Microsoft news – Page 242

Posted on October 30, 2018 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Transforming higher education to address the skills gap

Digital transformation is reshaping every aspect of our lives – how we live, learn, and work. This transformation impacts the skills students need to succeed both in the workplace of today and in the future, when they will be tasked with solving the most complex issues of any generation in history.

As a company, Microsoft has a vested interest in the skills economy that will drive future breakthroughs in innovation. Further, as parents, colleagues and citizens, we feel compelled to help support digital transformation in Higher Education, so that every student has an opportunity to learn what we call future-ready skills.

So, what can we do to help?

To help students acquire future-ready skills, we believe there are three key focus areas we must address in the near term:

Support future-ready skills curricula while ensuring learning tools are accessible to all students
Empower institutions with tools to improve student engagement, experiences, and outcomes
Create safe and secure learning environments in the classroom and online

This week at the EDUCAUSE 2018 Annual Conference, Microsoft Education will share our new future-ready skills offering, new solutions for student success and lifecycle management, and advancements in safety and security. All are aimed at empowering Higher Education institutions to drive future-ready skills in safe and secure learning environments with successful outcomes.

Future-ready skills and accessible learning

As cyberthreats increase, so too does the demand for skilled cybersecurity professionals. Businesses need experts that can protect key systems, detect threats early on, and minimize business impact in the event of a security incident.

The new Microsoft Professional Program (MPP) Certificate in Cybersecurity was built to address the evolving landscape of threats businesses face and to enable students to develop the skills needed to start or grow a cybersecurity career. This 10-course MPP Cybersecurity track provides online courses, hands-on labs, and expert instruction to learn how to safeguard key systems, develop a cybersecurity defense plan, detect threats early, and minimize the business impact of information breaches. See the Microsoft Professional Program for CyberSecurity available on Microsoft’s Learning as a Service platform, delivered on OpenEdEx.

On campus, Higher Education Institutions depend on physical computer labs for classroom learning and development and test scenarios. Now, with Azure Lab Services, educators and IT admins can easily create computer labs in the cloud: automatically scale the number of virtual machines to the usage needed at the cost threshold you set, and delete the lab with a single click once you’re done. The service empowers professors, technicians, and students to work with virtual machines in the cloud without having to master the complexities of setting up the cloud infrastructure. Get an introduction, take a tutorial, or set up a classroom lab visit.

A key benefit to learning through technology, whether in the classroom or online, is that it can make content and engagement accessible to all students. Tools like Immersive Reader, Read Aloud and Dictation within Learning Tools help students of all abilities read, write and communicate. Building on top of these tools, new offerings like auto-generated captions and transcriptions for videos in English and Spanish are available with Microsoft Stream, in all Education plans of Office 365 for people who are deaf or hard of hearing (coming soon for audio and video in OneDrive and SharePoint Online). Capabilities such as Accessibility Checker and Automatic Alt-Text are also available in familiar applications such as Word and PowerPoint, to help content creators make visually compelling and accessible content for all learners.

Student success and lifecycle management

The new Dynamics Higher Education Accelerator, announced at EDUCAUSE today and available open-sourced on GitHub, makes it easier for all partners and developers to create new apps and workflows in Dynamics 365, enabling them to take new products to market faster. It contains industry standard data entities (e.g. student, course, test scores, etc.), pre-built dashboards, workflows, and sample data, as well as other tools to help partners and developers rapidly build business and analytic solutions for Dynamics 365 and the Microsoft Power Platform.

CampusNexus Engage, scheduled to be generally available in December 2018, is the outcome of a collaboration project between Microsoft and Campus Management, built using the Higher Education Accelerator.

In October, Campus Management announced that AccelerEd, a UMUC Ventures portfolio company bringing academic enablement and next-generation technology to educational institutions, has selected the CampusNexus® Suite on behalf of University of Maryland University College (UMUC). UMUC and AccelerEd will use CampusNexus, running on Microsoft’s Azure and Dynamics 365 platform, to increase student engagement, retention, and improve graduation rates through personalized experiences.

“At AccelerEd, our institutional relationships are always focused on improving the customer experience, advancing academic delivery, realizing cost efficiencies and creating a platform for growth and innovation in today’s competitive higher education landscape,” said AccelerEd President Tracy Woods. “Campus Management and Microsoft offer a technology collaboration that delivers on our performance expectations and our customer’s vision.”

