Microsoft news – Page 218

Posted on February 13, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Empathy and innovation: How Microsoft’s cultural shift is leading to new product development

The young Microsoft software engineer had just moved to the U.S. and was trying her best to stay in close touch with her parents back home, calling them on Skype every week.

But their internet connection in India was poor, and Swetha Machanavajhala, deaf since birth, struggled to read their lips over the glitchy video. She always had to ask her parents to turn off the lights in the background to help her focus better on their faces.

“I kept thinking, ‘Why can’t we build technology that can do this for us instead?’” Machanavajhala recalled. “So I did.”

It turned out her background-blurring feature was good for privacy reasons as well, helping to hide messy offices during video conference calls or curious café customers during job interviews. So Machanavajhala’s innovation was integrated into Microsoft Teams and Skype, and she soon found herself catapulted into the spotlight at Microsoft – as well as into the company’s work on inclusion, a joy to experience after having been excluded at a previous job where her deafness made it hard to fully participate.

Software engineer Swetha Machanavajhala poses with her parents in front of the Taj Mahal in India. — Microsoft software engineer Swetha Machanavajhala and her parents. Photo by Swetha Machanavajhala.

Microsoft employees say those twists and turns of innovation – aiming for A and ending up with a much broader B – have become more common at Microsoft in the five years since Satya Nadella was appointed chief executive officer.

Nadella’s immediate push to embolden employees to be more creative has been exemplified by the company’s annual hackathon. Machanavajhala and others say the event has helped spark a revival where employees feel energized to innovate year-round and to seek support from their managers for their ideas – even if those have nothing to do with their day jobs.

“The company has changed culturally,” Michael A. Cusumano, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management who wrote a book about Microsoft 20 years ago, recently told The New York Times. “Microsoft is an exciting place to work again.”

Chris Kauffman, a marketing manager in product licensing who has worked for Microsoft for 13 years, said Nadella’s focus on fostering collaboration was a turning point for her, as she noticed silos being torn down. Kauffman also realized the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) could help business people like her broach the realm of engineers and IT specialists. She and her team capitalized on both of those developments to create a chatbot and virtual colleague, answering thousands of licensing questions from around the world and helping to handle the accelerated pace of Azure cloud computing service updates.

“I went to my first hackathon three years ago and fell back in love with Microsoft,” Kauffman said. “I realized that I now have permission to talk to anyone I want to. I’m no longer limited by my job function or level. And my experience with the chatbot is a great example of how technology can be democratized and used by everybody.”

That new openness has led to an explosion in new products or fine-tuned improvements across Microsoft, for customers as well as for internal use. Employees say the resurgence is showing up both in product improvements and internal events such as TechFest, an annual showcase of Microsoft research that takes place in a few weeks.

Posted on February 13, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Feb. 14 Xbox Sessions: Terry Crews steps up his boom as Commander Jaxon in ‘Crackdown 3’

Terry Crews can do anything – he’s a talented actor, an activist, artist, and a former professional football player. He’s a man of many strengths (and muscles), but how are his gaming skills while playing as his in-game character, Commander Isaiah Jaxon, in the upcoming Crackdown 3? Tune-in to the next episode of Xbox Sessions, airing Thursday, February 14 at 4 p.m. PST on the Mixer Xbox Channel, Twitch Xbox Channel, and the Xbox YouTube Channel to find out!

Ahead of Crackdown 3’s February 15 worldwide launch with Xbox Game Pass, Xbox One, and Windows 10 PC, get an exclusive look at Terry Crews taking on the cruel and corrupt TerraNova Corporation across the futuristic city of New Providence. Catch Terry exploring the heights of this comic-book inspired playground of mayhem and destruction, using Commander Jaxon’s powerful abilities to collect Orbs and bring down a ruthless criminal empire.

Will Terry be able to step up his boom and annihilate the crime in New Providence? There’s only one way to find out! Join host Kate Yeager on Wednesday, February 14 at 4 p.m. PST to cheer Terry on via Mixer Xbox Channel, the Twitch Xbox Channel, and the Xbox YouTube Channel.

Posted on February 13, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Forbes: Microsoft’s Power Platform aims to ‘make other people cool’

A selection of PowerApps built by London Heathrow Airport, UK.Microsoft

Microsoft has always had to straddle an arguably difficult position in the software trade. The company has always needed to appear technically intricate, granular and powerful in the eyes of hard-core software developers. At the same time, the company has always had to present its software to market with a user-friendly ‘anyone can use it’ out-of-the-box style and approach.

There’s a little of that duality in the firm’s latest power play, which is a combination pack of technologies wrapped up under the Microsoft Power Platform brand.

This is all about presenting a selection of heavyweight backend technologies to hard-core developers and data scientists, but also to would-be so-called citizen developers who are typically businesspeople with an interest in getting applications and data to work the way they want them to work.

CEO Satya: be cool (to others)

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has tried to explain to his developer team that it’s not always about being the most amazing software engineer that creates the next big thing. Instead, it’s about creating amazing software power and putting that power in the hands of people who need it.

“You join here [Microsoft, the company itself], not to be cool, but to make others cool,” said Nadella, in a comment that has been widely reported internally and officially referenced here on c|net.

What Nadella meant was: build something so amazing that it empowers other people. This, of course, is a platform play, not a product play i.e. he wants people to use Microsoft technologies to create something great, rather than use an existing Microsoft technology to be great per se. It’s a logical enough strategy i.e. software products come and go, but platforms are more foundational and expansive… and so (typically) form a better long term business bet.

Microsoft Power Platform

The component parts of the Microsoft Power Platform have all previously existed as more distinct entities. This is essentially a coming together of Microsoft Power BI, Microsoft PowerApps and Microsoft Flow as a more unified offering available on top of Microsoft Azure cloud services.

“Our Power Platform – spanning Power BI, PowerApps and Flow – enables anyone in an organization to start building an intelligent app or workflow where none exists. It is the only solution of its kind in the industry – bringing together no-code/low-code app development, robotic process automation and self-service analytics into a single, comprehensive platform. And it enables extensibility across Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365 as well as the leading third-party SaaS business applications,” said Microsoft CEO Nadella, in a press statement.

