Investing in teachers’ growth to help them be more effective is key to improving student learning. The reason: teacher quality has more impact on students than any school education program or policy does, and in fact, teacher effectiveness is the largest factor influencing student outcomes, outside of family background1.
To transform education, it’s critical that all teachers, leaders, and staff have the ability and capacity to continually evolve their methods and adopt new technologies as lifelong learners. Microsoft education has developed many resources for educators and other school staff, whether they are classroom teachers, school leaders, or in other roles.
With the shift to the new Microsoft Learn Educator Center, we have taken the opportunity to refine the professional growth offerings we have available for educators and school leaders. We strive to support them in becoming proficient in Microsoft technologies, and in learning more innovative classroom skills through fun, guided, hands-on content specific to their role and goals.
Beginning on July 1, 2022, the Microsoft Innovative Educator badge will be retired. In its place, we’ll have a new set of educator learning opportunities to help you and your colleagues grow your skills—and work towards the Microsoft Innovative Educator Expert program.
Microsoft Educator
(Starting July 1, 2022)
If an educator or school leader is new to Microsoft teaching and learning tools, this learning path we have curated will help get you started. Focused on best practice and some basics for facilitating a blended or hybrid learning environment, this is the first step in a professional growth journey. To unlock this badge, successfully complete this online through the Microsoft Learn Educator Center, or through one of our training partners in an instructor-led setting.
Once an educator or school leader has earned the Educator badge and is ready to go deeper into Microsoft tools in teaching and learning, successful completion of two learning paths will unlock the Advanced Educator badge.
To experience all the toolsets and features that Teams has for supporting an inclusive and accessible learning environment, begin with Master Microsoft Teams for any learning environment.
Navigate through the 21st Century Learning Design learning path to see how skills such as collaboration, self-regulation, skilled communication, problem solving, knowledge construction and the use of Information and communications technology (ICT) for learning can be embedded into lessons to ensure that students are successful in their future roles. By successfully completing this learning path, you will be prepared to take the Microsoft Certified Educator Exam.
(Note: This is an annual badge and there will be new criteria each year for educators and school leaders to earn their annual Microsoft Advanced Educator badge).
Are you an educator who is striving to find new ways to engage your students and colleagues? (By “educator” we mean either a classroom teacher, a school leader, a professional learning specialist/trainer, an instructional aide, a curriculum specialist, or anyone who impacts teaching and learning in their role). If so, and you’d like to connect with a global, professional learning community of other educators just like yourself who are constantly pushing the boundaries of how learning functions in the classroom, we would love to have you as a part of our Microsoft Innovative Expert (MIE) community!
MIE Experts will be selected by the regional Microsoft representative based on the quality of the responses to the self-nomination form, the level of innovation and use of Microsoft tools described in the learning activity, and the level of detail describing how becoming a part of the program will impact both teaching and student learning.
Like most of you, I was glad to see the 2022 RSA Conference return to its in-person roots after a two-year digital hiatus. This year’s event was a great success, drawing 26,000 attendees to three days of cutting-edge security sessions, tutorials, seminars, and special events at Moscone Center in San Francisco. The conference included more than 600 speakers and 400-plus exhibitors, along with hundreds of media representatives. Microsoft Security was on the ground, interacting with customers and security professionals at Microsoft’s 20-plus earned sessions, as well as showcasing new solutions like Microsoft Entra that help realize our goal of comprehensive security.
I was honored to give a keynote address (video courtesy of RSA Conference) on the future of cybersecurity, including a look at where technology and human expertise are headed, as well as why creating a more inclusive and diverse security workforce will be critical in our defense against evolving threats. Also addressing a subject that’s become more urgent with the growth of the decentralized enterprise, my colleague Bret Arsenault, Microsoft Corporate Vice President (CVP) and Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), gave a special presentation on managing Shadow IT. All in all, it was a fun, collegial, and productive five days. Let’s look at some of the highlights.
Figure 1. Vasu Jakkal gives the keynote address—Innovation, Ingenuity, and Inclusivity: The Future of Security is Now.
Microsoft Security Hub—you made it shine
Thanks to our guests and some hard work by our onsite team, the Microsoft pre-day event was a huge hit. We registered 430 attendees for this all-day event held on June 5, 2022, at Bespoke Event Center. Attendees were able to partake in Q&As with security experts about Zero Trust, threat intelligence, multicloud protection, risk management, and how Microsoft is re-envisioning the future of identity and access with Microsoft Entra.
I hosted Bret Arsenault in a fireside chat about navigating today’s security challenges and my colleague Joy Chik, CVP of Identity and Access, made a special presentation on Microsoft Entra and the trust fabric of identity.
Figure 2. CVP of Identity and Access Joy Chik speaks at the 2022 RSA Conference.
Attendees also enjoyed our immersive walkthrough art experience (and of course, the custom swag bar). Many guests took advantage of the reception to network with other security professionals and reconnect with old friends. It was great to see some familiar faces and share new insights with defenders across our community—a big thank you to everyone who joined us!
Figure 3. Attendes network at the Microsoft Security Hub.
Microsoft had a booth at the North Expo of RSA which showcased Microsoft comprehensive security solutions across our six product families: Microsoft Entra, Microsoft Endpoint Manager, Microsoft Defender, Microsoft Sentinel, Microsoft Purview, and Microsoft Priva. More than 7,300 people visited the Microsoft booth.
Figure 4. Microsoft Security booth at RSA Conference 2022.