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Physical safety and online security

Our students live in an age of increased physical threats on campus, including gun violence, natural disasters and other safety risks. At the same time, data breaches, where personal information is stolen, and student cyberbullying are also a real concern. All potential hazards mandate the use of the strongest security technology, monitoring, notification and emergency response systems and technologies on today’s campuses.

Microsoft provides a comprehensive, intelligent, and extensible cloud platform to help keep students safe and secure in the classroom and online. Microsoft Threat Protection, announced last month at Ignite, is a new end-to-end solution that detects cyberthreats, remediates their effects, and protects Institutions from new and changing threats. It is Microsoft’s most comprehensive security solution and combines the intelligence of Microsoft’s security products. Microsoft co-sell ready partners provide solutions for access control, video surveillance and more.

Azure Digital Twins, a new IoT platform available in public preview on Oct. 15, will enable partners to build comprehensive digital models on any physical environment. These virtually represent the physical world and enable custom solutions that address Institutional needs to develop even more safe and secure learning environments on campus. Learn more about Microsoft Threat Protection and get the ebook on Physical Safety and Security.

For more information about Microsoft’s efforts across higher education, visit us at Microsoft’s Higher Education site.

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Posted on October 30, 2018 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Updated Quantum Development Kit offers new chemistry library, improved developer tools

At Microsoft Ignite, we shared our advancements over the past year and new capabilities within the Quantum Development Kit that will help us tackle real-world challenges. Starting today, you can download the updated Microsoft Quantum Development Kit and start leveraging the latest features. The update includes:

New quantum chemistry library. The new quantum chemistry library can be used to develop quantum simulation solutions in the chemistry domain.
Improved Q# developer experience. The Quantum Development Kit now delivers deeper integration with Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code. This update includes live feedback as you type, with errors indicated by underlined errors and warnings.
New Q# language capabilities. The Q# programming language has been extended in ways that unify how developers code common operations, such as iteration over arrays, making coding in Q# easier and faster.

New quantum chemistry library

Quantum computers have the potential to solve the world’s hardest computational problems and forever alter our economic, industrial, academic, and societal landscape. One significant area is computational chemistry, where quantum computers will drive advancements in areas such as drug discovery, development of pigments and dyes, and the development of catalysts for industrial processes. These processes could break down pollutants in exhaust streams, extract atmospheric nitrogen to make fertilizer, and enable new methods for carbon capture. For example, a quantum computer may help identify a way to remove carbon from our environment more efficiently, to combat global warming.

To unlock these potential applications, this release of the Quantum Development Kit now includes a state-of-the-art chemistry library that allows users to explore quantum algorithms for real-world applications in the computational chemistry domain. New features include:

State-of-the-art Q# implementations of methods for Hamiltonian simulation.
Various samples to help the user get started quickly.
Integrations with NWChem, an open source high-performance computational chemistry software package.

The chemistry library was developed in collaboration with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), a leader in both chemistry and data analytics. Together, the chemistry library and NWChem enable quantum solutions and allow researchers and developers a higher-level of study and discovery as they tackle today’s computationally complex chemistry problems.

Learn more about the new chemistry library here.

Exploring the quantum chemistry library with Visual Studio Code

Enhanced Q# language and developer experience

The updated Quantum Development Kit offers enhanced integration with both Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code. This includes IntelliSense features such as real-time feedback on errors. Additionally, the Q# language continues to improve and now provides more powerful language expressions that simplify the task of quantum programming. For instance, to simplify common code patterns, we added a conditional operator (condition? true | false) and iteration over arrays as well as ranges.

Learn more about the new Q# language changes here.

Valuable Hover information with Visual Studio

Update to Quantum Development Kit 0.3 Today!

With the updated kit you’ll find a suite of detailed documentation, tutorials, libraries, and sample algorithms and Q# code. You can dive right in with the included quantum codes and find easy-to-follow samples crafted in Q# for highly optimized and intuitively written code. The Quantum Development Kit supports a broad and inclusive range of development platforms, including Windows, Linux, and macOS. It also supports programming languages such as Python on Windows.

The kit also includes simulation tools that can mimic execution on a quantum computer and allows users to optimize their code and estimate the resource cost of running a solution on a real quantum computer with the help of the included Trace Simulator.

To start learning how to program for quantum, try our self-paced tutorials called the Microsoft Quantum Katas. These coding katas are great tools for learning a new programming language and rely on several simple learning principles: active learning, incremental complexity growth, and feedback.