So just looking at the component parts again and explaining their functions, we have Microsoft Power BI, Microsoft PowerApps and Microsoft Flow.

Microsoft Power BI is self-service Business Intelligence (BI) app that works to connect and analyze business data and present a graphical visualization of it on screen. It supports 43 languages and the data it ingests can come from an Excel spreadsheet or SharePoint list, an Oracle database or from an SAP or Salesforce application. Nearly 10 petabytes of data are uploaded to the service each month with more than 10 million report and dashboard queries executed against that data every hour.

Microsoft PowerApps forms the company’s citizen application development platform. Theoretically ‘anyone’ (says Microsoft) can use PowerApps to build web and mobile applications without writing code. There’s also a natural connection between Power BI and PowerApps so that users can put insights (from Power BI) in the hands of maintenance workers and others on the frontline in apps built using PowerApps.

Lastly here there is Flow. This is Microsoft’s user interface that allows users to work with Robotic Process Automation (RPA), a technology designed to help automate simple tasks (and reduce operational errors) through automated workflows.

Data flows, everywhere

Corporate vice president in Microsoft’s business applications group James Phillips explains that the team’s vision for Microsoft Power Platform started from the recognition that data is increasingly flowing from everything, and a belief that organizations that harness their data – to gain insights then used to drive intelligent business processes – will outperform those that don’t.

“We also recognize there aren’t enough programmers, data scientists and tech professionals to go around. So our goal was to build a platform not targeting these technology experts but for [ordinary] people – and the millions of other frontline workers who see opportunities every day to create something better than the status quo, but who’ve never been empowered to do anything about it,” wrote Philips, in a lengthy Microsoft cloud blog.

Philips and team say that the guiding vision for Microsoft Power Platform was a framework they called the ‘Triple-A Loop’ i.e. a closed-loop system allowing users to gain insights from data (Analyze) used to drive intelligent business processes via apps they build (Act) and processes they automate (Automate).

Why play platform games?

We might stand back and ask why Microsoft is so focused on its new and wider approach to platform games of this kind — and there are three fairly reasonable suggestions we can make here.

First, Microsoft has always done platforms i.e. Windows was and still is a platform and you run other things (apps, databases and other computing services) upon it.

Second, Microsoft has invested heavily in its own Azure cloud platform (which features as a key element of Microsoft Power Platform) and, over and above that, the firm has for a long time now been working to make large portions of its stack (such as Office as a platform, which we detailed here in 2015) big enough to be considered platforms in their own right.

Third, Microsoft (under CEO Nadella at least) appears to understand the power of platforms both inside the Microsoft universe and outside of it. Be that other platform Linux, be it Android or be it a major vendor’s data platform suite from the likes of SAP, Salesforce, Oracle and so on.

This is a world where data comes first — sometimes from databases, sometimes from AI computations, sometimes from the Internet of Things (IoT) and its devices and sometimes from actual users — even before the actual software applications that will feed on that data. That core fact very arguably makes any platform play strategically smarter for long term success… if perhaps not just a little cool too.

Posted on February 12, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Spark a love for literacy with February’s #MSFTEduChat TweetMeet

In celebration of World Read Aloud Day and February Literacy Month, we’re making literacy the guiding star for this month’s TweetMeet. With the help of our global education experts – and our invitation to you – we’ll discuss a range of aspects of literacy: How have you incorporated literacy in your lessons, and how do you spark the love for reading and writing in your students? What strategies work best to overcome daily challenges in the classroom?

We’re also getting some help this time around from Skype in the Classroom Literacy partners like Little Brown (@lbschool), Penguin Young Readers (@PenguinClass), LitWorld (@LitWorldSays) and others. Thank you for joining us!

The #MSFTEduChat TweetMeet will take place on Tuesday, February 19th, at 10:00 a.m. PST (check your time zone here). (Sounds great, but what’s a TweetMeet?)

We offer 5 simultaneous language tracks this month: English, French, Polish, Romanian and Serbian. Here’s a quick look at all language tracks and their corresponding Twitter hashtags for the February TweetMeet:

For each language track, we have one or more hosts to post the translated questions and respond to educators. As always, we’re super grateful to all current and former hosts who are collaborating closely to provide this service.

The #TweetMeetXX hashtags for non-English languages are to be used together with #MSFTEduChat so that everyone can find the conversations back in their own language. For example: Polish-speaking people use the combination #TweetMeetPL #MSFTEduChat. English-speaking educators may all use #MSFTEduChat on its own.

Learn how to spark a love for literacy in the next #MSFTEduChat TweetMeet! Join us on Tuesday, Feb. 19 from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. PST. #MSFTEduChat #Literacy Click To Tweet

TweetMeet fan? Show it off on your Twitter profile

Every month more and more people discover the unique flow and characteristics of the TweetMeet events and become passionate about them. Show your passion for the TweetMeets right from your own Twitter page by uploading this month’s #MSFTEduChat Twitter Header Photo to the top of your own Twitter profile. Besides English, this same Twitter Header Photo is also available in each of this month’s additional language tracks.

Looking back on the January TweetMeet on Transforming Classroom Time

Last month’s #MSFTEduChat TweetMeet generated fascinating and practical conversations and insights from educators around the world. We captured some highlights from this broad discussion in this @MicrosoftEDU Twitter Moment.

Why join the #MSFTEduChat TweetMeets?

TweetMeets are monthly recurring Twitter conversations about themes relevant to educators, facilitated by Microsoft Education. The purpose of these events is to help professionals in education to learn from each other and inspire their students while they are preparing for their future. The TweetMeets also nurture personal learning networks among educators from across the globe.

We’re grateful to have a support group made up exclusively of former TweetMeet hosts, who volunteer to translate communication and check the quality of our questions and promotional materials. They also help identify the best candidates for future events, provide relevant resources, promote the events among their networks, and, in general, cheer everybody on.

When and how can I join?

Join us Tuesday, February 19 from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. PST on Twitter using the hashtags #MSFTEduChat, #Literacy and #MicrosoftEDU (which you can always use to stay in touch with us). To find the event time for your specific location, use this time zone announcer.