Standout sessions
Microsoft speakers appeared in more than 20 earned sessions at this year’s RSA, addressing everything from supply chain attacks to ransomware, botnets, and ways to protect our democracy. We also hosted 40 sessions in our booth. Some of our most popular sessions included:
Practical Learnings for Threat Hunting and Improving Your Security Posture: Hosted by Jessica Payne, Principal Security Researcher and Threat Intelligence Strategist at Microsoft, and Simon Dyson, Cyber Security Operations Centre Lead in NHS Digitals Data Security Centre, this 50-minute session addressed threat hunting and security posture improvements from a threat intelligence-informed perspective. Attendees gained insights from Jessica’s experience in demystifying and defusing real-world ransomware attacks. They also got a first-hand recounting of Simon’s work securing the complex network maintained by England’s National Health Service (NHS) during the pandemic, and how his team’s experience can benefit all of us.
Conti Playbook: Infiltrate the Most Profitable Ransomware Gang: Participants learned how a disgruntled affiliate exposed one of the most infamous ransomware gangs, divulging its ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) secrets to help take them down. This immersive, hands-on workshop guided attendees through a typical Conti attack sequence and provided tips to defend against advanced persistent threats. Thanks to Tom D’Aquino, Fabien Guillot, and Arpan Sarkar of Microsoft partner Vectra AI for this presentation.
Microsoft Defender Experts for Hunting Has Got Your Back: Abhishek Agarwal, Chief Security and Technology Officer at Helix Biotech, examined threat hunting’s virtuous cycle: track, hunt, and analyze. Specifically, attendees learned how Microsoft Defender Experts for Hunting uses AI to accomplish all three components of the cycle faster, providing automated detection, hunting, and analysis to help the team track and stop threats across the company’s multi-national enterprise.
Microsoft Security Research—How We Responsibly Disclose Vulnerabilities to Apple, Google, and the Linux Community: Jonathan Bar Or, Principal Security Researcher at Microsoft, discussed how disclosing bugs makes the world safer and benefits users, as well as giving Microsoft Security a better understanding of the technologies we work to protect. The goal is to challenge our own detections and prove product truth—making Microsoft Defender stronger by challenging our own blue teams.
Solve Secure Access Needs for Workload Identities with Microsoft Entra: Microsoft Product Managers Nick Wryter and Sandy Jiang led this informative session on the phenomenon of exploding workload identities. Currently, workload identities outnumber user identities five to one; the challenge being that many traditional identity and access management solutions don’t manage these prevalent and frequently over-permitted identities. Nick and Sandy explained how the new Microsoft Entra addresses this problem by providing a comprehensive view of every action performed by any identity on any resource, detecting anomalous permission usage at cloud scale.
Tracking Highly Evasive APTs with Vectra Detect & Microsoft Sentinel: Tom D’ Aquino, Senior Security Engineer at Vectra AI, led this demonstration of real-life threat-hunting using Vectra Detect and Microsoft Sentinel. Tom demonstrated real-world workflows for threat tracking, including individual threat severity, lateral movement, threat targets, and more.
The Shift of “Why” and “How” of Ransomware Attacks; How Microsoft Helps Customers Survive Ransomware: Led by MacKenzie Brown of Microsoft’s Detection and Response Team (DART), this session examined the how and why behind the recent increase in ransomware attacks. Attendees learned how attackers have evolved their methods to exert minimum effort for maximum return on investment (ROI), and why DART’s methodology can help you defeat them.
Shining a light on Shadow IT
Shadow IT can be broadly defined as a “set of applications, services, and infrastructure that are developed and managed outside of defined company standards.” These kinds of ad-hoc systems can pose a compliance risk, especially for security, privacy, data governance, and accessibility. Like any organization, Microsoft has not been immune to the proliferation of Shadow IT.
Figure 5. Vasu Jakkal and Bret Arsenault speak at the Microsoft pre-day event.
In keeping with our commitment to security for all, MicrosoftCVP and CISO Bret Arsenault gave a special presentation on June 8, 2022, addressing Microsoft’s approach to managing Shadow IT. Bret discussed how Microsoft’s security team is enabling engineers and developers to build and operate security capabilities in the cloud, as well as Microsoft’s three primary principles for managing and addressing Shadow IT. For attendees wanting to learn more, we followed up the event with a free white paper on managing Shadow IT. We’ve also made Bret’s presentation slides available to everyone.
2022 Excellence Awards
The Microsoft Security Excellence Awards (formerly Microsoft Security 20/20 Awards) recognize Microsoft Intelligent Security Association (MISA) members’ success during the past 12 months. This year’s 10 award categories were carefully selected to recognize the unique ways MISA members support their customers and help improve Microsoft security products. Our cross-functional panel carefully examined hundreds of nominations, narrowing the field to just three finalists for each category.
In the spirit of collaboration, Microsoft and MISA members alike voted on the winners. After dinner and cocktails, the awards were handed out at the San Francisco Design Center by Microsoft executives Phil Montgomery, Andrew Conway, Alym Rayani, Irina Nechaeva, Desmond Forbes, Sue Bohn, Mandana Javaheri, Madhu Prasha, Scott Woodgate, and myself. MISA members are a critical part of our approach to comprehensive security. We’re grateful for their vision and dedication to our shared mission of helping customers do more, safely. To all of this year’s finalists and winners—congratulations!
Comprehensive security year-round
Microsoft now protects 785,000 customers around the world, including our own digital estate. Our goal is to provide comprehensive security for our customers while enabling greater security for our shared online world. Microsoft’s best-in-breed protection, built-in intelligence, and simplified management integrates more than 50 product categories in six product families, allowing you to be fearless in the pursuit of your vision. Our newest product family, Microsoft Entra, helps fulfill that mission by creating a secure entry point for end-to-end security. Entra provides a unified admin center for Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), Entra Permissions Management, and Entra Verified ID where your organization can quickly verify and secure every identity or access request—all in one place.
