Microsoft news – Page 240

Posted on November 6, 2018 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Bringing mixed reality and Dynamics 365 together

Hey everyone!

I hope this note finds you well. For those who have been following and participating in our mixed reality journey, welcome to our new home in the Dynamics 365 blog! For those new to us, on behalf of everyone who works on mixed reality business applications at Microsoft it is our pleasure to meet you.

My name is Lorraine Bardeen, and I am the general manager of engineering for Mixed Reality Business Applications at Microsoft. I have the pleasure of working for James Phillips in the Business Applications Group and the privilege to lead a world-class team of engineers working to bring mixed reality to people and organizations across the globe.

I have been working on the mixed reality business for over six years and I still show up at work every day excited to work with customers, partners and developers to innovate and solve real problems using mixed reality. With mixed reality, we can understand data in context and simplify workflows to extend human ability. When this happens workers feel more effective, businesses see more progress and everyone has a chance to participate in the modern workplace.

Today marks an important day for all of us on the mixed reality business applications team. Today, we officially mark general availability of our first Dynamics 365 business applications: Dynamics 365 Remote Assist and Dynamics 365 Layout.

To celebrate this important milestone I wanted to write this post and share more about why mixed reality and Dynamics 365 have come together, what people can expect from these first mixed reality business applications, and how they are already being used and deployed.

Why mixed reality and Dynamics 365 have come together

A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to speak to press and analysts in San Francisco about mixed reality business applications at Microsoft. As part of that moment in time, Alysa Taylor talked about our vision for business applications and I had the chance to talk specifically about mixed reality. In particular I talked about why mixed reality and Dynamics 365 have come together and I wanted to share some of that with you here as well.

With Dynamics 365, customers are reimagining their business processes by leveraging modern, unified, intelligent and adaptable solutions that bring together the vast amounts of data across their organization to empower their employees with new tools to help them feel more effective at work. Factory and field service worker. Patient and provider. Storefront and supply chain. No silos — just customers, products, employees and data more closely connected than ever before. Mixed reality represents a totally new part of this solution because of the capabilities it provides.

We recognize that these employees need information in context to apply their knowledge and craft. Not only on a 2-D screen — but information and data in context, at the right place, and at the right time, that they can use hands-free so employees can produce even greater impact for their organizations. We’ve focused on integrating these mixed reailty business applications with the common data service that underlies Dynamics 365 so that companies get the full value of high-value data connecting the full workflow.

Introducing the general availability of Dynamics 365 Remote Assist

With today’s release of Dynamics 365 Remote Assist we are taking an important step forward in helping address some of the current, unmet needs of Firstline Workers. Firstline Workers represent more than 2 billion people in roles that make them the first points of contact between a company and the world it serves, between a company and its products. They are often the first to engage, the first to represent a company’s brand, the first on the scene to address a problem.

With Dynamics 365 Remote Assist we can enable technicians and remote experts to solve problems in real time with heads-up, hands-free video calling, annotations, and file sharing. By identifying and addressing issues accurately we can also eliminate the need for costly travel expenses while improving operational efficiency.

Organizations will be able to communicate securely with industry-leading identity and security measures, including Azure Active Directory. In addition, they will be able to leverage work order data from Dynamics 365 Field Service on-site using the common data service.

For business decision-makers looking for new ways to empower their employees and create more collaborative ways of problem-solving, this is pretty exciting stuff! But enough talking about it — here is Microsoft Dynamics 365 Remote Assist in action.

Introducing the general availability of Dynamics 365 Layout

Lastly, with today’s release of Dynamics 365 Layout we are now providing our customers and partners with a way to visualize room layouts in real-world scale. The ability to walk through proposed layouts in physical space or virtual reality. Review and make changes with stakeholders in real time, saving time and money. Move, resize and rotate 3-D models to edit layouts on the spot. Here is a peek at Dynamics 365 Layout in action.

Mixed reality business applications being deployed

About four months ago we released the public preview of our two mixed reality business applications. During that time, we had the chance to work with and learn from many great companies, and I wanted to take a moment to spotlight a couple of them here.

ZF Group

A great way to see Remote Assist and Layout in action is through the work of ZF Group, a German car-parts manufacturer headquartered in Friedrichshafen. An early partner on our journey, ZF Group has been working with us over the past few months to help ensure these apps, even in preview, are crafted with insights from those who will be using them daily to get their work done. In developing these apps with customers, we are not only looking to make great software — we’re looking to empower the Firstline Workers using the apps.

Learn more about how ZF Group uses Microsoft mixed reality tools.

Chevron

Chevron is already achieving real, measurable results with its global HoloLens deployment. Previously it was required to fly in an inspector from Houston to a facility in Singapore once a month to inspect equipment. Now it has in-time inspection using Dynamics 365 Remote Assist and can identify issues or provide approvals immediately. In addition, remote collaboration and assistance have helped the company operate more safely in a better work environment, serving as a connection point between firstline workers and remote experts, as well as cutting down on travel and eliminating risks associated with employee travel. Learn how Chevron is deploying Microsoft Dynamics 365 Remote Assist and Microsoft HoloLens.

This is just the beginning! We will have a lot more to share in the months ahead, and I am looking forward to sharing more then.

As always, I’m available on Twitter (@lorrainebardeen) and eager to hear about what you’re doing with mixed reality.