Today, developers around the world are exploring the Microsoft Quantum Development Kit and experiencing the world of quantum computing, from startups to the enterprise and across academia, research, and design. The scalable Microsoft quantum computing solution is already enabling problem-solvers from various disciplines and skill levels to explore the world of quantum development and begin solving some of the planet’s most complex challenges. With our updated Quantum Development Kit, we’re excited to help our growing community take another step toward the new world of quantum computing.

Posted on October 30, 2018 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Building an ecosystem for responsible drone use and development on Azure

The next wave of computing is already taking shape around us as IoT enables businesses to sense all aspects of their business in real-time, and take informed action to running cloud workloads on those IoT devices so they don’t require “always on” connectivity to the cloud to make real-time context-aware decisions. This is the intelligent edge, and it will define the next wave of innovation, not just for business, but also how we address some of the world’s most pressing issues.

Drones or unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) are great examples of intelligent edge devices being used today to address many of these challenges, from search and rescue missions and natural disaster recovery, to increasing the world’s food supply with precision agriculture. With the power of AI at the edge, drones can have a profound impact in transforming businesses and improving society, as well as in assisting humans in navigating high-risk areas safely and efficiently.

With these advanced capabilities also comes great responsibility including respecting the laws that govern responsible drone use in our airspace, as well as the applications of the drones to scan the environment. We believe it is important to protect data wherever it lives, from the cloud to the intelligent edge.

In addition to building the platforms for innovation, we at Microsoft believe it is crucial to also invest in companies and partnerships that will enable the responsible use of drones and associated data. Today we are making two important announcements that further our commitment to responsible use of drones as commercial IoT edge devices running on Microsoft Azure.

AirMap powered by Microsoft Azure

Today we announced that AirMap has selected Microsoft Azure as the company’s exclusive cloud-computing platform for its drone traffic management platform and developer ecosystem.

Drone usage is growing quickly across industries such as transportation, utilities, agriculture, public safety, emergency response, and more, to improve the efficiency and performance of existing business processes. Data generated by drones is infused with intelligence to augment the value that companies and governments deliver to customers and communities. However, concerns about regulatory compliance, privacy, and data protection still prevent organizations from adopting drone technology at scale.

AirMap works with civil aviation authorities, air navigation service providers, and local authorities to implement an airspace management system that supports and enforces secure and responsible access to low-altitude airspace for drones.

With AirMap’s airspace management platform running on Microsoft Azure, the two companies are delivering a platform that will allow state and local authorities to authorize drone flights and enforce local rules and restrictions on how and when they can be operated. Their solution also enables companies to ensure that compliance and security are a core part of their enterprise workflows that incorporate drones.

AirMap selected Microsoft Azure because it provides the critical cloud-computing infrastructure, security, and reliability needed to run these mission-critical airspace services and orchestrate drone operations around the world.

Earlier this year, Swiss Post, the postal service provider for the country of Switzerland, joined with drone manufacturer Matternet and Insel Group, Switzerland’s largest leading medical care system, to fly time-sensitive laboratory samples between Tiefanau Hospital and University Hospital Insel in Bern. This was an alternative to ground transport, where significant traffic can cause life-threatening delays. The operations are supported by Switzerland’s airspace management system for drones, powered by AirMap and Microsoft Azure, for safety and efficiency.

DJI Windows SDK for app development enters public preview

Last May at our Build developer conference, we announced a partnership with DJI, the world’s leader in civilian drones and aerial imaging technology, to bring advanced AI and machine learning capabilities to DJI drones, helping businesses harness the power of commercial drone technology and edge cloud computing.

Today at DJI’s AirWorks conference, we are announcing the public preview of the Windows SDK, which allows applications to be written for Windows 10 PCs that control DJI drones. The SDK will also allow the Windows developer community to integrate and control third-party payloads like multispectral sensors, robotic components like custom actuators, and more, exponentially increasing the ways drones can be used in the enterprise.

With this SDK, we now have three methods to enable Azure AI services to interact with drone imagery and video in real-time:

Drone imagery can be sent directly to Azure for processing by an AI workload.

Drone imagery can be processed on Windows running Azure IoT Edge with an AI workload.

Drone imagery can be processed directly onboard drones running Azure IoT Edge with an AI workload.

We take the security of data seriously, from the cloud to edge devices such as drones. Azure IoT Edge includes an important subsystem, called the security manager, which acts as a core for protecting the IoT Edge device and all its components by abstracting the secure silicon hardware. It is the focal point for security hardening and provides IoT device manufacturers the opportunity to harden their devices based on their choice of hardware secure modules (HSM). Finally, the Azure certified for IoT program only certifies third-party Azure IoT Edge hardware that meets our strict security requirements.