Our commitment to comprehensive security also means providing the latest research and first-hand knowledge to help keep your organization secure. You can learn more at Cyber Signals, a cyberthreat intelligence brief drawn from the latest Microsoft data and research. If you attended RSA and engaged with Microsoft, please take a few minutes to respond to our RSAC 2022 survey so we can continue to improve your experience. My thanks to everyone who attended, and we’ll see you next year!
To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us at @MSFTSecurity for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.
When Jim Chen left his own startup to run his family’s company four years ago, he quickly saw its half-century old business model needed a reset.
King Steel Machinery was founded in Taichung, Taiwan, in the 1970s. For decades, success had come from designing and building precision shoe-making machinery for big-name footwear brands popular with consumers around the world.
But soon after he became vice president for business development under a family succession plan, Chen identified a shift in the market. Footwear brands were looking for more than just machinery. They also wanted customized manufacturing solutions, data insights and sustainable outcomes.
The 30-something entrepreneur realized that to survive, grow and compete, the company needed to embrace digital transformation and become an eco-friendly innovator. To get there, employees, managers and his family would have to adopt a new mindset.
“Digital transformation is the process of choosing the right digital tools. Once goals are set, choosing the tools is easy,” Chen said. “My family elders who started this company have been supportive, but we didn’t make these changes all at once. It was a step-by-step process. Both customers and employees have felt the impacts and benefits.”
Previously, Chen headed Otrajet, a startup that developed an innovative never-flat tire for bicycle-sharing fleets. It thrived under a culture based on innovation and transformation.
So, when Chen moved across to King Steel he was well versed in how to launch new product lines, add systems for easy onboarding of new hires and open new manufacturing centers. He had a vision in place, but to execute it he needed to get more than 100 employees on board to support change.
Jim Chen, founder of King Steel Machinery in Taichung, Taiwan. Photo credit: Microsoft
King Steel’s staff range in age from 18 to 70, each with their own ways of thinking. When Chen asked managers what problems they were facing, they all had different answers. Reaching consensus was next to impossible.
Chen rose to the challenge. He wanted to foster an environment in which employees could talk to each other regardless of hierarchy or position.
That’s when managers started training employees to use Microsoft Teams as a platform for staff communications. Six months later, he has noticed a difference. Employees at all levels started exchanging ideas and company-wide communications were fluid, Chen said.
The company decided to apply Teams to even bigger projects, even using it to boost operational efficiency by adding suppliers into the Teams ecosystem for instant communications.
Chen also faced another challenge: the threat of cybercrime. After the company’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform was hacked, its entire system had to be shut down for recovery.
It was a major blow to operations, and a wake-up call for King Steel. Leaders in the company needed to build resilience against both competitors and malicious hackers. The right digital tools could help. Chen and his team implemented the Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM platform and rolled out a suite of Microsoft Cloud data solutions.
It also embraced the mixed-reality capabilities of Dynamics 365 Remote Assist, using HoloLens 2 to troubleshoot and maintain their equipment on the factory floors of their customers.
King Steel then looked to Microsoft boost its manufacturing services with custom data solutions. The company started mining equipment data, such as how injection molding machines work and how changing materials can achieve new results. Employees now collect parameters such as temperature, pressure and input quantity, which they use to bring new insights to their clients.
Two King Steel employees collaborate using a Surface device. Photo credit: Microsoft
The company also stepped up its efforts around sustainability by developing its Nature Cross Future initiative – a direct molding process that allows shoemakers to produce recyclable midsoles.
“In 2020 we launched a new machine that’s very different. It can 100 percent recycle the midsole, helping brands enormously reduce the waste of midsoles and flip flops.
“It’s a big deal for the industry. Going forward, Nature Cross Future will help redefine the whole shoe industry and King Steel will focus on sustainability,” he said.
Midsoles are notoriously difficult to recycle. However, King Steel has developed high-tech machines that can produce completely recyclable midsoles.
The company has also incorporated Microsoft digital technologies into the manufacturing process, increasing efficiency and boosting sustainability. It uses Teams and Dynamics 365 to increase the speed of research, development and manufacturing. These technologies help create new machines for different brands in different production lines, so the whole industry can move into green manufacturing much faster than expected.
Additionally, Microsoft Azure IoT Digital Twins make the entire value chain transparent, reducing material waste and saving energy. Some shoe factories lose inventory when unofficial shoes get produced to be sold on the black market. Digital Twins help factories precisely manage the whole value chain.
King Steel also has been looking at other ways to reduce carbon emissions from shoemaking. The company has developed a process that uses a foam agent to collect carbon dioxide from the air.
Chen says that by embracing digital transformation, King Steel can now offer its shoemaking customers sustainable and customized manufacturing and data solutions.
While it’s hard to predict what he’ll face next, Chen believes his family business is well prepared for challenges in the years ahead.
Top image: A King Steel worker on the factory floor of King Steel using HoloLens 2. Photo credit: Microsoft
I am honored to announce our Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards winners and finalists. This year, our global and diverse partner ecosystem is helping to build a distributed computing fabric – across the cloud and edge – to help every organization build, run and manage their mission-critical businesses anywhere. Your stories showcase the success you’ve had building innovative solutions on Microsoft Cloud and platforms. We’re hosting Microsoft Inspire 2022 from July 19-20, where we will celebrate these incredible achievements from you, our partners across the globe.
Over this past year, we’ve continued to see how businesses, individuals, and entire industries are using technology in new ways to address their specific and emerging needs. We’ve seen partners simplify and accelerate cloud migrations to help your customers in their digital transformation journey.