Learn more

Posted on November 6, 2018 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Cybersecurity and the world: A time to reflect, a time to act

Sign the petition to support digital peace: https://digitalpeace.microsoft.com/

As world leaders prepare to meet in Paris to honor the centennial of the armistice that ended World War I, it’s important to apply the lessons learned from the tragedies of the 20th century. It’s a time for people to ensure that their voices are heard in the cause for digital peace. To learn more and add your voice, go to https://digitalpeace.microsoft.com

Posted on November 5, 2018 by sick skills — Leave a comment

1 week until Skype-a-Thon 2018: Join to open your students’ hearts and minds via global learning

If you want to give your students something they can’t wait to go home and share around the dinner table, and keeps them interested and curious for days, participate in Skype-a-Thon. And if you want to give your students something they’ll never forget from their time with you as their educator, participate in Skype-a-Thon. It’s just a week away and an event you don’t want to miss!

Many of the participating educators in over 90 countries tell us this is their favorite activity of the year, because it engages their students deeply in learning and opens their hearts and minds to the world. Just be ready for the added enthusiasm in your classroom!

One of those participating educators is Todd Flory (Kansas, USA), who says: “We are excited to connect with experts and virtual field trips that will make our academic standards come to life. Our students learn so much more when they can ask questions and do authentic research. We also love connecting with other classrooms around the world, as it helps our students celebrate diversity and learn that our differences are what makes us special and stronger as a global society.”

Another educator from Nigeria, Olukemi Olurinola, says: “Participating in Skype-a-Thon is always the highlight of our school year! We open our classrooms to the world and connect with experts and other classrooms to learn about different cultures and environments and help them model compassion for one other. The best way to learn about the world is learning with the world.”

We expect nearly 500,000 children and guest experts around the world to connect via Skype on November 13^th and 14^th. They’ll share stories about their culture and their environments, play games, take virtual field trips and, most importantly, discover that we are more similar than different around the world.

Participating classrooms and Skype in the Classroom partners will travel an estimated 14 million virtual miles from over 90 countries through these live Skype experiences. And with every 400 virtual miles traveled, participating classrooms will help support up to 35,000 children in need with an education in WE Villages. That’s one of the great things about this event: while it opens the hearts and minds of students, it always opens potential for many more children to receive an education.

It’s not too late to register. You can find a classroom or guest expert to connect with and many resources and activity plans to integrate Skype-a-Thon into your curriculum.

We hope you’ll join this global learning community on their 48-hour journey around the world to leave an impact on the next generation of global citizens. Please share all the fun with @SkypeClassroom and #skypeathon and #MicrosoftEDU.

Posted on November 5, 2018 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Engineers from Walmart and Microsoft will work side-by-side in new ‘cloud factory’

Walmart is expanding its technology center in Austin, Texas, to accelerate digital innovation that transforms how associates work and delivers more convenient ways for customers to shop.

About 30 technologists, including engineers from both Walmart and Microsoft, will work together side by side in the cloud factory, expected to open in early 2019 as an extension to a strategic partnership announced in July. The factory will be an expansion of Walmart’s innovation hub, a vibrant workplace opened earlier this year in the center of Austin’s growing technology scene.

The Walmart-Microsoft team – known internally as “4.co” for its location at Fourth and Colorado streets – will initially focus on migrating Walmart’s thousands of internal business applications to Microsoft Azure. The team will also build new, cloud-native applications. The collaboration will be part of a multi-year journey to modernize Walmart’s enterprise application portfolio, create more efficient business processes and decrease operational costs associated with legacy architecture.

large, open, modern workplace with colorful mural in background — Walmart’s innovation hub in Austin, Texas.

The work will continue digital solutions already deployed at Walmart, including thousands of IoT sensors on HVAC and refrigeration systems that process a billion daily data messages from stores worldwide. The solution helps Walmart save energy and prevent product loss.

Based in Arkansas, the global retailer is also deploying Microsoft AI in a number of use cases, including internal chatbots that help associates navigate benefits, find mentors and better manage supplier engagements. Walmart has also deployed a natural language processing platform capable of processing 40 terabytes of unstructured text and providing near real-time insights and actions in support of business operations.

To shed light on 4.co and the company’s innovations, Transform chatted with Clay Johnson, executive vice president and enterprise chief information officer at Walmart.

TRANSFORM: Why is digital transformation important to Walmart?

JOHNSON: Technology is changing the way people live, work and shop – and the pace of change is only getting faster. We want to create new and incredibly convenient ways for our customers to shop, and as technology cycles get shorter and shorter, we must increase our speed and agility.

To do this, we’re digitally transforming processes and empowering our associates with consumer-grade technology and tools. Digital transformation is pervasive across the company and we’re pushing the envelope to accelerate innovation.

TRANSFORM: How is Walmart using Microsoft AI? Where do you see it going?

Clay Johnson, executive vice president and enterprise chief information officer at Walmart.

JOHNSON: We’re layering AI across every facet of our business. We have lots and lots of data that represents value we can leverage. That’s where AI, machine learning and Cognitive Services in Microsoft Azure come in to play.

We took our natural language processing platform and a single business case – post-payment auditing – to build out the platform at massive scale and apply it in other use cases. For associates who are tasked with finding that needle in the haystack, machine learning will help them go through unstructured text quickly. But ultimately, it’s not just about efficiency. A lot of this will drive impact to the bottom line.