We are encouraged by all the creative applications of drones we are seeing on Azure today across industry sectors, and the following are a few examples of this.

SlantRange: Is an aerial remote sensing and data analytics company servicing the information needs of the agriculture industry, with over two decades of experience in earth science, defense, and intelligence applications. The company has patented foundational technologies for aerial crop inspections and introduced innovative analytical methods that deliver valuable agronomic data within minutes of collection, anywhere in the world, using low-power edge computing devices. These technologies have propelled SlantRange’s growth from a few Nebraska corn and soybean farms just a few seasons ago to over 40 countries and a wide variety of crops today, including contracts with many of the world’s leading agricultural suppliers and producers.

Clobotics: Is a global AI company helping wind energy companies to improve its productivity by automatically inspecting, processing, and reporting wind turbine blade defects. The company has inspected over 1,000 wind turbines in the past few months around the world. Clobotics’ end-to-end solutions combine computer vision, machine learning, and data analytics software with commercial drones and sensors to help the wind energy industry automate its inspection service. Clobotics’ Wind Turbine Data Platform, along with its computer vision-based edge computing service, provides a first-of-its-kind wind turbine blade life-cycle management service. As a Microsoft WW Azure partner, Clobotics works closely with Microsoft Azure and the IoT platform to provide the most innovative and reliable services to its enterprise customers.

eSmart systems: Brings more than 20 years of global intelligence to provide software solutions to the energy industry, service providers, and smart cities. By bringing AI to the edge on Azure IoT Edge, eSmart Systems are revolutionizing grid inspections. Their Connected Drone solution has the capability to analyze 200,000 images in less than one hour, this is more than a human expert can do in a year. The result is reduced operational cost, better insights into the current status of the grid, and fewer outages.

Earlier this year we announced a $5 billion investment in IoT and the intelligent edge to continue innovation, strategic partnerships, and programs. The latest announcements with strategic partners like AirMap and DJI continue to push the boundaries of what is possible, and we look forward to seeing what our joint customers go on to build.

Posted on October 30, 2018 by sick skills — Leave a comment

ID@Xbox celebrates release of 1,000 titles

Before we announced the ID@Xbox program, we did a listening tour in 2012 with more than 50 developers to help us shape a program that really worked for developers. At the time, it felt like a lot of people! It’s almost surreal that we’re now looking at thousands of talented people working at more than 3,000 studios independently creating games for millions of players around the world on Xbox One and Windows 10 with the ID@Xbox program. It’s an amazing feeling to not only see how much the independent development scene has grown over the years, but also to be part of a program that empowers and helps independent developers continue to do what they love.

Sixty-seven countries across the globe, over four billion hours played by the community and more than a billion dollars in digital revenue later, we’re thrilled to share that 1,000 games have been released through the ID@Xbox program. Joining some of our most memorable releases like Studio MDHR’s Cuphead, Fullbright’s Tacoma, playdead’s INSIDE, Chucklefish’s Stardew Valley, Matt Makes Games’ Celeste and The Behemoth’s Pit People, games including Team17’s Overcooked 2, Dark Star’s Sinner: Sacrifice for Redemption and Pixel Trip Studios’ The Videokid launched this year helping push us to this new milestone.

Over these past five years, we’ve seen the releases of incredible titles across every single genre imaginable – and lots of games we never could have imagined when we got started! We’re stoked that ID@Xbox is continuing to offer developers a place to share their stories in a meaningful way, helping to increase independent game discoverability and shaping Xbox One and Windows 10 as platforms that anyone can make games on and create with. We’re continuing to celebrate this momentum into the future and bring even more rad experiences to players with upcoming titles like Slow Bros.’s Harold Halibut, Capybara Games’ Below, Aurora 44’s Ashen, Black Desert from Pearl Abyss and Sable from Shedworks.

The 1,000^th release this month marks an important milestone for ID@Xbox, and we’re taking the opportunity to look back on the impact our development partners and fans have had on the program:

Above all, thank you to the fans that have shown independent developers an indescribable amount of love on Xbox since day one, and thank you to the developers that keep making awesome game and giving us great feedback on a daily basis about how we can improve our program. We’re psyched to help developers bring us more surprises, more outside-of-the-box thinking and discovering new ways to push boundaries within gaming.

Stay tuned to Xbox Wire for more exciting updates on awesome games coming from independent developers via ID@Xbox!

Posted on October 29, 2018 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Microsoft’s Board of Director Video Series: An interview with Teri List-Stoll

Microsoft’s board of directors wants our shareholders, customers, partners and employees to have the chance to get to know the board and hear how it operates. Our board of directors video series helps achieve this through informal interviews that provide deeper insights into board members’ backgrounds, their perspectives on board service and insights into the Microsoft boardroom.

The latest installment features Teri List-Stoll, executive vice president and chief financial officer at Gap Inc. Teri joined the board in October 2014 and brings extensive financial and consumer business experience. In her interview, Teri shares one of her most pivotal career moments, gives a behind-the-scenes look into how Microsoft’s board operates, and discusses how technology is shaping the future of business.

You can read more about our board and our approach to corporate governance on our Investor Relations website.

Posted on October 29, 2018 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Mad? Sad? Glad? Video Indexer now recognizes these human emotions

Many different customers across industries want to have insights into the emotional moments that appear in different parts of their media content. For broadcasters, this can help create more impactful promotion clips and drive viewers to their content; in the sales industry it can be super useful for analyzing sales calls and improve convergence; in advertising it can help identify the best moment to pop up an ad, and the list goes on and on. To that end, we are excited to share Video Indexer’s (VI) new machine learning model that mimics humans’ behavior to detect four cross-cultural emotional states in videos: anger, fear, joy, and sadness.

Endowing machines with cognitive abilities to recognize and interpret human emotions is a challenging task due to their complexity. As humans, we use multiple mediums to analyze emotions. These include facial expressions, voice tonality, and speech content. Eventually, the determination of a specific emotion is a result of a combination of these three modalities to varying degrees.

While traditional sentiment analysis models detect the polarity of content – for example, positive or negative – our new model aims to provide a finer granularity analysis. For example, given a moment with negative sentiment, the new model determines whether the underlying emotion is fear, sadness, or anger. The following figure illustrates VI’s emotion analysis of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s speech on the importance of education. At the very beginning of his speech, a sad moment was detected.

All the detected emotions and their specific appearances along the video are enumerated in the video index JSON as follows:

Cross-channel emotion detection in VI

The new functionality utilizes deep learning to detect emotional moments in media assets based on speech content and voice tonality. VI detects emotions by capturing semantic properties of the speech content. However, semantic properties of single words are not enough, so the underlying syntax is also analyzed because the same words in a different order can induce different emotions.

VI leverages the context of the speech content to infer the dominant emotion. For example, the sentence “… the car was coming at me and accelerating at a very fast speed …” has no negative words, but VI can still detect fear as the underlying emotion.

VI analyzes the vocal tonality of speakers as well. It automatically detects segments with voice activity and fuses the affective information contained within with the speech content component.

With the new emotion detection capability in VI that relies on speech content and voice tonality, you are able to become more insightful about the content of your videos by leveraging them for marketing, customer care, and sales purposes.

For more information, visit VI’s portal or the VI developer portal, and try this new capability for free. You can also browse videos indexed as to emotional content: sample 1, sample 2, and sample 3.

Have questions or feedback? We would love to hear from you!

Use our UserVoice to help us prioritize features, or email VISupport@Microsoft.com with any questions.

Posted on October 29, 2018 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Data Science Summer School students take a fresh look at the world’s largest rapid transit system

DS3 2018 at Microsoft Research New York City

This month marked the 5th anniversary of the Microsoft Research Data Science Summer School (DS3). DS3 is an intensive, eight-week hands-on introduction to data science for college students in the New York City area committed to increasing diversity in computer science. The program is taught by leading scientists at Microsoft Research and is held at the Microsoft Research New York City lab.

Each year the program receives upwards of 200 applications, out of which only eight students, demonstrating academic excellence and a passion for using technology to help society, are selected to participate. These students complete four weeks of intensive course work and spend the remaining four weeks of their summer working on an original research problem. Graduates of the program have gone on to a number of exciting careers, ranging from data scientist positions at companies like Microsoft, Bloomberg, and American Express to PhD programs at universities such as Cornell and NYU.

Past projects have looked at how students progress through the New York City public school system, investigated demographic disparities in the city’s policing activities, and formulated improvements for the city’s taxi fleet and bike sharing service.