As the needs of our customers and the world continue to evolve, we added two new awards this year to recognize the important work our partners are doing to navigate today’s security and compliance challenges. We created an additional Security category, which includes the new Compliance award. For our partners who drive operational excellence in partner profitability and digital transformation, we created an Operational Excellence award, allowing partners to highlight their important work in those areas. Additional information about this year’s award categories is available here.
We received more than 3,900 nominations across 126 countries/regions for this year’s Partner of the Year Awards. We were impressed by the breadth of nominated solutions and inspired by the success stories submitted this year – all were a reflection of the diverse and innovative solutions portfolio built by our partners, and a true representation of the global reach of our partner ecosystem.
The meaningful impact our partners enable through these solutions is a compelling reminder of the importance of partnership. These partnerships and our continued mission to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more are why we come together and celebrate this community every year.
Congratulations to this year’s winners and finalists, and to all our partners who have demonstrated innovation, commitment to their customers, and care for our world over this past year. We are excited to virtually gather as a community to recognize and celebrate your achievements from the past year, and to share new opportunities to develop and expand your business.
If you have not already registered for Microsoft Inspire, I encourage you to do so today!
We understand more now than ever small businesses are facing challenges they’ve never experienced before. We’re here to share some of the new and exciting features on Web that we find useful.
Introducing background effects on Web
Custom backgrounds are now available to web users. You can blur your background or select from Microsoft-provided backgrounds during your video meeting or call, making your meetings more fun and personal. Note that blurring or replacing your background may not prevent sensitive information from being visible to other people in the meeting.
CART captioning on Web
You can now view captions coming from a CART provider (real-time captioning) within the Microsoft Teams meeting window instead of a secondary window. Follow along with what is being said without having to choose between the captions and the presentation. Meeting organizers and participants can enable CART captions from their meeting options. Learn more here.
Live Captions in all available languages on Teams Meetings on Web
Live captions with speaker attribution allows you to see who is speaking along with what’s being said, making meetings more inclusive and easier to follow along. We have expanded to 27 new spoken languages, including German, Portuguese (Brazil), Japanese, and Hindi, to name a few. This provides flexibility and additional clarity for your participants to engage in meetings.
Live Transcript in all available languages on Teams Meetings on Web
Live transcription allows you to follow and review conversations alongside the meeting video or audio in real time. This promotes inclusivity for participants who have hearing disabilities or different levels of language proficiency. Attendees who joined late, or missed the meeting, can easily catch up by reading what was discussed from the transcript. We have also expanded to 27 new spoken languages, including German, Portuguese (Brazil), Japanese, and Hindi. Tenant admins have to turn on the Allow transcription policy to enable this feature.
To learn more about how small businesses are thriving during the pandemic with the help of Microsoft Teams, check out the blog series posts below:
Meet Core Fitness Miami, a small fitness and wellness business based in Miami that offers in-person and highly specialized training for clients alike. Due to the pandemic, the business found itself at a turning point and learned to creatively leverage Microsoft Teams to not only survive but thrive amid Covid-19.
When COVID19 initially arrived in the U.K., Clifton Coffee Roasters had to find new virtual ways to host specialized barista training courses, coffee tasting sessions, and product launches. The small business turned to shifting operations online and grew the business by reaching more customers than ever.
Establishing and maintaining meaningful customer connections can be tough in a virtual setting. Priority Bicycles, a small business based in New York City, used Microsoft Teams to host virtual showroom visits to display their products and service customers via a digital medium.
Prior to COVID-19 stay-at-home orders, Cahoots ran more than 80 in-person camps and weekly workshops for young people living with disabilities or facing exceptional challenges. The Australian small nonprofit was then forced to pivot and found new ways to service its community safely with Microsoft Teams.
We are excited for what’s to come for the future of Small Businesses and are here to help drive those efficiencies. Learn more about what Teams can do for you and your small business.
There are many optimization problems in finance, logistics, biotechnology, and AI where you need to find the best combination from an enormous range of choices. Combinatorial optimization problems such as these are difficult to solve at high speed and at a reasonable computational cost with existing computers because the number of combinatorial patterns increases exponentially as the scale of the problem grows.
One way to tackle these combinatorial optimization problems is to map them to a binary representation called an Ising model, and then use a specialized optimizer to find the ground state of this Ising system.
Toshiba’s new Simulated Quantum Bifurcation Machine+ (SQBM+) on Azure Quantum, based on its Simulated Bifurcation Machine (SBM), is an Ising model solver that can solve complex and large-scale combinatorial optimization problems with up to 100,000 variables at high speed.
Toshiba has adopted a new approach, inspired by their quantum computing research, that significantly improves the speed, accuracy, and scale of their SBM. There are two algorithms available through the SQBM+ provider in Azure Quantum: the high-speed Ballistic Simulated Bifurcation algorithm (bSB) designed to find a good solution in a short time; and the high-accuracy Discrete Simulated Bifurcation algorithm (dSB) which finds more accurate solutions at a calculation speed that surpasses that of other machines (both classical and quantum). An auto-tune function has also been implemented that will auto-select which algorithm to use based on the problem submitted. These algorithms are optimized automatically to provide the best performance on GPU hardware deployed in the Azure cloud.
Users can select one of these algorithms specifically, or simply allow the auto selection function to choose on their behalf. This choice is made by supplying values for the “algo” and “auto” parameters during solver instantiation using the Azure Quantum Python SDK. More information is available in the Toshiba SQBM+ provider documentation, and a sample showing how to choose between the different algorithm options can be found at the qio-samples repo.