From our monthly surveys we know that you may be in class at event time, busy doing other things or maybe even asleep – well, no problem! All educators are most welcome to join after the event. Simply take a look at the questions below and respond to these at a day and time that suit you best. You can also schedule your tweets in advance. In that case, be sure to quote the entire question and mention the hashtag #MSFTEduChat, so that everyone knows the right question and conversation to which you are responding. Mark the exact timings – they are different this month.

How can I best prepare?

We also have a special Minecraft: Education Edition resource from two of this month’s hosts:

Verona Adventure

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLrg1gJwdRU?feature=oembed&w=640&h=360]

Explore this Minecraft: Education Edition world made by hosts Ben Spieldenner and Simon Baddeley. Take your students through an argumentative writing adventure set against the background of the classic story of Romeo and Juliet, staged in the city of Verona.

Plus, get ready Skype in the Classroom’s Literacy Month:

We are partnering Little Brown Young Readers and will be wrapping up our celebrations with a free broadcast event and live Q&A. Classrooms and families are invited to join us on March 6^th to meet Cressida Cowell, author and illustrator of the hugely popular “How to Train Your Dragon” series. Cressida will inspire students to tap into their boundless imagination and will show how using character development and details in stories make them more believable and fun.

TweetMeet questions

In response to your feedback, we’ve reduced the number of discussion questions to just 4. This will give everyone more time to engage with one another.

Hosts

We’re excited to introduce the 13 hosts for this month’s TweetMeet. They’re all passionate about literacy and thrilled to talk to you and offer their insights. You can see them all and follow them with a click on our TweetMeet list.

Ben Spieldenner @BenSpieldenner (MIE Expert, Minecraft Global Mentor, Co-Director Cross Pond Collaborations, High School English Teacher & Educational Technologist – Ashland OH, USA)
Bushra Anis Naqvi @banaqvi (Teacher, trainer, researcher, speaker, futurist and active enthusiast working to prove how technologies can change educators and education – Lahore, Pakistan)
Claudia Daniels @ClaudiaRDaniels (Aspiring for Better – making a difference in the life of a child through reading, writing, poetry, Flipgrid, ClassDojo, MIE Expert – Cobb County GA, USA)
Dyane Smokorowski @Mrs_Smoke (2013 KS Teacher of the Year, 2009 NSBA Top 20 to Watch, Google Certified, Skype MT, ECET2KS, Inst Tech Coach, EdCampKS, Speaker, Global Collaboration Evangelist – Andover KS, USA)
Hammed Abdulazeez @hammedabdulaz (MIE Expert, MIE Master Trainer, Skype Master Teacher, EduTech Expert, Member British Council Liberary of Experience for Diversity and Inclusion – Lagos, Nigeria)
Holly Holland @HollandEdTech (Reading Coach, MIE Expert, Skype Master Teacher, OneNote Avenger, Seesaw Ambassador, Flipgrid Ambassador – Tampa FL, USA)
Jacek Zablocki @JacekZablocki (Primary school teacher of English and ICT, MIE Expert passionate about Mystery Skype – Wasilkow, Poland)
Linda Edwards @LindaEdwardsi (Special Needs Educator, TDSB, Seesaw Ambassador, Buncee Ambassador, Class Dojo Mentor, Flipgrid GridGuide & Ambassador, MIE, Go Bubble Ambassador, Wakelet Member – Toronto, Canada)
Martha Bongiorno @Mrs_Bongi (MIE Expert passionate about future-ready libraries, embedding technology within literacy campaigns, and student voice in the library – Atlanta GA, USA)
Milena Vojinović @voj_milena (Elementary/Middle School ESL Teacher from Serbia, MIE Expert – quite passionate about using ICT tools in class – Leskovac, Serbia)
Mirela Tanc @MirelaTanc (Secondary School teacher, TEDx Speaker, Let’s do it Ambassador, MIE Expert & Trainer, member of Harvard Learning Community, TeachSDGs Ambassador, Skype Master Teacher – Oradea, Romania)
Natacha Camus @litteratum1 (College and High School Literature Teacher, MIE Expert, passionate about art and its transmission through digital technology – Dijon, France)
Simon Baddeley @SimBadd64 (Director of Cross Pond Collaborations, Minecraft Global Mentor, Minecraft Certified Trainer, Content Creator, Innovator, English Teacher – Castleford England, UK)

What are #MSFTEduChat TweetMeets?

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8IK9WWESFo?feature=oembed&w=640&h=360]

Every month Microsoft Education organizes social events on Twitter targeted at educators globally. The hashtag we use is #MSFTEduChat. A team of topic specialists and international MIE Expert teachers prepare and host these TweetMeets together. Our team of educator hosts first crafts several questions around a certain topic. Then, before the event, they share these questions on social media. Combined with a range of resources, a blog post and background information about the events, this allows all participants to prepare themselves to the full. Afterwards we make an archive available of the most notable tweets and resources shared during the event.

TweetChat expert Madalyn Sklar recently published this helpful introductory guide:
Your Complete Guide to Twitter Chats: Why You Should Join & How to Make the Most of It

Please connect with TweetMeet organizer Marjolein Hoekstra @OneNoteC on Twitter if you have any questions about TweetMeets or helping out as a host.

Join for next month’s topic: #MakeWhatsNext with STEM

Posted on February 12, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

European teens use their voices for digital good at Italy’s Safer Internet Day events

Cyberbullying, sexting and online well-being are among 16 priority areas selected by young people across the globe as part of the 2020 Smarter Internet for Kids Agenda announced last week in Italy. Microsoft was on hand to hear the ideas and view the work of dozens of teens, all while continuing to promote digital civility, safer and healthier online interactions among all people.

In an online vote conducted by the European Council for Digital Good, (a “sister” council to Microsoft’s inaugural Council for Digital Good), more than 2,000 youth from 34 countries[1], chose the most significant and topical online safety issues. Privacy and data protection topped the list, while child sexual exploitation, misinformation and hate speech also ranked among the top 16. Digital civility/netiquette came in at No. 18, just missing the top 16 priorities. Yet, related topics online well-being and online safety, took the No. 12 and No. 13 spots, respectively. The 16 goals were selected to mark 16 years of international Safer Internet Day and were announced in Milan on Feb. 4, the eve of Safer Internet Day 2019.