With our chatbots, associates can use them to find a mentor or ask questions about benefits. They can get simple questions answered quickly. By saving them time, that’s more time they can spend on the sales floor helping our customers.

TRANSFORM: What are some benefits you’ve seen with other technologies like IoT and edge computing?

JOHNSON: With our IoT work and sensor enablement, we’re looking at our energy consumption and other factors to predict equipment failures before they happen. Improving equipment performance can result in enhanced energy efficiency, which lowers costs and our carbon footprint. That’s good for the customer and the environment. Sustainability is a big deal for us.

Putting IoT data into edge analytics lets us look at data at a store level and backhaul it to Azure to look at it across a region or the whole U.S. We started talking to Microsoft about this concept of a set of stores being a “micro-cloud,” and you roll them into Azure for data analytics and insights. A lot of this work is coming out of our Austin site.

TRANSFORM: How did the concept of 4.co come to be? What are the team’s goals?

JOHNSON: With this partnership with Microsoft, we started talking, ‘‘Hey, what’s the best way to accelerate all the stuff we’re doing here? We need help and expertise. We want to move fast. How do we partner our smart people with Microsoft’s smart people?”

Then it was obvious: ”Why don’t we just co-locate the teams together.” We haven’t done something like this before with co-location, but I think the outcomes are going to be huge and strengthen our partnership even more. You’re going to see a lot more co-innovation around IoT, computer vision, big data and real-time analytics.

TRANSFORM: How do you think both companies will benefit?

JOHNSON: We’re going to learn a lot from each other. We’re going to learn a lot from Microsoft – which apps make sense to get to the cloud quickly and which don’t.

Microsoft’s going to get to see stuff at a scale they’ve never seen before. [Walmart has 11,200 global stores and 2.2 million associates]. I think they’ll learn a lot from our footprint. Co-locating top engineers from both companies will deepen the technical brainpower for creating disruptive, large-scale enterprise solutions for Walmart.

open, modern workplace — Walmart’s innovation hub in Austin, Texas.

TRANSFORM: Why did Walmart pick Austin for its technology office and 4.co? How are you interacting with the community there?

JOHNSON: You see a lot of tech companies and startups in Austin, and we wanted to blend that culture and the universities with our culture as we continue to grow and add tech talent to Walmart. Austin is a huge recruiting opportunity for us. Because our team in Austin works closely with our technology teams in Bentonville, [Arkansas], a pipeline of technology talent into Bentonville has also emerged.

Austin is also a very meetup-heavy city. So we were really purposeful in picking a location that puts us in the middle of the tech meetup scene. We host deep learning, AI and chatbot meetups. We do a lot of Women Who Code events.

We recently did a hackathon with Microsoft and the University of Texas at Austin, where we worked with a no-kill animal shelter. The students really enjoyed doing something for the local community. [The event focused on helping dogs through predictive modeling of the canine parvovirus disease].

TRANSFORM: What’s your vision for the future of retail?

JOHNSON: I think you’re going to see an omnichannel-type world that is a blend of e-commerce and brick and mortar, where consumers can have access to things at any point, any time. They can order online and pick up in the store or have it delivered same-day. You can see we’re starting to do that with our online grocery right now.

Top photo: Walmart’s technology center in Austin, Texas. All photos courtesy of Walmart. Follow Clay Johnson @ClayMJohnson.

Posted on November 5, 2018 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Empathy Vision Model: AI that can see and talk with us about our world

Microsoft unveils a smartphone app in Japan, featuring Rinna the chatbot with a combination of powerful new AI technologies

Artificial intelligence (AI) that can see and comment on the world around us will soon be interacting much more naturally with people in their daily lives thanks to a powerful combination of new technologies being trialed in Japan through a chatty smartphone app.

The app features Microsoft Japan’s hugely popular Rinna social chatbot. It was unveiled at the Microsoft Tech Summit 2018 in Tokyo on Monday and is still in its developmental stage.

The AI behind the app has enhanced sight, hearing, and speech capabilities to recognize and talk about objects it sees in ways that are similar to how a person would. As such, it represents a significant step towards a future of natural interactions between AI and people. At the heart of the app is the “Empathy Vision Model,” which combines conventional AI image recognition technology emotional responses.

With this technology, Rinna views her surrounding through a smartphone’s camera. She not only recognizes objects and people, she can also describe and comment verbally about them in realtime. Using natural language processing, speech recognition, and speech synthesis technologies – developed by scientists at Microsoft Research – she can engage in natural-like conversations with a phone’s human user.

“A user can hold their smartphone in their hand or place it in a breast pocket while walking around. With the camera switched on, Rinna can see the same scenery, people, and objects as the user and it talk about all that with the user,” Microsoft Japan President Takuya Hirano said.

Unlike other AI vision models, Rinna can describe her impressions of what she is viewing with feeling, rather than just listing off recognition results such as the names, shapes, and colors of the things she sees. Rinna on a smartphone can view the world from the same perspective as a user and can converse with that user about it.

Let’s take the following image to help illustrate the difference:

Conventional AI vision technology might typically react this way: “I see people. I see a child. I see a dog. I see a car.”

In contrast, Rinna with the Empathy Vision Model might say: “Wow, nice family! Enjoying the weekend, maybe? Oh, there’s a car coming! Watch out!”

As well as the Empathy Vision Model, which generates empathetic comments in real time about what the AI sees, Rinna’s smartphone app also features other cutting-edge features, including “full duplex.” This enables AI to participate in telephone-like natural conversations with a person by anticipating what that person might say next.