This year’s students used their newly acquired data science skills to examine another way of getting around New York City—the city’s subway system—and presented some impressive findings at the DS3 banquet to an overflowing room of select members of New York City’s tech community. They examined rider wait times and trip times, compared the subway to above ground travel, and investigated how changes to the system affect rider options.

Below is a summary of their presentation, which you can watch in full. The project is also available on GitHub.

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Akbar Mirza, a senior from City College, opened the talk by discussing the history of NYC’s subway system, which is the largest rapid transit system in the world, serving approximately 5.5 million riders each day. He highlighted the growing concern that the system has become unreliable due to aging equipment, some of which dates back to the early 20th century. And while current system-wide metrics provide some insight into the state of the subway system, they fail to capture how riders actually experience the subway.

Akbar Mirza

This motivated the students to investigate the subway system using the data behind the system’s new countdown clocks that record train locations. Specifically, they used a dataset collected and cleaned by local data scientist Todd Schneider that contained the approximate location of every train in the system for every minute of each day from January through May of 2018.

Next, Brian Hernandez, a senior from Hunter College, walked the audience through how this data could be used to understanding how long riders spend waiting for trains. He used these calculations to compare his commuting options on the F and 7 trains, showing that while the typical wait time is the same on both lines, the F train has much higher variability than the 7 train, making the 7 the preferred option.

Brian Hernandez

Amanda Rodriguez, a senior at Lehman College, continued the presentation with a more granular look at subway wait times throughout the city. She presented a comprehensive wait time model that considers station- and line-specific factors as well as day of week, time of day, and weather effects. Her analysis revealed interesting patterns in wait time variability throughout the city and showed that heavy rain can result in as much as a 25% increase in typical wait times at certain locations.

Amanda Rodriguez

Taxi Baerde, a senior from Adelphi University, introduced the next topic—constructing a formal representation of the subway network as a graph that could be used for finding shortest paths between any two stops and computing trip times. Taxi discussed how it’s surprisingly difficult to settle on such a representation because the network itself is so dynamic, with changing schedules, partial routes, and skipped stops. He also presented a method, called k-shortest paths, for identifying different possible itineraries between a pair of stations (for instance, taking the local versus express, or transferring between multiple likes).

Taxi Baerde

Next, Phoebe Nguyen, a junior at Baruch College, showed how Taxi’s cleaned subway graph could be used to compare different commuting options between a pair of stations in a two- step process—first, finding a set of candidate paths between the stations; and second, reconstructing how long it actually took trains to make these trips. She used this method to compare different options for various trips, showing once again that variability is often the key for deciding between two different options.

Phoebe Nguyen

Peter Farquharson, a junior from Lehman College, extended Phoebe’s results to answer a question on many busy New Yorkers’ minds: when is the subway a better option than a car? He demonstrated how open data from the city’s Taxi and Limosine Commission could be used to estimate how long past car trips between two subway stations would have taken, and compared this with corresponding subway trips. His results highlighted that, once variability is factored in, the subway can be an attractive alternative to driving when trying to get to midtown Manhattan during rush hour or traveling to JFK airport.

Peter Farquharson

Ayliana Teitelbaum, a sophomore from Yeshiva University, looked at trip times from a different angle to tackle a question that New Yorkers face in choosing where to live—how long should you expect your commute to take coming from different parts of the city? She extended Phoebe’s results by showing historical trip times between each of the nearly 500 stations in the system to a fixed workplace destination, and presented the results as a heatmap. By comparing typical and worst case commute times for each station, she showed that accounting for variability can increase commute times in the outer boroughs by up to 50%.

Ayliana Teitelbaum

Sasha Paulovich, a senior at Fordham University, presented the final set of results, considering how changes to the subway system affect riders and how subway experiences differ across demographic groups. She presented a heatmap similar to Ayliana’s that showed how we can expect commute times to change after the L train shuts down in January 2019, and an analogous map that projected commute times to LaGuardia airport if the proposed AirTrain extension to Willets Point is built. Finally, she discussed station options and commute times for riders requiring accessible stations and showed a correlation between median household income and commute times.

Sasha Paulovich

The team and their Microsoft Research mentors closed out the evening by fielding a host of questions from the audience, where the students discussed all of the additional topics they thought about tackling and the various extensions and future work to be done.

The team’s work has been accepted at the 2018 MIT Conference on Digital Experimentation (CODE) taking place in Cambridge, Massachusetts on October 26.