Once the 16 priority areas were identified, young people from 10 countries designed specific targets for each priority, as well as the means of achieving them. On Feb. 3, the teens memorialized their plans in posters that were displayed at a more public event on Feb. 4. Those attending the event voted on the most compelling and informative poster, with the critical topic of online well-being taking the top honor. Across these priorities, youth are calling on people around the world to work with them to reach their goals in just one year, by Safer Internet Day 2020. (Learn more at www.smarterinternet.org.)

Microsoft hosts pre-Safer Internet Day activities in Milan

I had the privilege of attending this series of pre- and Safer Internet Day activities with the teens, including the working session on Feb. 3, held at the Microsoft House. There, 60 young people gathered to learn of the priority areas from members of the European council, discuss the issues and create their posters. Nine teens were then selected to prepare for three separate panel discussions the next day. I worked with and helped to prepare three incredible teens from Greece, Iceland and Italy for a panel on online well-being where sexting, cyberbullying and incitement to harm were the featured topics. The next day, I delivered a presentation about Microsoft’s own Safer Internet Day release and served as the adult respondent on the panel.

“Just touching our screen, we are changing someone else’s life,” Paola from Italy told the audience during the online well-being panel. “Humans are not perfect; we are not perfect, but are we being asked to be perfect” for fear that all of this generation’s youthful missteps will be played out online?

These and other questions made for a thought-provoking and compelling session, where the participants drew distinctions between growing up in decades past and growing up in an online era. They spoke of friends and classmates being driven by “likes” and “followers;” they debated the risks and realities of sexting and encouraged others to stand up for those being bullied or treated uncivilly online.

“Listening and heeding the voice of youth is essential in the online world,” said Janice Richardson, the creator of international Safer Internet Day and the coordinator of the European council. “Children and young people are generally the early adopters of new technology, at a time when they are still developing their values and attitudes and don’t yet have the life experience upon which resilience is built.” (Along with university professor Ernesto Caffo of Telefono Azzurro, Italy’s helpline for children and adolescents, Richardson co-sponsored the events in Milan.)

Adults: Be open to questions from youth about life online

That is precisely why it is equally important to involve and educate parents, teachers, coaches, counselors and other adults in the ways teens and young people are engaging with technology. Youth need to be able to go to adults for advice and guidance about online risk exposure, and this is borne out in research.

On Safer Internet Day 2019, Microsoft released its third annual installment of research from teens and adults in 22 countries about their exposure to 21 different online risks. Data show that now more than ever, teens around the world are turning to parents and other trusted adults for help with online issues. Across the countries surveyed, 42 percent of teens said they asked a parent for help with an online risk in the last year, up 32 percent from the previous year. Meantime, 28 percent of teens said they turned to another trusted adult, up 19 percent. In Italy, those percentages jumped to 44 percent and 21 percent, respectively, up from just 5 percent for both adult groups a year earlier.

The messages from these data for both adults and teens are clear. Parents and teachers need to familiarize themselves with teens’ online activities and the risks young people may encounter online. Most importantly, adults need to be open to talking with youth, focusing on listening and suspending judgment. Meanwhile, teens need to reach out to grown-ups whom they trust if something they see online threatens them or makes them uncomfortable; odds are their friends and classmates are doing the same thing. (View the full 2019 research report here.)

Another youth-focused event took place on Safer Internet Day, Feb. 5 in Rome. Government and law enforcement officials, representatives from technology companies and leaders of nongovernmental organizations assembled to make short presentations to some 200 young people and to respond to their questions. This event was also sponsored by Telefono Azzurro.

Microsoft’s Council for Digital Good champions SID 2019

Meanwhile, back in the U.S., members of Microsoft’s inaugural Council for Digital Good took these messages to their peers and younger kids on Safer Internet Day 2019, with several members holding workshops and after-school activities about embracing digital civility and staying safe online. Our inaugural council was made up of 15 teens from 12 U.S. states selected in 2017 to help spread the word about digital civility and to grow a generation dedicated to safer and healthier online interactions. (Learn more here and here.) Although the official pilot program wound down in July 2018, several teens remain active in promoting digital civility and online safety.

Erin, from Michigan, hosted an event, and got 150 9- to 12-year-olds to commit to safer online habits and practices by advocating for the four tenets of the Microsoft Digital Civility Challenge:

Live the Golden Rule
Respect differences
Pause before replying, and
Stand up for one’s self and others. (Click here to read the full Digital Civility Challenge.)

Bronte, an 18-year-old from Ohio, reached out to fellow high school students, asking them what their ideal internet would look like, and suggesting they sign a “pledge for a safer internet.” Indigo, from California, led 50 fourth- and fifth-graders in games and activities that she created to instill good online behaviors. Other council members also held events in their schools and communities.

We can’t say enough about the young people we’ve met and continue to meet, as we spread the (still fairly new) message of digital civility. We thank them for valuing the concept and for being leaders among their peers and other youth.

Safer Internet Day 2019 may be in the rearview mirror, but there’s still time to commit to putting our best digital foot forward by taking the Digital Civility Challenge and committing to its four ideals. It’s not too late to share your pledge on social media. Use the hashtags #Challenge4Civility and #Im4DigitalCivility. For other information about online safety, visit our website and resources page, and for more regular news and information, connect with us on Facebook and Twitter.

[1] Albania, Armenia, Australia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, Faroe Islands, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, India, Iraq, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Mongolia, Morocco, Poland, Romania, Senegal, Slovakia, Spain, Syria, The Netherlands, Tunisia, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States

Posted on February 12, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Introducing the Imagine Cup Asia Regional Champions: Team Caeli from India

We are excited to introduce the winners of the Asia Regional Final! Team Caeli won top honors for their automated anti-pollution and drug delivery mask which utilizes Azure Machine Learning to improve quality of life for respiratory patients living in polluted areas.

At its core, Microsoft Imagine Cup has a mission to empower student developers to achieve more and create the next great technology solutions for the chance to win cash, prizes, mentoring, and travel. We believe that with student innovation and creativity, partnered with Microsoft technologies and Azure cloud resources, the possibilities are endless.