“The core technology of SQBM+ is SBM, which is software that utilizes currently available computers and achieves high-accuracy approximate solutions for complex and large-scale problems in a short amount of time. The outcome is the ability to solve Ising problems of up to 100,000 variables—at approximately a 10X improvement over our existing PoC service. And this is now all easily accessed through the Azure Quantum cloud platform,“—Shunsuke Okada, Corporate Senior Vice President and Chief Digital Officer of Toshiba.
Azure Quantum customers can access SQBM+ by adding the provider to their Quantum Workspace and selecting one of the available pricing plans: “Learn & Develop” (experimentation) and “Performance at scale” (commercial use).
Since joining the Azure Quantum Network in September 2020, Toshiba has continuously improved its quantum-inspired optimization solvers technology. Customers who want to solve combinatorial optimization problems including dynamic portfolio and risk management, molecular design, and optimizing routing, partitioning, and scheduling in a range of fields can apply SQBM+ today, harnessing the GPU resources in the Azure cloud through Azure Quantum.
Like a lot of people in their senior year of college, Alexa Carlin had a lot to look forward to. In January 2013, the South Florida native was set to graduate from the University of Florida in a few months, then start her dream job in New York that summer. She was also hours away from a party celebrating a major milestone in the latest of her entrepreneurial endeavors.
But all that came to a sudden halt when she ended up in a hospital, induced into a medical coma, with a 1% chance to survive.
She beat those formidable odds, but not without a lot of lessons learned along the way – and facing another health crisis soon after that would prove even more challenging.
“My whole life just changed. My near-death experience was in my past. And I overcame that. But my autoimmune disease is something I’ll never overcome,” says Carlin, now 31, recently married and based in Raleigh, North Carolina. “I realized, nothing’s going to change unless I decide to change. And I had to learn how to adapt to what I couldn’t control and say, this autoimmune disease is part of me, but it does not have to define what I can or cannot do with my life. And I at that moment stopped asking myself, why did this happen to me and started asking myself, why did this happen for me? And that really was a pivotal moment.”
Up until that time, Carlin had been on a fast and upward trajectory, a burgeoning businessperson, a trait she seemed to inherit from her dad, who was also an entrepreneur, specializing in sporting goods equipment. She says she always had this internal drive, which led her to being the first Student Body President elected as a junior (holding the position for two consecutive years), even though she was the shy new girl who had moved to a new town in middle school. Toward the end of her high school years, she founded her first business at the age of 17, designing and selling jewelry, donating a percentage of the proceeds to help build schools in Africa.
After selling out her first run of bracelets, she kept that business going while she was in college, but it didn’t last past then. She admits that a lack of confidence held her back, as she wasn’t widely sharing what she was doing beyond word of mouth. She wanted to fit in, make new friends and so she never really spoke about her passion. She did the sales venture on the side and only her roommates knew.
“I’d ride my bike to the post office after class and just kind of did what I had to do to make it happen,” she says.
Carlin was determined to learn from that experience to step out of her comfort zone, and started a blog called Hello Perfect – aimed at helping young women gain confidence in themselves.
She was about to celebrate with friends and family after gaining 1,000 likes for the blog on Facebook. But Carlin recalls not feeling good the week leading up to the event, until her mother insisted she go to an emergency room, where she was diagnosed with septic shock due to bacteria that had entered her blood stream. Doctors told her mother her daughter might not live 24 hours.
Carlin stayed in a coma for six days, waking up not being able to move or speak on her own. To focus on something other than the pain as she recovered, she redirected her thoughts as a way to heal. She pictured running on a high school track toward family and friends at a finish line.
“It taught me one of the most powerful lessons in business and in life, and that is to focus on the things that you do have control over,” says Carlin, who was able to graduate with her class in May of that year. But then another setback occurred, this time while she was in New York City starting her dream job at a magazine. She was sick again. And it was constant. After a year there, she found out it was an auto-immune disease – ulcerative colitis – and moved back home to heal with the help of her family.
For eight months she stayed mostly isolated inside their house, where she ended up writing a cookbook as she converted to gluten-free and vegan eating. But it was a frustrating time in her life.
“I remember just feeling so fed up because all I was doing was waiting, waiting for me to get my life back, waiting for me to be healthy, waiting for a doctor to give me something that would actually work, waiting for just anything to change, because every morning I woke up so sick,” says Carlin, who tried to find solace and answers from motivational speakers. But they didn’t help. “Who wants to spend their entire life waiting to overcome all these challenges and obstacles that come our way, versus making the best of it and turning those obstacles into opportunities? That’s what really inspired me to start sharing my story, vulnerably and authentically.”
Carlin used the now-discontinued Periscope app to film a daily show called “Morning Motivation with Alexa” – short videos meant to inspire her audience, which was slowly but steadily growing. She was still too sick to do in-person presentations, so she turned to social media to share her experiences. Technology had never been more important to her than when she was livestreaming from her bed.
“Technology has been game changer for me because I am able to get my message to the masses even when I’m not well enough to travel or to meet people and network in person,” says Carlin, who uses a Samsung Galaxy Book2 Pro 360 to run her business from anywhere. Samsung is among the many companies she works with and has provided her with a new Windows 11 laptop as one of its brand ambassadors. “It changed my life because I didn’t feel as alone.”
By 2016, she had focused her work on telling her story and inspiring others, starting a company called Women Empower X, “with the mission to help more women pursue their passions and get to the next level in their career and life.” She’s built up an all-virtual team, who help with creating and editing content and planning speaking engagements.
Carlin uses Microsoft 365 for most of those tasks. With Windows 11, her favorite feature is Snap Layouts, which allows her to have OneNote or Word on half of her screen while on the other half, she’s in a meeting with her team, so it’s easy for her to save changes she wants in an outline or script without leaving either app.
Whatever work she’s doing, she needs it to sync up to all the devices she uses, and OneDrive helps her do that on her phone, PCs and tablet. She also needs to be able to connect online reliably, showcase videos and edit at the last minute.
But oftentimes, she’s able to do a lot with just one key device.
With her Samsung Galaxy Book2 Pro 360, she can do all that, appreciating especially its ability to transform into a tablet to watch movies in hotel rooms, write on it to take notes, sketch out new ideas for her next book or speech, and give feedback to her team on edits.
While the tech tools are enabling, her tenacity and resilience are just as important.
“I pitched myself to 60 different small events and received 60 letters of rejection – or no responses,” she recalls. “I let that rejection sit with me for a few months before I stopped putting my dreams in the hands of strangers. I created my own events.”
She spoke for free at first, to very small meetups – five to 30 people at a time. Then she started getting paid. Now she’s talking to hundreds, sometimes thousands, of women at each event. And reaching even more online.
“I realized I needed to create a career that helps me achieve my dreams and my mission, while still understanding things out of my control,” Carlin says. “People needed to hear that my life’s not perfect. I don’t have it all together. I’m still going through all these challenges. But regardless of all those obstacles, I’m still chasing after my dreams. I’m still going after what I love.”
Oliver Brask Pedersen figured his first day at work as a technician at Novo Nordisk would follow many of the familiar patterns – get introduced to new people, find out where the cafeteria is located and receive the basic instructions on his new job. But he was in for a surprise.
The pharmaceutical giant, a leader in the global production of diabetes medicine, has been pioneering the use of emerging digital technologies for everything from simplifying floor operations in their manufacturing facilities across the globe to conducting virtual site visits from thousands of miles away. Some of those solutions include Microsoft HoloLens 2, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Remote Assist, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Guides and Microsoft Power Platform.
This includes introducing what is known as augmented instructions, via HoloLens 2, to shop floor employees, providing them with new possibilities to support both process performance and getting onboarded for new procedures.
“I had no idea what it was,” Pedersen said of his first experience with the HoloLens 2. “Once I put it on, it felt natural, and you got used to it. I like getting my hands on things, that’s easier for me. And the HoloLens felt more hands-on than reading a piece of paper. For a first timer, it was a lot easier.”
Augmented instructions using the HoloLens 2 helps Novo Nordisk employees understand complex steps without having to rely on memorization or the assistance of another co-worker. Photo by Casper Dufour.
With more than 49,000 people in 80 offices and 17 manufacturing sites globally, Novo Nordisk is responsible for half of the world’s insulin supply, serving more than 34 million diabetics in 170 countries. The company’s production facilities are a whirlwind of activity, with lines constantly processing batches of medicine.
In the past, when changing a format at the production line where Pedersen works, for example, employees either had to read and remember the elaborate instructions or get help from a colleague, which could be time consuming.
“It’s a lot easier to teach people when you can show them the things they need to do,” Pedersen said.
Of course, pharmaceutical organizations always need to comply with authority requirements and regulations, which can often be quite complex. For Novo Nordisk, any technology solution must meet Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP), which are imposed by national health authorities on organizations producing medical products, such as drugs, medical devices and more.
Complying with these requirements ensures that processes are reliable and consistent, and employees have the appropriate qualifications and training. Novo Nordisk worked alongside Microsoft to make sure it could implement innovative approaches, such as using the HoloLens 2 while also following these regulations.
Embracing new technology
Using the HoloLens 2, technicians and operators, like Pedersen, can go through complex processes with the help of real-time, 3D instructions that have been specifically written and approved for HoloLens use. This helps to guarantee that every step has been completed successfully while allowing them to visualize their full work environment.
“Depending on the specific use case or instruction, you will be guided step by step,” Corporate Vice President of Product Supply Technology Transformation at Novo Nordisk, Ole Feddersen said. “It will say, ‘Loosen this bolt.’ ‘Turn this lever left.’ ‘Take this out and put a new one in.’ All the time there will be arrows pointing at what you need to do and where you need to go next, where to check, and so forth. You get a very intuitive execution throughout the operation while having both hands free.”
Implementing mixed reality has allowed Novo Nordisk and other forward-thinking companies to have more effective process performance and improved onboarding of employees to new processes while also maximizing the value of hybrid and remote work.
Alex Knudsen, a technician on the Oral Finished Product line at Novo Nordisk’s production facility in Måløv, Denmark, uses the HoloLens 2 with augmented instructors to make adjustments to a machine. Photo by Casper Dufour.
While the leap from analog to digital would seem to be jarring for long-time employees, Novo Nordisk has discovered that most workers have been eager to explore this new technology.
“It’s actually been a very positive experience,” Feddersen said. “We feared this could cause problems for some people and that some would even be afraid of it and reluctant to use it. But we’ve seen quite the opposite – that people on the shop floor in our factories have been very keen on trying this out and once they have tried it, found that it’s a fantastic help.”
With more than 1,000 employees interacting with HoloLens 2 technology during the pilot, Novo Nordisk has created gains in the consistency of the work being done and given employees a sense of innovation within their day-to-day jobs. Many Novo Nordisk employees enjoy being part of the company’s drive to transform the industry and feel empowered to assist in the process.
Alex Knudsen is another technician in the Oral Finished Product at Novo Nordisk. He has worked with the mixed-reality solution from the start of the pilot and has appreciated how line workers have been able to give their input on the augmented instructions to make them work more efficiently.
As the number of approved augmented instructions grows, there is also a global community that meets to share best practices and suggestions on how to improve the HoloLens 2 process.
“They’ve sought a lot of input from people who use the guides on a daily basis,” Knudsen said. “If we see something that could be optimized, we can work with our local experts and central team to change the augmented instructions.”
Another benefit of using the augmented instructions is that it has created a more flexible workplace. The use of augmented instructions enables newcomers to get started much faster on performing new processes.
“It’s all about improving performance consistency and gaining flexibility on the shop floor,” Senior Manager, Extended Reality and Digital Consulting at Novo Nordisk, Anne Kathrine Vejgaard said. “We’re making sure we do things right the first time. Some of the feedback we heard is that operators can now take on more complicated tasks, processes they weren’t able to do before. It makes the job more engaging for a lot of people.”
Remote Assist to the rescue
With production facilities across the world, travel can be a major bottleneck in certain situations. Instead of continuing to abide by traditional rules, Novo Nordisk began thinking about disrupting the standards and started using Remote Assist with the HoloLens 2 to create virtual site visits and discovered the process could get results without the time and hassle of travel.
Anne Kathrine Vejgaard is the Senior Manager, Extended Reality and Digital Consulting at Novo Nordisk. Photo by Casper Dufour.
“We heard from many of our sites that in the beginning they were unsure about the experience using the HoloLens compared to standing next to your supplier. But now they see the benefit,” Vejgaard said. “Just imagine if you only needed four hours with somebody from Germany and you’re located in China. Let’s try out the HoloLens before considering travelling.”
On the production line, Remote Assist can also help things run smoothly. For Knudsen, an automation project stalled because the engineer couldn’t access the site in Denmark to help adjust the cobots (collaborative robots) used in the production. HoloLens 2 was able to help alleviate the issue.
“Instead of having to wait for the engineer to be able to gain access, we just put on the HoloLens and then accessed the program onsite,” Knudsen said. “He helped us make the changes that we needed. This is a very good option.”
As Novo Nordisk expands its use of technology throughout the company, the hope is to increase efficiency and production of critical medicine on a global scale to serve more patients and reduce the number of paper-based processes in use. Additionally, the company wants to take advantage of the tools to attract and hire more employees through digitization and automation.
“I think what is most exciting for the employees on the shop floor here is the way we can connect them to our manufacturing systems, so that they don’t have to go to a computer screen and they don’t have to go to another room,” Feddersen said. “They don’t have to go and read something. Information will come to them.”
“We can guide them now where we basically take them through a predefined process, but once we get further, and perhaps using other devices, we can dynamically tell people what to do. It will become a little bit like driving from A to B using GPS, where you don’t have to read the map up front and memorize the route. You will be told as the day goes along where to go next. Getting that kind of information to our people makes a big difference. That’s exciting.”
Top photo (GIF): Novo Nordisk employees are using the HoloLens 2 to support process performance and get onboarded for new activities.
They make restaurant recommendations, help us pay bills, and remind us of appointments. Many people have come to rely on virtual assistants and chatbots to perform a wide range of routine tasks. But what if a single dialog agent, the technology behind these language-based apps, could perform all these tasks and then take the conversation further? In addition to providing on-topic expertise, such as recommending a restaurant, it could engage in a conversation about the history of the neighborhood or a recent sports game, and then bring the conversation back on track. What if the agent’s responses continually reflect the latest world events? And what if it could do all of this without the need for any additional work by the designer?
With GODEL, this may not be far off. GODEL stands for Grounded Open DialogueLanguage Model, and it ushers in a new class of pretrained language models that enable both task-oriented and social conversation and are evaluated by the usefulness of their responses.
Pretrained language models are among the engines that power conversational AI, the technology that underlies these dialog agents. They can either be task-oriented (“give me a job, and I’ll do it”) or engage in a conversation without a specified outcome, known as open-domain or chit-chat. GODEL combines both these capabilities, giving dialog agents the ability to generate responses based not just on the context of the conversation, but also on external information, content that was not part of the dataset when the model was trained. This includes both structured content, such as information stored in databases, and unstructured content, such as restaurant reviews, Wikipedia articles, and other publicly available material found on the web. This explains how a simple task-based query about restaurant recommendations can evolve into a dialog about ingredients, food, and even cooking techniques—the kind of winding path that real-world conversations take.
In 2019, the Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing groups at Microsoft Research released DialoGPT, the first large-scale pretrained language model designed specifically for dialog. This helped make conversational AI more accessible and easier to work with, and it enabled the research community to make considerable progress in this area. With GODEL, our goal is to help further this progress by empowering researchers and developers to create dialog agents that are unrestricted in the types of queries they can respond to and the sources of information they can draw from. We also worked to ensure those responses are useful to the person making the query.
One of GODEL’s key features is the flexibility it provides users in defining their model’s grounding—the sources from which their dialog agents retrieve information. This flexibility informs GODEL’s versatility in diverse conversational settings. If someone were to inquire about a local restaurant for example, GODEL would be able to provide specific and accurate responses even though that venue may not have been included in the data used to train it. Responses would vary depending on whether the grounding information is empty, a snippet of a document, a search result (unstructured text), or information drawn from a database about the restaurant (structured text). However, each response would be appropriate and useful.
In addition to specificity, grounded generation helps keep models up to date, as the grounded text can incorporate information that may not have been available at the time the model was trained. For example, if a model were developed before the 2022 Winter Olympics, GODEL would be able to provide details on those games and a list of winners even though all the data available to train it predates that event.
Broad application of GODEL
Another main feature of GODEL is its wide range of dialog applications. While its predecessor, DialoGPT, and other prior pretrained models for dialog have mostly focused on social bots, GODEL can be applied to a variety of dialogs, including those that are task-oriented, question-answering, and grounded chit-chat. In the same conversation, GODEL can produce reasonable responses for a variety of query types, including general questions or requests for specific actions.
In addition, GODEL’s responses have been evaluated for their helpfulness. In our paper, we show that evaluation is done more reliably on datasets that are goal-directed, and that people generally agree on which responses are better when asked to judge their utility towards achieving certain goals. Equipped with this robust evaluation setup, we compared our model against several strong baselines and state-of-the-art approaches and show that GODEL is superior in terms of both human and automatic evaluation, as indicated in Figure 1. The paper describes extensive experiments against other state-of-the-art pretrained language models and demonstrates that performance gains are even larger in these cases.
Figure 1: These charts illustrate GODEL’s performance against T5, a pretrained model that performed best in our evaluation. They compare the aggregate performance of models fine-tuned from GODEL against that of models fine-tuned from T5. They show that GODEL performs much better in human evaluations and makes appreciable gains in the automatic evaluation. The test set for these experiments combines a variety of dialog genres, including task-oriented dialog, conversational question-answering, and grounded chit-chat.
The following examples illustrate different dialog scenarios where GODEL uses a variety of sources to respond to identical user queries.
This example illustrates how GODEL responds in an open-ended scenario in which the user asks a question that is completely unrelated to the initial question. Despite the lack of relevance, GODEL responds appropriately while trying to bring the conversation back on track.
This example illustrates how GODEL responds in a task-oriented setting in which the model is connected to the components of a traditional goal-oriented dialog systems, such as a database. In this case, the relevant environment contains structured information, a database returning two restaurants relevant to the current conversation.
This example illustrates how GODEL responds in a task-oriented setting in which traditional components of task-oriented dialog systems are not available. In this case, GODEL retrieves a restaurant review via a search engine. The response reflects both the context of the conversation and a snippet of the retrieved text, a restaurant review.
This example illustrates how GODEL responds in a question-answering scenario, where the user asks a general question and the context provides the dialog agent with the words it needs to search for the relevant information on the web.
GODEL available as open source
To advance research, we believe it is crucial to make code and models publicly available, and we have released GODEL as fully open source. We have made three versions of GODEL available: base, large, and extra-large. We are also including the code needed to retrain all pretrained models and to fine-tune models for specific tasks: the CoQA dataset, intended for conversational question-answering; the Wizard of Wikipedia and Wizard of the Internet datasets, aimed at information-seeking chats; and MultiWOZ is for task-completion dialogs.
We hope GODEL helps numerous academic research teams advance the field of conversational AI with innovative dialog models while eliminating the need for significant GPU resources. We plan to continuously improve GODEL and make more models available to the research community. Please visit our project page to learn more about the GODEL project and new releases.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank our fellow colleagues at Microsoft Research who contributed to this work and blog post: Bill Dolan, Pengcheng He, Elnaz Nouri, Clarisse Simoes Ribeiro.
How can Microsoft empower satellite operators to focus on their mission and enable them to continue the operation of their satellites, without making capital investments in their ground infrastructure?
To answer that question, Microsoft worked alongside the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and our partner Xplore, to demonstrate how the commercial cloud can provide satellite mission management for NOAA’s legacy polar satellites (NOAA-18)—extending the mission life of these satellites while reducing the cost of operation through Azure Orbital Ground Station as-a-Service (GSaaS).
Partnering with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Xplore
The initiative was part of a year-long cooperative research and development agreement (CRADA) with NOAA, where we worked together to determine the ability of the Azure Orbital platform to connect and downlink data from NOAA satellites. NOAA also tested the ability of Microsoft Azure to comply with specified security controls in a rapid and effective manner. Our cloud-based solutions performed successfully across all measures.
Partners are central to Microsoft’s approach to space, and they played a key role in this project. As part of the CRADA, we leveraged our partner network to bring together Azure Orbital with Xplore’s Major Tom mission control software platform. This approach enabled NOAA to transmit commands to the NOAA-18 spacecraft and verify the receipt of these commands. This test was conducted in real-time, and data was flowing bi-directionally with the NOAA-18 satellite.
Commercial technology enabled the rapid demonstration of these innovative capabilities. Xplore was able to move quickly to bring functions of NOAA’s heritage space system architecture to the Azure cloud through their Major Tom platform. This highlights the power of Azure as a platform to bring together Azure Orbital as the ground station, Major Tom to provide the mission control software for commanding and telemetry viewing, and the NOAA operators to monitor the scenarios.
This successful demonstration shows that the Azure Orbital GSaaS, and the partner network it brings together, enables sustainable outcomes for satellite operators. Our work with NOAA is just the beginning of the journey. We look forward to partnering with additional satellite operators to help them reduce their infrastructure management costs, lower latency, increase capacity and resiliency, and empower their missions through the power of Azure Orbital GSaaS and the Azure cloud.
Learn more about Azure Orbital and Azure Space
To learn more about Azure Orbital GSaaS, visit our product page, or take a look at the session with Microsoft Mechanics, which goes into more detail on how we connect space satellites around the world and bring earth observational data into Azure for analytics via Microsoft and partner ground stations. We demonstrate how it works and how it fits into Microsoft’s strategy with Azure Space to bring cloud connectivity everywhere on earth and to make space satellite data accessible for everyday use cases.
More broadly, Azure Space marks the convergence between global satellite constellations and the cloud. As the two join together, our purpose is to bring cloud connectivity to even the most remote corners of the earth, connect to satellites, and harness the vast amount of data collected from space. This can help solve both long-term trending issues affecting the earth like climate change, or short-term real-time issues such as connected agriculture, monitoring and controlling wildfires, or identifying supply chain bottlenecks.