This capability helps Rinna make decisions about how and when to respond to someone who is chatting with her, a skill set that is very natural to people, but not common in chatbots. It differs from “half duplex,” which is more like the walkie-talkie experience in which only one party to a conversation can talk at any one time. Full duplex reduces the unnatural lag time that can sometimes make interactions between a person and a with chatbots feel awkward or forced.

Rinna’s smartphone app also incorporates Empathy Chat, which aids independent thinking by the AI. This helps keep a conversation with the user going as long as possible. In other words, the AI selects and uses responses most likely to encourage a person to keep engaged and talking.

It is still in its development stage and the timing of its general release has not been set. But the voice chat function is available as “Voice Chat with Rinna” on Rinna’s official LINE account in Japan.

READ the Latest on artificial intelligence in Asia

Posted on November 5, 2018 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Photos from last week’s Future Decoded event in London

Tens of thousands of people attended Microsoft’s Future Decoded in London on October 31 and November 1.

Partners, consumers, experts, journalists and analysts heard from keynote speakers including Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella, UK CEO Cindy Rose, Azure Executive Vice-President Jason Zander, UK Chief Technology Officer Michael Wignall, broadcaster and author Matthew Syed.

During the event, Microsoft announced a partnership with British Gas owner Centrica, a deal with NHSScotland to revolutionise healthcare in the country and cut waiting times, a tie-up with the University of Cambridge to help AI research in the UK, and the expansion of the “defending democracy” program.

Microsoft also released research on AI, showing that nearly half of bosses believe their business model won’t exist by 2023.

Here’s everything that happened during the two days (click pictures to enlarge):

Microsoft UK CEO Cindy Rose opened the event

The hashtag #FutureDecoded trended on Twitter during the event

Satya Nadella at Future Decoded — Satya Nadella delivers his keynote talk on day two

Jenny Lay-Flurrie, chief accessibility officer at Microsoft, during her keynote

Anna-Victoria Fear, Product Marketing Manager for Azure, wears HoloLens

The Modern Workplace Theatre in the exhibition hall

Microsoft Timeline — A Microsoft timeline

Space scientist Maggie Aderin-Pocock delivers her keynote

Chris Bishop, Director of Microsoft Research Cambridge, spoke about AI — Chris Bishop, Director of Microsoft Research Cambridge, speaks about AI

The main hall, where the keynotes took place

Esther McVey, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, during her talk on the main stage

This stand ran a competition to win a suit

VISR, a Microsoft partner that specialises in Mixed Reality

Jason Zander, EVP of Azure, talks about Microsoft's cloud platform — Jason Zander, EVP of Azure, talks about Microsoft’s cloud platform

A stand showing how Microsoft helps the manufacturing and construction industries

Sir Michael Caine on stage with Derrick McCourt, General Manager, Customer Success Unit at Microsoft

The Microsoft for StartUps team on their stand

Broadcaster and author Matthew Syed delivers his keynote on growth mindset

The Hands-on Labs gave visitors the chance to try out Microsoft products

Michael Wignall, Microsoft UK Chief Technology Officer, was the host of the event

Microsoft is working with the British Heart Foundation to help save lives

Posted on November 2, 2018 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Weird and wonderful games from ID@Xbox

A thousand games have launched through the ID@Xbox program – hopefully, you’ve picked that up by now. My name’s Glenn and I’ve been doing marketing for the ID@Xbox program almost from day one, so I’ve been around for the launch of all but a couple of these. (And I have the grey hair to prove it. Seriously, I had no grey hair before I started working on ID.)

Other than my impeccable grammar and stunning fashion sense, one thing I pride myself in is playing (nearly) all the ID@Xbox games. So, when we got to the 1,000 game milestone I thought to myself, “Hey, Self, I should write an article celebrating all the amazing, landmark, award-winning games in the ID@Xbox program!” And then I thought: “Meh – that’s exactly what everybody would expect, and ID@Xbox is about embracing all kinds of games – including new, unique and different games – from independent publishers.” And what I enjoy as much as anything else about working on the ID team is finding strange and usual games that you’d never see anywhere else.

So, here we go – some of the most unusual, strangest, and even flat out weird games that you can find on Xbox One, courtesy of the ID@Xbox program.

Anarcute – It’s cute anarchy. Get it? Your goal is to assemble a group of cute animals to take on the evil corporations ruling and ruining the world. As you march through the city wreaking havoc you recruit cute companions to join your cause Mob rule has never been so cute! And man is it cute. They make civil disobedience unbelievably cute. Even the music’s cute!

Goat Simulator – In this paradigm of sublime brilliance from the geniuses at Coffee Stain you play (as you might have guessed) as a goat. And you destroy things. And lick things. And when you lick things your goat tongue sticks to things. And can steal Deadmau5’s head. And jump on trampolines (so many trampolines). And you can morph into a tall goat (giraffe), or fancy goat (penguin), etc. And you earn points for doing things. And I guess there are missions – I don’t know, I was too busy licking things.

Headlander – Don’t lose your head over this one! In this 2D puzzle game with some light combat, you fly around as a head on a jetpack thing and suck off the heads of robots, then stick your head on their bodies, thereby gaining control of each robot’s specific abilities. While the “head sucking” premise alone would earn this game a spot on this list, the groovy sci-fi spin on “Austin Powers” kicks it over the edge – we would expect nothing other than something this unique from our friends at Double Fine, creators of Psychonauts, Broken Age, and others.

Level 22 – You’re late for work and you have to sneak to your desk without being seen by the boss or you’re fired! It’s a stealth game set in the world of work which sounds really simple, but it’s actually a pretty complex puzzle game with the addition of vents to crawl through, doughnuts to distract guards with, newspapers and coffee cups and all manner of office paraphernalia. And some of the achievements in this game are seriously meta. This was one of our earlier ID@Xbox releases and I played this thing into the ground. At work. While I should have been working. Don’t tell the boss!

Maize – I used to live in Iowa and I like corn. There I said it. I’m not sure if that’s why I was drawn to the game or if it was the incredible visuals and beautiful art portraying sentient corn exploring a farm and then a laboratory to unravel the mystery of why sentient corn exists in the first place. And along the way you pick up an obnoxious talking teddy bear robot companion who just simply cannot believe that he’s saddled with being a sidekick to a dumb corn stalk. I mean, can you blame him? If you like adventure games, and corn, and teddy bears, and hysterical writing, and corn, then this is the game for you. And if you don’t like all those things then you really need to put some time aside to reevaluate your life choices.

Roundabout – You’re a limo driver and for some reason your limousine is constantly spinning in circles. Sure, you probably could have stopped to get it fixed at any point – sounds like a transaxle (I have no idea what that means). But you just go with it. With your horribly broken car you pick people up, drop them off and undertake various missions. And it’s all intercut with full motion videos (FMV) of these wacky people you’re picking up being wacky. This one is worth playing for the FMV scenes alone, if not to simply try to find out why somebody would make a game like this.

Thomas Was Alone – Unlike a lot of the other games on this list, Thomas Was Alone isn’t a funny game. It’s a serious game about a group of characters, each with distinctive, well developed personalities and a sophisticated character arc that progresses throughout the story. And they’re blocks. Blocks of different colors and sizes, but basically squares are rectangles. But you really care about those squares and rectangles by the end of the story. You really do. It’s weirdly beautiful.

Soda Drinker Pro – This is the crème-de-la-crème of weird games. This is the Mt. Everest of strangeness. This is the Mona Lisa of bizarre-o land. To describe this game in writing is an affront to the majesty of its absurdity, but with apologies I’ll give it a try. You drink soda. And you’re really good at it. And you drink soda on the beach, in a park, in a city and in various other locations appropriate to the activity of drinking soda. If you have mad skillz you can locate some bonus sodas. Sounds amazing, right? But wait, that’s not the half of it – literally. If you manage to stumble through some texture on one wall in level two you are transported to a completely different game. And that game is… also quite unique. There are some turtles and clocks and… who am I kidding I can’t possible describe it. If you have the chops to be a Soda Drinker – and not an amateur soda drinker – then check it out. (And if you’re from the Midwest and you say “Pop” I guess you’re out of luck.)

And so, that’s my list. There are many, many more strange and weird games that you should check out. Honorable mentions include: I Am Bread, Manual Samuel, Stay, The Magic Circle, Three Fourths Home and so many more. Please, go check out some of the weirdness that the ID@Xbox program delivers!

Posted on November 2, 2018 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Team Xbox looks lack on their favorite ID@Xbox and indie game memories

All of us here on Team Xbox are tremendous fans of the talent involved in the creation of games, especially those that come into the ID@Xbox program. From cartoon platformers to adventure games to strategy simulators, there’s a robust catalog of titles that deliver countless memories from those gaming worlds. It’s almost unfair that we can only share a few of those with you too, but we’ve taken some of our most memorable moments and captured them here in this feature. Enjoy.

Chris Charla – Senior Director of ID@Xbox

Having been part of ID@Xbox since the beginning, it’s extremely hard to pick one moment from the thousands of great moments and games and people involved with this program on both the Xbox and developer side. But if you made me pick just one, it would be E3 2015, when I was onstage, in the dark, watching Chad and Jared Moldenhauer introduce Cuphead. I knew how hard they were working, and I knew that after the teaser the year before, people were expecting a lot. I also know how much that trailer was going to blow everyone away. That moment when the StudioMDHR logo came up on stage, I got goosebumps like I never have before, and I just could not get the silly grin off my face watching that game own the stage at E3. There have been tons and tons and tons of other fantastic moments and games over the last five years, but that moment will always stay with me!

Phil Spencer – Head of Xbox

The game that comes to mind for me is Brothers. I have such a vivid memory of the first time I completed the game as there’s a key moment at the end in which the game mechanic is designed to reinforce the emotion I felt as a player. If you haven’t played it, Brothers is a cooperative, puzzle-based game where each thumbstick controls one of the two brothers on screen simultaneously. In the game, the brothers’ mother has died and their dad is sick and in need of medicine. The game is about the brothers’ quest to get medicine and by the end of the game, the older brother dies as well. As the story draws to a close, the younger brother is alone, trying to get back to his dad and to do so, he must swim across a stream. We learn early in the game that the younger brother does not swim. Until this moment in the game, he’s only crossed water on the back of his older brother.

So there I was, trying to finish the game, pausing and working to solve the puzzle of how to get the younger brother across the water without his older brother. And then the answer just came to me and when I tried it and it worked – it was spine tingling. I felt the loneliness and sadness of the young brother. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a gameplay mechanic that evoked emotion in the way Brothers did for me and so many other players.

Ashley McKissick – Head of Xbox Game Pass

Four years ago, when my son was six-years-old, we spent our winter vacation playing Never Alone and exploring the Iñupiat culture together. It was the perfect game to play with my little one. The co-op nature meant that we had to work together, and the controls were so intuitive and well-crafted. The fact that, while playing through the adventure, we also got to learn about this special Alaskan Native community, made it even more special. I also just absolutely loved the art style in Never Alone, especially the environments, and I am so glad that ID@Xbox enabled us to discover this game. Playing this little gem will remain a fond holiday memory for my son and I.

Craig Duncan – Studio Head, Rare Games

I’ve enjoyed many incredible ID@Xbox games over the years but my favorite moment is quite a recent one while browsing the what’s new in Xbox Game Pass section there was a game called Manual Samuel. I hadn’t heard of it but was drawn to the art of a cartoon death holding a puppet and then spent the next few hours being pulled out of my gaming comfort zone doing what appeared to be normal everyday tasks; without spoiling the plot which everyone should experience spoiler free it made me smile throughout and laugh at some of the dialog and the crazy moments that poor Samuel had to navigate with appropriate well deserved achievements awarded throughout including probably the craziest driving achievement I have ever earned 😊 A really funny, enjoyable and unique little adventure.

Katie Stone Perez – Principal Program Manager, Mixer

The timer ends, you see the results, and my daughters jump up and cheer “We did it!” We have come together as a family and defeated the unbread. That’s my favorite ID@Xbox moment. My family loves playing games together and Overcooked 2 provides a great level of challenge but when we work together we can always be successful. Each level starts with us coming up with a plan and then the chaos ensues. The game has become an almost nightly ritual for us before bed and I love that we can have that moment of success that unites us as a family.

Jeff Rubenstein – Xbox Comms and Inside Xbox Host

I may not recall my daughter’s first word, or exactly when she took her first steps. Should we have saved a lock of hair from her first haircut? Yet I vividly remember her first Minecraft world, I showed her how to record her first PotG in Overwatch, and was sitting right next to her during her first Fortnite Victory Royale – the culmination of a carefully laid game education curriculum that began with… Chariot. Yes, Frima Games’ platformer has players dragging a king’s coffin to a more luxurious burial site to placate his demanding spirit (who berates you on your journey), but it’s colorful, kid-friendly, and teaches the mechanics of platforming and cooperative play. More importantly, it sparked a love of gaming and a father-daughter bonding activity that continues to this day. And that’s better than a pair of bronzed baby shoes any day.

Graeme Boyd – Xbox Live’s AceyBongos and Inside Xbox Host

The day I got married is one of the greatest days of my life. I am, of course, talking about Stardew Valley. My real wedding was pretty good too, I guess. But in Stardew Valley, getting married felt like the culmination of months of hard work and careful relationship building as I carved out my new life on the farm. It felt like acceptance.

That’s the funny thing about Stardew Valley – it starts out like a nice mash-up of Harvest Moon, Animal Crossing, and even Minecraft. But soon enough the rhythms of it – tending your crops, selling your goods, making new friends, exploring the town, the seasons rolling in and out – they get inside you. You feel part of something special. And for me, that experience was one of the most relaxing and fulfilling I’ve ever had in a video game. Stardew Valley became my happy place (I still have a map of the town next to my desk at work and I gaze longingly at it during stressful conference calls). Getting married made it even happier.

Oh, yeah. I got married to Leah. Obviously.

Will Tuttle – Editor in Chief of Xbox Wire

I’m a sucker for a great narrative and ID@Xbox has no shortage of amazing narrative-driven games, from the haunting family drama of the excellent What Remains of Edith Finch to the sci-fi horror of Soma. The best of these combine a compelling narrative with unique simple-but-complex gameplay. One of my favorite games of this generation, Thomas Was Alone by Bithell Games, is a pitch-perfect example of that intoxicating blend. At first glance, the game looks like a straightforward, minimalistic platformer starring a group of quadrilateral shapes, but it quickly becomes clear that it’s much more.

Thanks to top-notch writing and some truly wonderful narration by British humorist Danny Wallace (who won a BAFTA for his performance), those little blocks become Thomas, Claire, Chris, John, and Laura. By combining those beautifully humanized shapes with some good old-fashioned puzzle platforming, Thomas Was Alone helped to push the medium forward in unexpectedly new ways.

Larry Hryb – Xbox Live’s Major Nelson and Inside Xbox Host

As a fan of film, music and obviously video games, I’ve long had an appreciation for content created and produced by independent studios. So, when I heard the ID@Xbox team was celebrating the release of their 1,000th indie title, I naturally considered some of my favorites and it was impossible not to think about Cuphead.

Cuphead is an absolute gem, featuring beautifully crafted visuals reminiscent of sound cartoons from the golden age of animation. The soundtrack is easily some of the best music you will hear in a video game, composed using live musicians playing jazz, early big band, and ragtime music, a favorite genre of mine. But Cuphead doesn’t just look and sound great, it plays great too. My colleagues may heckle me a bit as I praise Cuphead’s gameplay since I am admittedly “challenged” by some of the levels, but the game is just so much fun to play.

As great as Cuphead is though, the real magic of the game is with the number of subtle references (some might even call them Easter Eggs) seamlessly interwoven into the game. I heard mention of a Street Fighter reference when you battle the frogs Ribby and Croaks, and when I encountered that particular scene, it indeed appeared to be a clear tribute to Street Fighter.

Sure, there are the more obvious ones, like a building in the background named after the developers or the name of their studio appearing in different places. But when you dig a little deeper, you’ll discover a seemingly unending link to other cartoon characters, video games and real people including actors, musicians, artists, and cartoonists. It’s fascinating as you play the game when you recognize one of these subtle links and even more fascinating to think of all the hidden connections yet to be discovered.

Posted on November 2, 2018 by sick skills — Leave a comment

How your company can be a positive force for disability employment

by Jessica Rafuse, Microsoft Accessibility Senior Program Manager

NDEAM is a wrap, what’s next?

As National Disability Employment Awareness Month comes to an end, I reflect on the last month and ask, “Now what?!” Making a positive impact on the unemployment and underemployment rates for people with disabilities is a challenge that must extend beyond NDEAM and must be a collaborative effort. So how do we keep the momentum going?

To help answer the question, we gathered experts and influencers from over 75 different organizations from across the Seattle-area to the second annual Microsoft DisAbility Employment Symposium.

As Bri Sambo from T-Mobile put it, we must “lean on the community we have and collaborate with other companies.” The Symposium generated discussion on common challenges, lessons learned, and innovation in disability employment. We celebrated people with disabilities and committed to our ongoing efforts towards inclusion. Then we said goodbye. As the last guest exited the building, the lights dimmed in the conference room, and I realized, “Now, the real work begins.”

What can your company do to continue the journey to positively impact disability employment? Three things: get Ready, get Set, Hire!

GET READY

1. Nurture a culture of inclusion

A common theme across the Symposium was the importance of nurturing a culture of inclusion. Celebrating people with disabilities within your organization will ignite a sense of disability pride that results in a more inclusive and productive workplace. Here are a few things to consider:

Recognize Talent: People with disabilities are an asset to the workplace. From innovation to troubleshooting to project management skills, each individual with a disability brings with them a unique set of skills that they have honed as a result of their disabilities. Remember that 70% of disabilities are non-apparent, so you like have someone in your workplace today who is already adding value to the team.
Create opportunity for connection: To build a culture you first need to build a community. Our Disability Employee Resource Group is a long standing group of employees, who have helped to define disability inclusion at Microsoft. If you are looking for a first step in this journey, start here. Just a few passionate employees with common experiences can support your business in the creation of truly inclusive culture.

DisAbility Employment Symposium Opening Panel – in order left to right: Jessica Rafuse (Microsoft), Keith Clark (Seattle Lighthouse), Megan Mauney (Amazon), Becky Curran (Disability: IN) and Bri Sambo (T-Mobile)

GET SET

2. Invest in accessibility

Another common theme we saw during the event was companies referencing the importance of embedding accessibility into the fabric of their companies as key to recruiting and retaining talent with disabilities. So how do they do it?

Be creative, be frugal, and be resourceful. “Investment” does not always mean “budget” allocation. Utilize resources that are available for free on public platforms. For example, watch Introduction to Disability and Inclusion to learn the basics, and educate your colleagues by using Microsoft Accessibility Training Resources particularly our At a Glance series, which provides bite-sized accessibility trainings.
Leverage technology to empower people with disabilities. The role of technology is indisputable in empowering all people, including people with disabilities. From accessible career websites to assistive technologies like screen readers (e.g., Narrator and JAWS) for people who are Blind or Low Vision, accessible technology can make your company more attractive to talent with disabilities. As an individual, you also have a role in making your workplace more accessible with a few simple tricks. Try using the Accessibility Checker before sending an email or turn on Translator within PowerPoint during your next meeting. If you want to know more about accessibility features check out our Accessibility Feature Sway and at the Microsoft Accessibility Site.
Accessibility in all levels of your company. Senior leaders are immensely influential as accessibility champions. Ignite your leader’s passion for accessibility by sharing personal stories about how your company’s business has positively impacted the lives of people with disabilities. In support of NDEAM, Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, celebrated with six accessibility feature demos: Inclusive Presentations, Seeing AI, Xbox Adaptive Controller, Learning Tools, Soundscape, and Eye Control.

HIRE

3. Hire someone with a disability today!

The timing is now. While nurturing your company culture and integrating accessibility into all that you do, actively seek candidates with disabilities to join in your journey. People with disabilities are just the problem solvers you need to provide feedback on your efforts as you strive for improvement.

Transparency in recruiting: candidates appreciate transparency in your company’s inclusion efforts and clear timelines on the accessibility journey. For hiring managers, open communication is key to confront bias and to allow for discussion around your company’s policies for workplace accommodations and benefits.
Identifying gaps: partner with your internal talent acquisition team, HR, legal, or other stakeholders to understand the process for working with candidates with disabilities. Ensure that your organization has a process for soliciting and responding to requests for accommodations. Offer trainings to all members of a recruiting ecosystem and co-create resource guides that are specific to your business. Don’t wait for the processes and policies to be perfect, “Hiring talent with disabilities is just common sense, just ask us what we need.”- Nyle DiMarco
Resources abound: check out the Disability Equality Index (DEI), which serves as an neutral benchmarking tool to evaluate, measure, and improve your company’s disability inclusion efforts. We are sharing even more of our learnings through our Disability Inclusion Sway and the Microsoft Inclusive Hiring Site.

Jenny Lay-Flurrie and Nyle DiMarco onstage at DisAbility Employment Symposium

Thank you again to all the companies, organizations, and disability influencers who participated in our DisAbility Employment Symposium and to those who helped develop these learnings. For those who were not able to join us in-person, Disability:IN can help you to find other businesses in your area that are also committed to disability inclusion. Be curious, be bold, and be collaborative. Hire someone with disabilities and they will guide you along the way.

Posted on November 2, 2018 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Microsoft’s code-mixing project could help computers handle Spanglish

Communication is a large part of who we are as human beings, and today, technology has allowed us to communicate in new ways and to audiences much larger and wider than ever before. That technology has assumed single-language speech, which — quite often — does not reflect the way people naturally speak. India, like many other parts of the world, is multilingual on a societal level with most people speaking two or more languages. I speak Bengali, English, and Hindi, as do a lot of my friends and colleagues. When we talk, we move fluidly between these languages without much thought.

This mixing of words and phrases is referred to as code-mixing or code-switching, and from it, we’ve gained such combinations as Hinglish and Spanglish. More than half of the world’s population speaks two or more languages, so with as many people potentially code-switching, creating technology that can process it is important in not only creating useful translation and speech recognition tools, but also in building engaging user interface. Microsoft is progressing on that front in exciting ways.

In Project Mélange, we at Microsoft Research India have been building technologies for processing code-mixed speech and text. Through large-scale computational studies, we are also exploring some fascinating linguistic and behavioral questions around code-mixing, such as why and when people code-mix, that are helping us build technology people can relate to. At the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), my colleagues and I have the opportunity to share some of our recent research with our paper “Word Embeddings for Code-Mixed Language Processing.”

A data shortage in code-mixed language

Word embeddings — multidimensional vector representation where words similar in meaning or used in similar context are closer to each other — are learnt using deep learning from large language corpora and are valuable in solving a variety of natural language processing tasks using neural techniques. For processing code-mixed language — say, Hinglish — one would ideally need an embedding of words from both Hindi and English in the same space. There are standard methods for obtaining multilingual word embeddings; however, these techniques typically try to map translation equivalents from the two languages (e.g., school and vidyalay) close to each other. This helps in cross-lingual transfer of models. For instance, a sentiment analysis system trained for English can be appropriately transferred to work for Hindi using multilingual embeddings. But it’s not ideal for code-mixed language processing. While school and vidyalay are translation equivalents, in Hinglish, school is far more commonly used than vidyalay; also, these words are used in slightly different contexts. Further, there are grammatical constraints on code-mixing that disallow certain types of direct word substitutions, most notably for verbs in Hinglish. For processing code-mixed language, the word embeddings should ideally be learnt from a corpus of code-mixed text.

It is difficult to estimate the amount of code-mixing that happens in the world. One good proxy is the code-mixing patterns on social media. Approximately 3.5 percent of the tweets on Twitter are code-mixed. The above pie charts show the distribution of monolingual and code-mixed, or code-switched (cs), tweets in seven major European languages: Dutch (nl), English (en), French (fr), German (de), Portuguese (pt), Spanish (es), and Turkish (tr).

The chart above shows the distributions of monolingual and code-mixed tweets for 12 major cities in Europe and the Americas that were found to have very large or very small fractions of code-mixed tweets, represented in the larger pies by the missing white wedge. The smaller pies show the top two code-mixed language pairs, the size being proportionate to their usage. The Microsoft Research India team found that code-mixing is more prevalent in cities where English is not the major language used to tweet.

Even though code-mixing is extremely common in multilingual societies, it happens in casual speech and rarely in text, so we’re limited in the amount of text data available for code-mixed language. What little we do have is from informal speech conversations, such as interactions on social media, where people write almost exactly how they speak. To address this challenge, we developed a technique to generate natural-looking code-mixed data from monolingual text data. Our method is based on a linguistic model known as the equivalence constraint theory of code-mixing, which imposes several syntactic constraints on code-mixing. In building the Spanglish corpus, for example, we used Bing Microsoft Translator to first translate an English sentence into Spanish. Then we aligned the words, identifying which English word corresponded to the Spanish word, and in a process called parsing identified in the sentences the phrases and how they’re related. Then using the equivalence constraint theory, we systematically generated all possible valid Spanglish versions of the input English sentence. A small number of the generated sentences were randomly sampled based on certain criteria that indicated how close they were to natural Spanglish data, and these sentences comprise our artificial Spanglish corpus. Since there is no dearth of monolingual English and Spanish sentences, using this fully automated technique, we can generate as large a Spanglish corpus as we want.

Solving NLP tasks with an artificially generated corpus

Through experiments on parts-of-speech tagging and sentiment classification, we showed that word embeddings learnt from the artificially generated Spanglish corpus were more effective in solving these NLP tasks for code-mixed language than the standard cross-lingual embedding techniques.

The linguistic theory–based generation of code-mixed text has applications beyond word embeddings. For instance, in one of our previous studies published earlier this year, we showed that this technique helps us in learning better language models that can help us build better speech recognition systems for code-mixed speech. We are exploring its application in machine translation to improve the accuracy of mixed-language requests. And imagine a multilingual chatbot that can code-mix depending on who you are, the context of the conversation, and what topic is being discussed, and switch in a natural and appropriate way. That would be true engagement.