The first out of three Regional Final events kicked off this weekend at Ignite | The Tour. Asia regional competitors were challenged to submit an original technology project utilizing Azure, and hundreds of teams were evaluated in the preliminary Online Semifinals round. 12 finalists were selected to move forward to the in-person Asia Regional Finals. The finalist teams traveled to Sydney, Australia on February 11 and participated in an Entrepreneurship Day and Ignite | The Tour activities to learn how to take their project to the next level and integrate the latest and greatest technologies into their solutions. Their experience culminated in giving a live demo of their Imagine Cup projects to a panel of judges and the top three were selected.

Team Caeli will advance to the Imagine Cup World Championship this May, where they will compete against the winners of the EMEA and Americas Regional finals for a chance at USD100,000 and a mentoring session with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Follow the action on Twitter and Instagram to stay up to date with the competition.

1^st place – Caeli, India

Caeli is a smart automated anti-pollution and drug delivery mask specifically designed for asthmatic and chronic respiratory patients. Caeli implements breakthrough features and Azure Machine Learning in a portable format to improve the quality of life for respiratory patients living in polluted areas.

Prize: USD15,000 and a spot in the Imagine Cup World Championship

2^nd place – RailinNova, China

The team developed a Rail Component Inspection Robot which operates through automatic positioning using AI and IoT, and identifies various railroad defects through multi-sensor fusion in order to replace the number of workers needed in a rail inspection project. The results can be processed in real-time to identify possible defect areas.

Prize: USD5,000

3^rd place – AidUSC, Philippines

The team developed Aqua Check, which utilizes Microsoft Azure’s Custom Vision to empower anyone to analyze for contamination by taking a photo of a water sample through a microscope. Using Azure Web and Azure Maps, the project can map contamination locations.

Prize: USD1,000

Congratulations to all the Asia Regional Finalists for all their incredible innovations this year. Do you want to build the skills necessary to bring your technology solution to the next Imagine Cup? Get started learning Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Mixed Reality and more with Azure for Students.

Posted on February 11, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Hear from education experts around the world in the new Microsoft Flagship School Podcast

Launching a new school is one of the most inspiring challenges leaders and educators can take on. The Microsoft Flagship School Podcast provides practical ideas and experiences from leaders around the globe, to make this journey to transform from the ground up, a little easier.

Today, I am pleased to share the release of a new podcast series to help inspire leaders around the world as they take steps on the journey to transform from the ground up. Drawing inspiration from our work with participating schools in our Flagship School program – an advisory to support ideation on new school construction and development – this new podcast provides an easily accessible source of information that can be listened to any time, on your popular podcast platforms.

Featuring many thought leaders in the education space working across different facets of education and learning design, construction and furnishing through to Microsoft experts on the technology front, the Microsoft Flagship School Podcast provides 20-minute injections of inspiration to share knowledge and best practices on building a new school. It’s also a great source of tangible actions that align to the pillars of the Microsoft Education Transformation Framework and shares ideas on how to build with the 12 tenets in mind.

All episodes are available today for listening on demand via Apple Podcast, Spotify, Stitcher and Google Play Music.

Here is what we have in store:

Episode 1: The possibilities for your new school

The world is changing, fast. Launching a new school gives education teams an incredible opportunity to build a future-focused, engaging learning environment from the ground up. In our first episode I share some of my thoughts on education transformation alongside Beth Hamilton, founding Principal of Wilburton Elementary, Bellevue Washington, who shares her experiences on recently opening the new school.

Episode 2: The learning approach in your new school

Every part of a school from the building, to the devices deployed, to the furniture purchased should work towards the goal of improving learning. Therefore, before we explore the many components to think about in your new school, we dig into what the learning approach will be for students. This episode features Tom Vander Ark from Getting Smart, and education leader Michelle Zimmerman from Renton Prep.

Episode 3: Learning environments in your new school

When designing from the ground up, we have an opportunity to consider the latest research in how the learning environments impact student experiences. In this episode, we speak with experts Madelyn Hankins, General Manager of Steelcase Education and Prakash Nair, CEO and Founder of Fielding Nair International, who have both led school design and furnishings across the world. We also spend some time with Terry Byers of Churchie Grammar, Queensland.

Episode 4: Personalized learning and data in your new school

Data is the new oil. With focus, careful collection and refinement, data can fuel a student’s learning path in meaningful ways. It exemplifies how technology can play a pivotal role in shaping students’ learning in ways not previously possible. In this episode, we hear from experts Maria Langworthy of Microsoft Education, Aidan McCarthy, a system leader in the Catholic education system in Western Australia, and James Protheroe, an education leader from Wales.

Episode 5: A positive culture in your new school

There is growing awareness of the importance of culture and mindset. We need new schools to be built with a strong culture that will help students and staff thrive. In this episode, we talk to Professor Lea Waters, a global expert on positive education, who shares the link between well-being and learning, and the importance of creating a positive school culture.

Episode 6: Accessibility and inclusion in your new school

Every new school needs to be built with a strong lens of accessibility and inclusion. Together they are a powerful force that is essential for every new school to incorporate deeply throughout its learning environments. In this episode, we talk to leaders from Microsoft, Megan Lawrence, Mike Tholfsen and Will Lewis, focusing on how technology can accelerate the path to making an inclusive and accessible school even more achievable.

Episode 7: Advancing the smart in your new school

Technology can play a huge role in advancing physical structures, design, and operations to put more smarts into school facilities and management. In this episode, we hear from Bert Van Hoof of Microsoft and Mark Hepburn of Iconics, who are both doing important work to support sustainable and advanced ideation on what it means to leverage technology to improve the way we live, learn, and play.

Episode 8: Making, creating, and coding in your new school

When you bring together passion and education, learning thrives. Learning styles are increasingly taking a playful approach designed to drive skills through the use of Minecraft: Education Edition and physical computing. In this episode, we hear from Deirdre Quarnstrom, GM of Minecraft Education at Microsoft, Jacqueline Russell, Principal Program Manager at Microsoft and classroom teacher Chhaya Narayan, and her students Emily and Tawara from Elim Christian College, NZ.

Episode 9: Acquiring devices in your new school

In this episode we hear how to choose the right devices for your school – from individual devices to larger form devices – and how to create a successful foundation to surround 1:1 to set up for success. In this episode hear best practices from Jason Wilmot, K12 leader at Microsoft Education and Jonathan Bishop, Head Teacher of Broadclyst Community Primary School, UK

Episode 10: Creating the future with your new school

In this uncertain century, there is one constant: continuous change. We can’t predict the future of education, but we can guide it by ensuring our schools are adaptable and creative environments, and our educators and leaders evolve with the technology. We end this season hearing insights from Microsoft leader and former school principal Mark Sparvell, and some final thoughts from me to close out the series.