Posted on October 29, 2018 by sick skills — Leave a comment

New to Xbox Game Pass in November: ‘Olli Olli 2 XL,’ ‘Sheltered’ and more

We’re adding five more great games to the Xbox Game Pass catalog in November, in addition to the growing list of over 100 games already included in your membership. Starting November 1, Xbox Game Pass members can jump into Sniper Elite 4, Olli Olli 2 XL, Rise and Shone, Sheltered, and then on November 6 the same day as its debut on Xbox, Grip: Combat Racing.

But, you want more? Tune into Inside Xbox at X018 on November 10 and brace yourself for even more great games coming to Xbox Game Pass — we think you’ll like them.

Let’s dive into the new games, coming to Xbox Game Pass:

Sniper Elite 4 (November 1)

Combining complex ballistics, stealth gameplay, and third-person action, Sniper Elite 4 is the latest entry of this World War 2 combat series. This time featuring some of the largest and most diverse environments to navigate than ever before as you’re tasked to liberate wartime Italy from the iron grip of fascism.

Olli Olli 2 XL Edition (November 1)

Achieve new levels of control and expression as you skate, trick, and grind through 100 different levels with a new expanded combo system including Manuals, Reverts, Revert-Manuals, and Grind-Switching. Take on friends in Combo-Rush, a local-multiplayer mode for 2-4 players or when it’s time to chill, Free-Skate mode offers extended levels to learn the ropes, nail those tricks, or simply cruise and flow..

Sheltered (November 1)

Times are hard after an apocalypse, and your family will need all the comfort they can get to help them survive what’s to come. Sheltered is a post-apocalyptic bunker simulator where you need to keep your family of four alive for as long as possible. You’ll face many obstacles, meet crazy individuals, fight off intruders, scavenge for materials, and explore a randomly generated map on every playthrough.

Rise and Shine (November 1)

Play as the young child Rise as he embarks on an epic action-packed shooting adventure with his sacred gun Shine by his side. Together they’ll fight to take down an invading army of aliens known as Space Grunts in the hopes of saving a world where classic video game characters live. Featuring massive explosions, awesome hand drawn set pieces, and gigantic bosses to do battle with, Rise and Shine has all the ingredients of the next great shooter for you to tackle.

Grip: Combat Racing (November 6)

The return of hardcore combat racing is here and the stakes are higher than ever before. Grip: Combat Racing is packed with content. On top of the single-player campaign and Carkour stunt mode, there’s 22 breathtaking tracks spanning four planets, 15 armored combat vehicles, multiple race formats, and PVP battle arenas all with split-screen for up to four players.

Join Xbox Game Pass Today

With over 100 great games for one low monthly price, including highly-anticipated new Xbox One exclusives the day they’re released, including the highest-rated* Xbox exclusive of this generation Forza Horizon 4, plus more games added all the time, Xbox Game Pass gives you the ultimate freedom to play. If you haven’t tried Xbox Game Pass, start your 14-day free trial now, and discover your next favorite game.

For the latest Xbox Game Pass news, follow us on Twitter and Instagram and stay tuned to Xbox Wire. Until next month, game on!

*Source: Metacritic

Posted on October 26, 2018 by sick skills — Leave a comment

For 3 siblings, Microsoft was the perfect fit

Two brothers sat at their Commodore 64, eyes fixated on the screen. Fifteen-year-old Aydin Aslaner had caught computer fever; as he showed his 2-year-old brother Milad Aslaner what the magical, boxy, beige machine with the black and green screen was all about, Milad got hooked, too.

“I literally could not go to school some days because I loved our computer so much,” said Aydin. “Windows 3.1 in 1995,” he said, “it was my life.”

Fast forward 20 years to their mother’s dinner table: Aydin was bantering with Milad about whose company was better, Apple or Microsoft. Their middle sibling, sister Aylin Aslaner-Chahin, a civil engineer, passing the potatoes to her mother, amused at her spirited, competitive brothers.

The three siblings had no idea then how their three careers would one day intersect.

After Aydin finished his computer science degree, he spent the following years in various technical positions in Germany before he decided that he wanted to go into business for himself. At the time, Milad had just graduated from high school, so Aydin asked Milad to open a consultancy/PC store with him.

“As crazy as it sounded, I agreed. So there I was, 18 years old, following my big brother to build our own business,” recalled Milad.

But two weeks before the store was scheduled to open, Aydin got a phone call that changed the trajectory of all three Aslaner careers forever.

It was Microsoft, where Aydin had dreamed about working. He didn’t feel like he could pass up the opportunity. Taking the job would mean leaving Milad to open the store on his own, which the younger brother was less than thrilled about.

“As selfish as it sounds, I was against it,” recalled Milad. “How was I supposed to run a business without my brother? I’m happy he went for it, but for me it sounded crazy.”

Aydin joined Microsoft, and Milad opened the doors and ran the business solo. He did well enough for several years, but he grew restless. He sold the business and eventually landed at Apple’s Ireland offices.

Meanwhile, their sister, Aylin, was well into her career as a civil engineer. Family dinners were interesting, she recalled. Aydin raved about Microsoft, Milad praised Apple, and there she was between them, absorbing it all.

It reminded her a lot of when the siblings were young, how the adventurous Milad was always ready to jump into something new but also looked up to the steady Aydin, who was forging the path ahead. And how she was always somewhere in the middle, happily holding it all together, observing them and quietly plotting her own path but rarely quick to leap into her brothers’ schemes.

Though she didn’t see a future for herself at a technology company back then, she did remember being impressed with the way her oldest brother spoke about Microsoft.

“I was learning so much at my job and at the company—it was the best thing that ever happened to me, and I wanted my siblings to have the same experiences,” Aydin said.

His persuasion plan had begun.

Posted on October 26, 2018 by sick skills — Leave a comment

How working like a beaver is helping to replenish water

On a crisp autumn day just outside the town of Peshashtin in central Washington, I could be seen alongside seven other Microsoft employees hauling bunches of dogwood and alder saplings down a steep embankment in Darby Canyon to the trickling creek below. For a day, we stepped away from our standing desks and back-to-back Skype meetings to roll up our sleeves and work with Trout Unlimited on a fascinating project, constructing beaver dam analogs – BDAs – on Darby Creek.

Let me answer the two obvious questions here. First, what are BDAs? They are lines of pilings driven into the streambed with branches woven between them that mimic the functionality of beaver dams, generating a host of water availability and quality benefits, such as reducing sediments and stream temperature in the summer. Secondly, why are Microsoft employees weaving beaver dams in central Washington? Believe it or not, this project represents the future of our approach to water, and specifically water replenishment.

Microsoft has been taking actions, within our operations and with our partners, to use less water and preserve this vital natural resource. Overall, our approach rests on four cornerstones: understanding water risks, setting water reduction goals, investing in replenishment, and fostering digital transformation in the water space. Increasingly, we’re looking beyond conservation to include replenishment in this water strategy.

By supporting water replenishment, we have an opportunity to balance our consumption of water, while generating tangible water benefits for the ecosystems and communities where we operate. As a changing climate and competing demands for water put greater pressure on this essential resource, it’s important for companies like Microsoft to engage in water replenishment, particularly in water-stressed regions where we have substantial operations.

One such region is central Washington, where we have datacenter operations, and just over the mountains, our global headquarters in Redmond. Given the proximity and import to our business, it just made sense as the location for our initial investments in water replenishment. In addition to the BDA project, Microsoft partnered with the Bonneville Environmental Foundation to support projects that will increase flows and habitat conditions for migrating fish, remove fish passage barriers, and test new irrigation techniques that can improve the quality and quantity of fruit, while using less water. These projects are designed to produce tangible benefits that are meaningful for the aquatic environment and for the agricultural sector in the area.

Our work won’t end here. Microsoft is a global company with an operational presence around the world and we want our water stewardship program to span the globe as well. To accomplish this, we’re evaluating what we’ve learned in central Washington and are experimenting with ways to apply it more broadly. We know that as we explore scaling replenishment, we’ll need to keep some key factors in mind:

Replenishment investments should be informed by what’s happening on the ground in a region with respect to water – this could vary from lack of availability of water for aquatic species to inadequate access to drinking water for people. The famous axiom “all politics are local” could be applied to water, with “water” replacing “politics.”
Working with partners who understand what is happening on the ground is critically important, and we need to collaborate with them and listen to their guidance.
Replenishment investments should be directed toward activities that will contribute to alleviating water stress.

We endeavor to make our operational commitments serve a higher value than just improving our operations – from carbon neutrality, renewable energy, AI for Earth, and beyond, we are focused on making changes that can scale globally and deliver benefits well outside of our four walls. As we explore the role Microsoft can play in water, we’ll look to and build off the work, experiences and lessons learned along the way to advance an environmentally sustainable agenda. Follow this blog to learn about our progress.