more to share on how Xbox Plaza is shaping up, all things FanFest and so much more goodness on E3 2019 in coming weeks and months ahead so be sure to stay tuned to Xbox Wire, This Week on Xbox and Inside Xbox for all the latest info.

The Phantom White Special Edition Joins the Xbox Wireless Controller Family

Controller announcements The Xbox Wireless Controller – Phantom White Special Edition is the second controller in our Phantom Series following the Phantom Black Special Edition.  The design is the optimal blend of luxury and Sci-Fi, embodying a new slant on technical beauty. You can grab the Phantom White Special Edition at retailers worldwide beginning April 2 for $69.99 USD, or pre-order yours today at select retailers, including your local Microsoft Store or online.

State of Decay 2 Lets You Choose Your Own Apocalypse

During today’s Inside Xbox segment, we revealed more about the two all-new terrifyingly awesome difficulty levels coming to State of Decay 2 with the free Choose Your Own Apocalypse Update (that we mentioned late last year) coming to Xbox Game Pass members and current players starting on March 26. Dread Zones will offer exciting challenges for experienced players, such as deadlier zombies, plague-infected juggernauts, a faster-acting blood plague, and fewer resources to scavenge. Want the ultimate challenge? Nightmare Zones are grueling endurance tests for hardcore players, featuring wandering groups of freaks and hostile humans capable of scoring lethal headshots against your survivors.

A Closer Look at the Future with Project xCloud

On today’s episode of Inside Xbox, we gave viewers their first real look at Project xCloud, a vision for game-streaming technology that will complement our console hardware and give gamers more choice in how and where they play. We’re developing Project xCloud not as a replacement for the video game console, but as a way to provide the same choice and versatility that lovers of music and movies enjoy today. We’re adding more ways to play Xbox games. We’re excited to share more about the technology in the coming months, including the first details of how and when you can help us to test it in real-world scenarios later this year.

Spatial Sound and the Wireless Display App are Changing the Game

As you might have heard, Xbox One currently supports Spatial Sound that’s specifically mixed for Dolby Atmos. During today’s show, we announced that the team is working to bring Spatial Sound to your whole Xbox One experience, regardless of whether it was specifically mixed for it. That includes all your games, movies, TV shows, and music content. Think as it as up-scaling for sound. To put it in simplest term: In the near future, all the content you experience through Xbox One is going to sound like it’s been mixed for Spatial Sound. We also announced that the team is in the process right now of rolling out the Wireless Display app, which is available in the Microsoft Store today. This app lets you project from your desktop or laptop PC or even your tablet onto the biggest and best screen in the house. Go check it out now!

DayZ Shambles Out of Xbox Game Preview

Bohemia Interactive’s DayZ has been a big hit on Xbox Game Preview, so we were happy to share on today’s episode that this intense RPG shooter will be coming out of XGP on March 27. Yes, you and your friends will be able to take on zombie hordes, as well as other players, in an attempt to stay alive. You’ll need to scavenge the world for weapons, food, water, weapons, and medicine, dealing with both zombies and competing players as you try to survive the outbreak. It’s one of the most intense experiences on Xbox One, and we’re excited for the full version to be released.

We hope you enjoyed the show, and we’ll see you next month!

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Project xCloud: Choice for how and when you game

Back in October we formally unveiled our work on Project xCloud: a vision for game-streaming technology that will complement our console hardware and give gamers more choices in how and where they play. Since then, we’ve been heads down and hard at work, preparing to launch the first public trials later this year. At the same time, we wanted to stay transparent about our progress and chat with the Inside Xbox team, showing you the first public demo of the technology in action.

One of the great developments in entertainment over the last decade is how easy and common it’s become to read, listen, or watch your digital content (often via streaming). We’ve seen this revolutionize the way people experience music and video, letting them dive in from wherever they wish and on whichever device is most convenient to them at the time. Applying this approach to the world of video games is a more challenging endeavor.  Games by their very nature are interactive entertainment. – And that interactivity is a substantial difference from watching TV or listening to music. We now find ourselves at an inflection point, where current technology can deliver a console-quality experience with the right cloud infrastructure, content and community in place.

We’re developing Project xCloud not as a replacement for game consoles, but as a way to provide the same choice and versatility that lovers of music and video enjoy today. We’re adding more ways to play Xbox games. We love what’s possible when a console is connected to a 4K TV with full HDR support and surround sound – that remains a fantastic way to experience console gaming.  We also believe in empowering gamers to decide when and how to play.

We believe in the future where you will be able to seamlessly access content on your phone, tablet or another connected device.  Imagine that you just began a single-player campaign the day before heading out of town and want to keep playing from where you left off.  Maybe you just need a few more minutes to wrap up that weekly challenge before you head into work, but your bus just won’t wait.  Or maybe the living-room television is occupied by someone else in the household when you arranged to play co-op with your friends.

While our vision for the technology is complementary to the ways in which we use consoles today, Project xCloud will also open the world of Xbox to those who may not otherwise own traditional, dedicated gaming hardware. True console-quality gaming will become available on mobile devices, providing the 2 billion-plus gamers around the world a new gateway to previously console- and PC-exclusive content.  We can achieve this vision with the global distribution of Microsoft’s datacenters in 54 Azure regions and the advanced network technologies developed by the team at Microsoft Research. We’re excited about our ability to deliver a best-in-class global streaming technology.

Project xCloud is an integral part of our vision for placing you the gamer at the center of your experience, giving you more choice in how and when you play. We’re excited to share more about the technology and our progress in the coming months, including the first details of how and when you can help us test it in real-world scenarios later this year.

There’s so much more to come, so stay tuned. We’ll be in touch.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

What’s new with Seeing AI

Saqib Shaikh holds his camera phone in front of his face with Seeing AI open on the screen

By Saqib Shaikh, Software Engineering Manager and Project Lead for Seeing AI

Seeing AI provides people who are blind or with low vision an easier way to understand the world around them through the cameras on their smartphones. Whether in a room, on a street, in a mall or an office – people are using the app to independently accomplish daily tasks like never before. Seeing AI helps users read printed text in books, restaurant menus, street signs and handwritten notes, as well as identify banknotes and products via their barcode. Leveraging on-device facial-recognition technology, the app can even describe the physical appearance of people and predict their mood.

Today, we are announcing new Seeing AI features for the enthusiastic community of users who share their experiences with the app, recommend new capabilities and suggest improvements for its functionalities. Inspired by this rich feedback, here are the updates rolling out to Seeing AI to enhance the user’s experience:

  • Explore photos by touch: Leveraging the Custom Vision Service in tandem with the Computer Vision API, this new feature enables users to tap their finger to an image on a touch-screen to hear a description of objects within an image and the spatial relationship between them. Users can explore photos of their surroundings taken on the Scene channel, family photos stored in their photo browser, and even images shared on social media by summoning the options menu while in other apps.
  • Native iPad support: For the first time we’re releasing iPad support, to provide a better Seeing AI experience that accounts for the larger display requirements. iPad support is particularly important to individuals using Seeing AI in academic or other professional settings where they are unable to use a cellular device.
  • Channel improvements: Users can now customize the order in which channels are shown, enabling easier access to favorite features. We’ve also made it easier to access the face recognition function while on the Person channel, by relocating the feature directly on the main screen. Additionally, when analyzing photos from other apps, the app will now provide audio cues that indicate Seeing AI is processing the image.

Since the app’s launch in 2017, Seeing AI has leveraged AI technology and inclusive design to help people with more than 10 million tasks. If you haven’t tried Seeing AI yet, download it for free on the App Store. If you have, please share your thoughts, feedback or questions with us at seeingai@microsoft.com, or through the Disability Answer Desk and Accessibility User Voice Forum.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

10 of the latest Microsoft Teams integrations to help you work smarter

We built Microsoft Teams as a platform to bring together all of your workplace tools, apps, and services—whether or not we built them—to allow you to deliver better workday flow for you and your employees. A lot of you recognize the power of Teams, and you’ve been asking how to use Teams to its full advantage. Look no further. Today, we’re sharing ten of the latest Teams integrations you can use every day to simplify workflows, refocus your attention, and get back to working smarter—not harder. This is something our CEO, Satya Nadella, recently addressed in his interview on the future of communication at work with the Wall Street Journal.

Ten of the latest integrations to try in Teams

These ten integrations bring everything from customer feedback and employee polls, to workflow and project management, into Teams, to make your apps work for you.

  1. Funnel customer feedback straight into Teams: Twitter
    As one of the largest social media platforms around, Twitter mostly needs no introduction. However, did you know it’s a great way to gather customer feedback? By integrating Twitter into Teams, you can set up alerts relevant to your company. So, when a customer tweets at your handle or uses your hashtag, it flows directly into Teams, where you can share or respond without stopping your workflow.
  2. Transform the way you work: ServiceNow
    ServiceNow delivers digital workflows that create great experiences and unlock productivity. The cloud-based Now Platform transforms old, manual ways of working into modern digital workflows, so employees and customers get what they need when they need it. Read more about the ServiceNow integration for Virtual Agent, a chatbot that helps build conversational workflows to resolve common ServiceNow actions, as well as IntegrationHub, which lets anyone break down development backlog with codeless workflows in an easy-to-use interface.
  3. Get organized with your very own automated administrative assistant: Zoom.ai
    Zoom.ai lives inside your chat, email inbox, and calendar to help you offload and automate tasks. You interact with it by typing commands in a chat window, where it can schedule Teams meetings for you, brief you on your day, send and receive reminders, and create documents when you need them. It works for you, where you work. Watch the Zoom.ai video to learn more.
  4. Organize any of life’s projects: Trello
    Trello is a project management software whose boards, lists, and cards enable you to organize and prioritize your projects in a flexible way. By integrating in Teams, you can see your Trello assignments, tasks, and notifications and have conversations about them—without leaving Teams. A fun way to bring together project management and project collaboration. Watch the Trello video to learn more.
  5. Run polls in tandem with your conversations: Polly
    Polly is a survey app that lets you create surveys in Teams. You can quickly create polls in your Teams channels and view results in real-time. You have the option to create multiple choice polls, freeform polls, or a mixture of both. Turn on comments and you’ve got yourself a full discussion board. Get the answers you need without disrupting workflows or clogging inboxes. Visit Polly for Microsoft Teams to learn more.
  6. Celebrate your organization’s culture and values: Disco
    Disco is a solution that rallies your entire company around your core values. It makes it easy to give public shout-outs and congratulate your colleagues in real-time. So, next time a team member delivers a project ahead of schedule or demonstrates one of your team or company values in their work, pay it forward by giving them Disco “points” in Teams. They’ll feel supported and, who knows, maybe repay your appreciation. Watch the Disco video to learn more.
  7. Help teams deliver value to customers faster by releasing earlier, more often, and more iteratively: Jira
    Jira Software is a leading software development tool used by agile teams to plan, track, and release great software. Integrate Jira with Teams for a seamless way to visualize the important things like development velocity, workloads, bug resolution, and app performance all in real-time—from Teams. This makes it easy to inject insights into group collaboration without disrupting workflows. Learn more about Microsoft Teams Jira Connector.
  8. Bring more structure to online brainstorming: MindMeister
    MindMeister is an online mind-mapping tool that lets you capture, develop, and share ideas visually. And by integrating in Teams, you can take notes, brainstorm, visualize project plans, and easily show connections between ideas all while discussing details with your team in the chat. Read Create and Manage All Your Mind Maps in Microsoft Teams! to learn more.
  9. Bring creative work to team work: Adobe Creative Cloud
    Adobe Creative Cloud gives you the world’s best apps and services for video, design, photography, and the web including Adobe Photoshop , Illustrator CC, InDesign CC, Premiere Pro CC, and more. Integrate with Teams to bring your creative work and teamwork together. You can share work, get feedback, and stay up-to-date on tasks and actions. Read Adobe XD Adds Integration with Microsoft Teams—Creativity meets collaboration to learn more.
  10. Build software in the way that works best for you: GitHub
    GitHub is the platform where developers work together, solve challenging problems, and create the world’s most important technologies. Whether you are a student, hobbyist, consultant, or enterprise professional, the GitHub integration in Teams allows you to create, share, and ship the best code possible.

Get started with Teams

Bringing these apps and tools together in Teams is a great way to bring focus back to your workflow. They’re easy to integrate and offer something for everyone, whether you’re developing software, managing projects, or gathering customer feedback. And with new apps going live on Teams every day, your next productivity superpower is only a few clicks away. Check the Teams Store today so you don’t miss out!

Posted on by — Leave a comment

With lessons learned from computers, a new platform could help boost production of lifesaving biological therapies

The power of the Station B platform lies in pulling all those pieces of the puzzle together in one integrated system, Phillips said. Both initial deployments will occur in labs that are overseen by health, safety, ethical and medical regulators.

“It marries Microsoft’s deep expertise in programming languages, modeling capabilities and machine learning with lab automation and the power of the cloud and intelligent edge — that combination of tools doesn’t exist anywhere in this industry today,” Phillips said.

To solve one key challenge, the platform uses Synthace’s lab automation system to allow users to run experiments from the cloud and precisely replicate each step in complicated scientific protocols.

Synthace’s Antha software allows the user to replace subjective instructions like “shake a test tube vigorously” with digital language that isn’t open to misinterpretation and that lab robots can execute. Building on top of Azure IoT, Antha is a high-level language for describing biological experiments that allows an array of lab machines made by different manufacturers to run them, much like printer drivers allow any make or model of printer to print PDF documents.

That ability to run experiments exactly the same way each time gives users confidence that the results they’re seeing are meaningful, and not just a fluke in the way the experiment happened to be set up that day.

Synthace’s system — which can handle experiments that simultaneously test dozens of different parameters or genetic constructs rather than one or two at a time — speeds up the research process exponentially. Combined with machine learning capabilities, it also gives customers the ability to pose and learn from much more sophisticated lines of inquiry.

“The near infinite power of biology can only be unlocked by bringing software abstraction and automation to biological R&D and manufacturing, and by enabling biologists to build atop their collective work. That is what the Antha platform does successfully,” said Tim Fell, Synthace chief executive officer.

Sarah-Jane Dunn stands in front a mural with her arms crossed
Sarah-Jane Dunn, scientist for Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK. Photo by Jonathan Banks.

’This could have huge reach’

The Station B platform will be tested first in the lab of Bonnie Bassler, chair of Princeton’s Department of Molecular Biology, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and recipient of a MacArthur genius grant, who studies how bacteria wield outsized power by acting as collectives. The Princeton team includes Bassler’s longtime collaborator Ned Wingreen, a physicist and professor in Princeton’s Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics.

“Historically we’ve thought of bacteria as only having harmful behaviors, like infecting us and causing disease, but more recently scientists have discovered the microbiome, a rather magical bacterial community that lives in and on us and that keeps us alive,” Bassler said. “What my lab has always wondered about is how do bacteria manage to either kill us or keep us alive? They’re so tiny.”

Bassler discovered the widespread use of a phenomenon called quorum sensing in the bacterial world. It’s a form of molecular communication that bacteria use to determine when their numbers have reached a critical mass. When they reach the “quorum,” together they trigger behaviors that are only successful when bacteria act as a coordinated group — such as unleashing virulent diseases.

In a proof-of-concept pilot, the team will deploy the Station B platform to investigate how cholera bacteria use quorum sensing to form biofilms, thin layers of bacteria that grow on almost all surfaces. Bacteria living in biofilm communities can be 1000 times more resistant to antibiotics than non-biofilm bacteria.

Princeton researchers will use the Station B platform and Synthace’s lab automation tools to construct and test different versions of two proteins that are key to biofilm formation — which are also genetically programmed to light up. The light allows the scientists to see and measure how much of each protein is produced under many different conditions and in different regions of the biofilm.

Bassler compares the working microbiologists in her lab to master craftspeople, creating elegant and complicated genetic constructs to produce a desired result. But that artisanal process yields only a few prospects at a time and doesn’t allow the team to massively attack the problem.

The Station B platform will be able to build and test dozens of engineered proteins at once — in whatever combinations a researcher can dream up and type into the system for a liquid handling robot to produce. The platform will then help the scientists learn which of the protein constructs behave most like the natural proteins and yield an accurate picture of how biofilm cells organize, Bassler said.

The goal is to build on that basic understanding and find an Achilles heel that might weaken virulent biofilms or increase their sensitivity to antibiotics.

“The platform will allow us to ask more questions, get more results and do more experiments than a graduate student or postdoc, no matter how clever, can do today. So, it gets us to the winning genetic constructs faster,” Bassler said.

Equally important, the platform will also collect and help analyze data from every single lab experiment — including ones that fail, Bassler said. By necessity, scientists have to pursue their most fruitful lines of inquiry, but that can leave an untapped trove of information about why something didn’t succeed.

“If this extra information can help us discover the underlying patterns in what works and what doesn’t work and why, that would be a transformative leap for us,” she said.

The value of deploying the Station B platform in Bassler’s lab is that those researchers have already built an extensive inventory of genetic components, chemical mixtures and models in the years that they’ve been studying bacteria like cholera.

If the team can begin to uncover the rules and principles that govern those systems, Wingreen said, they may be able to program them in transferrable ways. That could potentially enable a doctor who studies cancer or an engineer working on low-carbon fuels to imagine a genetic construct that they’d love to test and get an exact blueprint for assembling it — without spending years at a lab bench.

“From my perspective, this could have a huge reach,” Wingreen said. “Just as the tech sector was democratized by software that lets you ask for what you want in a microchip design and have someone make it, we need that same revolution in biology.”

Top image: Breech Odu works in an Oxford Biomedica lab, where the Station B platform will be deployed to accelerate discovery and manufacturing of gene and cell therapies. Photo by Jonathan Banks.

Related:

Jennifer Langston writes about Microsoft research and innovation. Follow her on Twitter.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Seattle Times: ‘Even one cigarette’ in pregnancy can raise risk of babies’ death, Seattle Children’s and Microsoft find

It’s no surprise that smoking during pregnancy is unhealthy for the fetus — just as it’s unhealthy for the person smoking. But the powerful combination of medical research and data science has given new insights into the risks involved, specifically when it comes to babies suddenly dying in their sleep.

The risk of Sudden Unexpected Infant Death (SUID) increases with every cigarette smoked during pregnancy, according to a joint study by Seattle Children’s Research Institute and Microsoft data scientists.

Further, while smoking less or quitting during pregnancy can help significantly, a risk of SUID exists even if a person stops smoking right before becoming pregnant, the team demonstrated.

“Any amount of smoking, even one cigarette, can double your risk,” said Tatiana Anderson, a post-doctoral research fellow at Children’s who worked on the study, which was published Monday in the journal Pediatrics.

Most Read Local Stories

Anderson and the rest of the team estimate that smoking during pregnancy is responsible for 800 of the approximately 3,700 SUID deaths in the United States every year. That’s 22 percent of all SUID cases.

The team analyzed vast data sets from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that included every baby born in the United States from 2007 to 2011. In that time span, more than 20 million babies were born and 19,127 died of SUID, which includes Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS).

The study found that the risk of SUID doubles if a person goes from not smoking to smoking just one cigarette daily throughout pregnancy. At a pack a day (20 cigarettes), the risk is tripled compared to nonsmokers. The odds plateau from there.

The chance of SUID decreases when women quit smoking or smoke less: Women who tapered their smoking by the third trimester showed a 12 percent decreased risk. Quitting altogether by the third trimester lowered the risk of SUID by 23 percent.

The biggest predictor of SUID risk was the average number of cigarettes smoked daily throughout the three trimesters of pregnancy, rather than smoking more or less at any particular point.

“Thus, a woman who smoked 20 cigarettes per day in the first trimester and reduced to 10 cigarettes per day in subsequent trimesters had a similarly reduced SUID risk as a woman who averaged 13 cigarettes per day in each trimester,” the study states.

Having such precise data about the effects of smoking before and during pregnancy better arms health-care providers to speak with their patients, Anderson said.

“Doctors need to have frank discussions with patients,” she said. “Every cigarette you can eliminate on a daily basis will reduce your risk of SUID.”

Microsoft data scientists teamed up with the Children’s researchers after John Kahan, who heads up customer data and analytics for Microsoft, lost his son Aaron to SIDS in 2003. After Aaron’s death, days after he came home from the hospital, Kahan started the Aaron Matthew SIDS Research Guild. In 2016, he climbed Mount Kilimanjaro to raise money for SIDS research.

When he returned from Africa, he found out his team at Microsoft had been working with the available data on infant deaths. Their goal was to use algorithms to analyze the data and help come up with a way to save babies like Aaron from SUID.

Juan Lavista, a member of Kahan’s team at that time, is now the senior director of data science at the AI For Good research lab, which is part of an initiative called AI for Humanitarian Action, launched by Microsoft president Brad Smith. The idea behind the initiative is to use artificial intelligence to tackle some of the world’s most difficult problems, and it has allowed Lavista to work on things like the SUID study full time instead of cramming it in around his day job.

Data scientists can use computing power to work with huge data sets to help solve confounding issues like SUID, climate change and immigration, Lavista said.

“There are many problems the world has that, we believe, we can make a difference with AI,” he said.

The collaboration has been exciting for Anderson, the Children’s research fellow. She says this unusual partnership between the medical world and the technology sector has applications in many different fields.

“I think it is really exciting because it is a concept that absolutely can be used to ask questions outside of SIDS,” Anderson said. “Everybody is there because they want to make a difference. It is very much a collaborative effort.”

The scientists at Microsoft and Children’s aren’t stopping with the publication of this study. Lavista said they are delving into other questions surrounding SUID, such as the impact of prenatal care, how the age of an infant relates to sudden death and an examination of what SUID looks like in all 50 states.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Strength in diversity: Backstage Accelerator announces first cohorts with Microsoft for Startups as partner

Back in September, we shared the news that Microsoft for Starutps had joined Backstage Capital as a launch partner for Backstage Accelerator. Today, Backstage shared details of the first cohorts of startups at its four accelerator locations with Fast Company and announced that the programs are launching in the coming weeks.

acc-cohort-logo-grid-3

The first cohort of startups at Backstage Accelerator

At Microsoft for Startups, we’re focused on creating much greater diversity within our startup ecosystem. The founders who have been chosen to be a part of Backstage Capital’s inaugural cohorts represent a step toward greater diversity and representation and we’re excited to contribute support.

The new Backstage Accelerator is a three-month program “designed to give founders the support they need to reach their next critical milestone.” With locations in Detroit, London, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia, Backstage Accelerator is created for underrepresented founders, providing them with the tools and mentorship needed for success.

To that end we will be providing technology and business support, extending the Microsoft for Startups offer to qualified Backstage Accelerator startups, and by committing mentorship and guidance to startups in the program.

The accelerators are scheduled to launch over the coming weeks:

● Detroit – March 12

● Philadelphia – March 21

● Los Angeles – March 26

● London – April 2

For more information about Backstage Accelerator and its cohort startups, you can visit: https://backstagecapital.com/accelerator/

If you would like more information about Microsoft for Startups, you can see our list of benefits here: https://startups.microsoft.com/en-us/benefits/