We hope this new resource is helpful to spark ideas for your own school. And if you like it, give us a rating of 5 stars!

Posted on February 11, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Next Generation Washington: Our priorities for 2019 session of Washington State Legislature

The Washington State Legislature recently began its 2019 session. In keeping with Microsoft tradition, I’d like to share with you our legislative priorities. What follows are a few of the issues at the top of our agenda this year.

Ensuring a healthy community: the need for affordable housing in the Puget Sound region
Growth in the Puget Sound region has created new challenges and, chief among them, is a now-critical need to increase the supply of affordable housing. To help address the affordable housing crisis in our community, Microsoft recently announced a commitment of $500 million in the Puget Sound region. Our investments will take the form of funds to support the creation of low- and middle-income housing, as well as grants to homelessness-related initiatives.

This session, we also ask lawmakers to join us by renewing and expanding the state’s commitment to this important issue. We are urging legislators to continue making direct public investments in affordable housing by appropriating $200 million in the 2019-21 capital budget to the Housing Trust Fund to expand increase development of housing for low-income individuals and families. Although this figure represents a significant increase from the $110 million included in recent budget cycles, we believe it is appropriate given the scale of the problem at hand.

Beyond direct public investment, we are requesting that lawmakers enact policies that encourage private development of affordable housing. Condominium liability reforms, for example, would eliminate barriers and stimulate new development of affordable housing units for the middle-income market. Allowing cities to extend the multifamily tax exemption beyond its existing 12-year limit is another idea we are advocating. Finally, we encourage lawmakers to provide incentives for local communities to reduce zoning and permitting hurdles to allow increased production of other forms of affordable housing in their communities, especially near transit hubs.

The bottom line: We are committed to efforts that increase the availability of affordable housing and provide opportunities for a diverse range of citizens to live in the communities in which they work.

Closing the rural broadband gap
In Washington, about one in 10 residents in rural communities lack broadband communications access. These figures reflect a nationwide problem: Nearly 20 million Americans in rural areas lack access to a service that has become as fundamental as electricity.

Here and elsewhere, this broadband gap constrains the ability of many rural residents to fully participate in the digital economy and the opportunities it provides. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to stay that way.

Microsoft is investing heavily in broadband development through our Airband Initiative, which focuses on bringing broadband coverage to rural Americans through commercial partnerships and investment in digital skills training for people in the newly connected communities. Proceeds from Airband connectivity projects are reinvested into the program to expand broadband to more rural areas. Rural Washington is a key focus area for Airband, and we recently announced important partnerships with providers like Native Networks and Declaration Networks that will bring broadband to more rural Washingtonians.

As for the public side of this public-private partnership, we encourage the Legislature to build on the $10 million it appropriated last year to support broadband development and deployment in rural areas by creating a State Broadband Office and investing $25 million in a competitive grant program to support additional broadband deployment in underserved areas.

The bottom line: We believe the public and private sectors, working together, can eliminate the rural broadband gap in our state within the next four years.

Protection of data and personal privacy
Today, we run our businesses, connect with friends and family, and live our lives in a digital world. Now, more than ever before, there is an urgent need to modernize privacy laws. We know it, and the public knows it.

At a time when the public’s growing concern with maintaining individual privacy threatens to undermine trust in technology and stifle the promise and progress it can bring, lawmakers have a duty to act decisively.

Microsoft has been advocating for new federal privacy laws since 2005, but progress at the federal level remains stalled. But privacy legislation is starting to sweep across the country, with California leading the nation last year with a major new privacy law that will protect that state’s consumers who use technology and other services. That state’s approach builds on important developments in other countries, including across Europe. It’s important for Washington state to be a leader in this space as well, and this legislative session provides an opportunity for it to do so.

Sen. Reuven Carlyle (D-Seattle) has introduced important legislation that represents the right approach to modernizing state law. And Rep. Shelley Kloba (D-Kirkland) has introduced the companion bill in the House. Sen. Carlyle’s bill builds on the best aspects of approaches elsewhere, and we endorse it. As the legislation moves forward, it will be important for stakeholders to come together to work through important details, including provisions that exempt small businesses that impact fewer consumers.

The bottom line: At Microsoft, we believe privacy is a fundamental human right, and we support efforts by lawmakers in Olympia to protect the data and privacy of Washington consumers in a manner that allows innovation to continue and is also sensitive to the needs of the state’s small businesses.

A principled approach to facial recognition technology
While the proliferation of facial recognition has created many new and positive benefits around the world, we believe that it is time for a clear-eyed look at the risks and potential for abuse of this growing technology. Three simple steps to put appropriate limits on use will address the potential for bias or discrimination in facial recognition systems, intrusions into privacy and the potential for use of mass surveillance to encroach on democratic freedoms.

We believe it’s especially important to empower customers and consumers alike by ensuring that companies that participate in the facial recognition market enable academics and third parties to test their services. There is no more reason for a company in the facial recognition market to object to third-party testing than there is reason for an automobile company to object to testing the airbags in a new car. The public deserves the transparency needed to evaluate whether these services are error-prone and biased in their results.

We look forward to working with state lawmakers on these issues.

The bottom line: By putting guardrails around the use of this maturing technology, Washington lawmakers have an opportunity to blaze a trail that can serve as a model for effective privacy legislation nationwide.

Investment in high-speed rail
Another initiative that will create unprecedented economic opportunities for Washington residents for generations to come is the development of a high-speed rail line linking Vancouver, Seattle and Portland.

Leaders in these communities are working collaboratively to formalize the Cascadia Innovation Corridor, a strategy to drive additional job growth and better position our area as a global center of innovation and commerce.

High-speed rail could reduce the travel time between Seattle and Vancouver to a little over an hour. Early feasibility studies have confirmed this service could be operated cost-effectively. It’s now time to move from the planning stage to the implementation phase. Microsoft is supporting the governor’s $3 million budget proviso to establish a formal partnership between Washington, Oregon and British Columbia to chart a path forward to develop and operate high-speed rail service within Cascadia corridor.

The bottom line: The Cascadia Innovation Corridor will be a game-changer. We must act now to develop the legal and financial structures to move forward.

New opportunities for Washington citizens
We support efforts to increase economic opportunities and enhance quality of life for the people of Washington. Beyond these priorities, Microsoft will continue to support other public policies and investments that create new opportunities for Washington citizens, including expanding computer science education, career-connected learning opportunities and programs that boost postsecondary credential attainment.

We’re proud that our company and more than 50,000 of our employees call Washington home, and we are honored to have this opportunity to share our ideas about how to make it an even greater place to live and work.

We look forward to working with lawmakers and other stakeholders, and we welcome your thoughts on our agenda for 2019.

Posted on February 11, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Email overload: Using machine learning to manage messages, commitments

As email continues to be not only an important means of communication but also an official record of information and a tool for managing tasks, schedules, and collaborations, making sense of everything moving in and out of our inboxes will only get more difficult. The good news is there’s a method to the madness of staying on top of your email, and Microsoft researchers are drawing on this behavior to create tools to support users. Two teams working in the space will be presenting papers at this year’s ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining February 11–15 in Melbourne, Australia.

“Identifying the emails you need to pay attention to is a challenging task,” says Partner Researcher and Research Manager Ryen White of Microsoft Research, who manages a team of about a dozen scientists and engineers and typically receives 100 to 200 emails a day. “Right now, we end up doing a lot of that on our own.”

According to the McKinsey Global Institute, professionals spend 28 percent of their time on email, so thoughtful support tools have the potential to make a tangible difference.

“We’re trying to bring in machine learning to make sense of a huge amount of data to make you more productive and efficient in your work,” says Senior Researcher and Research Manager Ahmed Hassan Awadallah. “Efficiency could come from a better ability to handle email, getting back to people faster, not missing things you would have missed otherwise. If we’re able to save some of that time so you could use it for your actual work function, that would be great.”

Email deferral: Deciding now or later

Awadallah has been studying the relationship between individuals and their email for years, exploring how machine learning can better support users in their email responses and help make information in inboxes more accessible. During these studies, he and fellow researchers began noticing varying behavior among users. Some tackled email-related tasks immediately, while others returned to messages multiple times before acting. The observations led them to wonder: How do users manage their messages, and how can we help them make the process more efficient?

“There’s this term called ‘email overload,’ where you have a lot of information flowing into your inbox and you are struggling to keep up with all the incoming messages,” explains Awadallah, “and different people come up with different strategies to cope.”

In “Characterizing and Predicting Email Deferral Behavior,” Awadallah and his coauthors reveal the inner workings of one such common strategy: email deferral, which they define as seeing an email but waiting until a later time to address it.

The team’s goal was twofold: to gain a deep understanding of deferral behavior and to build a predictive model that could help users in their deferral decisions and follow-up responses. The team—a collaboration between Microsoft Research’s Awadallah, Susan Dumais, and Bahareh Sarrafzadeh, lead author on the paper and an intern at the time, and Christopher Lin, Chia-Jung Lee, and Milad Shokouhi of the Microsoft Search, Assistant and Intelligence group—dedicated a significant amount of resources to the former.

“AI and machine learning should be inspired by the behavior people are doing right now,” says Awadallah.

The probability of deferring an email based on the workload of the user as measured by the number of unhandled emails. The number of unhandled emails is one of many features Awadallah and his coauthors used in training their deferral prediction model.

The team interviewed 15 subjects and analyzed the email logs of 40,000 anonymous users, finding that people defer for several reasons: They need more time and resources to respond than they have in that moment, or they’re juggling more immediate tasks. They also factor in who the sender is and how many others have been copied. They found some of the more interesting reasons revolved around perception and boundaries, delaying or not to set expectations on how quickly they respond to messages.

The researchers used this information to create a dataset of features—such as the message length, the number of unanswered emails in an inbox, and whether a message was human- or machine-generated—to train a model to predict whether a message is deferred. The model has the potential to significantly improve the email experience, says Awadallah. For example, email clients could use such a model to remind users about emails they’ve deferred or even forgotten about, saving them the effort they would have spent searching for those emails and reducing the likelihood of missing important ones.

“If you have decided to leave an email for later, in many cases, you either just rely on memory or more primitive controls that your mail client provides like flagging your message or marking the message unread, and while these are useful strategies, we found that they do not provide enough support for users,” says Awadallah.

Commitment detection: A promise is a promise

Among the deluge of incoming emails are outgoing messages containing promises we make—promises to provide information, set up meetings, or follow up with coworkers—and losing track of them has ramifications.

“Meeting your commitments is incredibly important in collaborative settings and helps build your reputation and establish trust,” says Ryen White.

Current commitment detection tools, such as those available in Cortana, are pretty effective, but there’s room for further advancement. White, lead author Hosein Azarbonyad, who was interning with Microsoft at the time of the work, and coauthor Microsoft Research Principal Applied Scientist Robert Sim seek to tackle one particular obstacle in their paper “Domain Adaptation for Commitment Detection in Email”: bias in the datasets available to train commitment detection models.

Researcher access is generally limited to public corpora, which tend to be specific to the industry they’re from. In this case, the team used public datasets of email from the energy company Enron and an unspecified tech startup referred to as “Avocado.” They found a significant disparity between models trained and evaluated on the same collection of emails and models trained on one collection and applied to another; the latter model failed to perform as well.

“We want to learn transferable models,” explains White. “That’s the goal—to learn algorithms that can be applied to problems, scenarios, and corpora that are related but different to those used during training.”

To accomplish this, the group turned to transfer learning, which has been effective in other scenarios where datasets aren’t representative of the environments in which they’ll ultimately be deployed. In their paper, the researchers train their models to remove bias by identifying and devaluing certain information using three approaches: feature-level adaptation, sample-level adaptation, and an adversarial deep learning approach that uses an autoencoder.

Emails contain a variety and number of words and phrases, some more likely to be related to a commitment—“I will,” “I shall,” “let you know”—than others. In the Enron corpus, domain-specific words like “Enron,” “gas,” and “energy” may be overweighted in any model trained from it. Feature-level adaptation attempts to replace or transform these domain-specific terms, or features, with similar domain-specific features in the target domain, explains Sim. For instance, “Enron” might be replaced with “Avocado,” and “energy forecast” might be replaced with a relevant tech industry term. The sample level, meanwhile, aims to elevate emails in the training dataset that resemble emails in the target domain, downgrading those that aren’t very similar. So if an Enron email is “Avocado-like,” the researchers will give it more weight while training.

General schema of the proposed neural autoencoder model used for commitment detection.

The most novel—and successful—of the three techniques is the adversarial deep learning approach, which in addition to training the model to recognize commitments also trains the model to perform poorly at distinguishing between the emails it’s being trained on and the emails it will evaluate; this is the adversarial aspect. Essentially, the network receives negative feedback when it indicates an email source, training it to be bad at recognizing which domain a particular email comes from. This has the effect of minimizing or removing domain-specific features from the model.

“There’s something counterintuitive to trying to train the network to be really bad at a classification problem, but it’s actually the nudge that helps steer the network to do the right thing for our main classification task, which is, is this a commitment or not,” says Sim.

Empowering users to do more

The two papers are aligned with the greater Microsoft goal of empowering individuals to do more, tapping into an ability to be more productive in a space full of opportunity for increased efficiency.

Reflecting on his own email usage, which finds him interacting with his email frequently throughout the day, White questions the cost-benefit of some of the behavior.

“If you think about it rationally, it’s like, ‘Wow, this is a thing that occupies a lot of our time and attention. Do we really get the return on that investment?’” he says.

He and other Microsoft researchers are confident they can help users feel better about the answer with the continued exploration of the tools needed to support them.

Posted on February 11, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Microsoft Business Applications for Healthcare: Empowering teams for exceptional patient experiences

This week at the HIMSS 2019 conference, the healthcare IT community will explore solutions to the most urgent challenges facing modern health. Microsoft will share new innovations to help health organizations navigate the complex technology transformations needed to deliver modern patient experiences that promote successful treatments and well-being.

The Microsoft Healthcare team will showcase intelligent healthcare solutions that connect health data and systems securely in the cloud, improve communication with teams and patients, and advance precision healthcare. These featured solutions—powered by Microsoft 365, Azure, and the new Microsoft Healthcare Bot service—interoperate with Microsoft Business Applications to enable personalized care, empower care teams, and advance precision healthcare.

Today, people want the same level of access and engagement with healthcare providers as they get from other digital brand experiences. Case in point: a recent survey by Transcend Insights found that 93 percent of patients expect care providers to provide access to information about their medical history, and 71 percent want to digitally provide status updates to better inform diagnoses and decisions.

Dynamics 365 unifies operations and patient engagement, breaking down silos created by the patchwork of business systems and databases within the organization. As patients interact with web portals and clinicians, providers can access a 360-degree view of the patient for more personalized service. And by using solutions like the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Health Accelerator, healthcare providers can more easily create new use cases and workflows using the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) based data model.

Improving patient engagement with virtual clinics

As the healthcare industry shifts to value-based care, many providers focus on face-to-face patient experiences at the clinic or hospital. Now imagine the challenge of improving care for patients scattered across remote, difficult-to-reach villages.

Helsinki and Uusimaa Hospital (HUS) are solving the issue by using Microsoft cloud solutions to create a virtual hospital that provides remote, virtual health services throughout Finland, including sparsely populated regions.

HUS moved to the cloud with Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365 to create digital hubs for its medical specialties, and then added Dynamics 365 for Customer Service. Now providers have tools to access a 360-degree view of patients across departments and care givers to improve treatment. Patients can access self-service portals for medical information and self-help therapies, plus receive virtual one-on-one treatments from specialists. It’s a win-win for everyone. Patients are empowered to feel more in control of their health which boosts confidence and support, and providers can provide personalized care to more patients.

HUS is also conducting pilot programs with artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to direct patients to the right place right away and improve digital healthcare services. Providers will be able to gain insights from complex data to develop precision medicine and treatments for different patients and groups.

Learn more about the HUS Virtual Hospital in this customer story, as well as in the short video below.

Empowering care teams for exceptional at-home services

Another way Dynamics 365 is improving patient care is by enabling care teams to remotely monitor patients, share knowledge across health teams, and coordinate the right level of care.

In Australia, more older citizens are choosing to live at home, rather than a nursing facility. For residential wellness provider ECH, this means making life simple for 15,000 clients while providing support for the domestic healthcare workers. ECH deployed Dynamics 365 to streamline the onboarding of new clients, helping to match them with the right specialists. They also adopted Dynamics 365 for Talent to attract and onboard skilled care providers and set them up for success which is critical in a field with high stress and turnover. They’re helping to reduce burnout and attrition by using Dynamics 365 to promote continuous learning, track employee accomplishments, and help workers get certified and trained.

Improving operational outcomes with no-code apps

A key to exceptional patient experiences is empowering staff to streamline care processes, reduce redundancy, and gain insights to make decisions faster.

New York’s largest healthcare provider, Northwell Health, is streamlining patient care processes using Dynamics 365 for Customer Service and the Microsoft Power Platform to give employees tools to optimize patient care, reduce costs, and ensure regulatory compliance.

Using PowerApps, a Northwell Health doctor with no technical expertise created an app that gives physicians, nurses, and administrators visibility into tasks that need to be completed like patient requests to ensure a patient gets a needed X-ray. The app takes data entered into Dynamics 365, stored in the PowerApps Common Data Service, and augments it with attributes from the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Healthcare Accelerator, which makes it easier to create new use cases and workflows using a FHIR-based data model.

By connecting the app to the Microsoft Bot Framework, clinicians and administrators can leverage predictive insights and automated workflows to quickly get fast answers about patients. Plus, all data is on the trusted Azure cloud that helps ensure the compliance, confidentiality, integrity, and accessibility of sensitive data.

Get the full story at HIMSS

These three stories are just a peek at how Microsoft Business Applications are helping transform patient experiences. If you are attending HIMSS, be sure to visit our booth (#2500) and attend sessions to learn more from our healthcare technology experts. Find more information about our location and sessions in this schedule, and be sure to check out the resources below: