Microsoft news – Page 83

Posted on October 6, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Despite COVID-19, tech provides new way to upskill people with disabilities

Using Microsoft Teams has created a remote work environment for v-shesh and has bolstered its inclusivity work to a higher level.

“We have been able to simulate our work environment. We have mixed groups in different employability programs, using Teams and Microsoft Office,” he says. “We’ve also conducted interviews (for candidates) on Teams.”

This shift in digital training has also helped v-shesh onboard job seekers during the pandemic safely. Deepthi Ganesh, who is in the final year of her undergraduate degree in computer application, came on board in August. The 21-year-old is a person with autism. She signed up for courses in Microsoft Office, communications, technology, and life skills to prepare herself for the workforce once she graduates from a college in Mumbai.

“I am very fond of computers. I want to do a good job in a good company,” Deepthi says. “It is very interesting training. I can share my link from the calendar. I can download assignments from Microsoft Teams to the desktop and also (share my) assignment response. I like the audio and video (features). I can raise my hand and share my screen.”

Posted on October 6, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Why we invite security researchers to hack Azure Sphere

Fighting the security battle so our customers don’t have to

IoT devices are becoming more prevalent in almost every aspect of our lives—we will rely on them in our homes, our businesses, as well as our infrastructure. In February, Microsoft announced the general availability of Azure Sphere, an integrated security solution for IoT devices and equipment. General availability means that we are ready to provide OEMs and organizations with quick and cost-effective device security at scale. However, securing those devices does not stop once we put them into the hands of our customers. It is only the start of a continual battle between the attackers and the defenders.

Building a solution that customers can trust requires investments before and after deployment by complementing up-front technical measures with ongoing practices to find and mitigate risks. In April, we highlighted Azure Sphere’s approach to risk management and why securing IoT is not a one-and-done. Products improve over time, but so do hackers, as well as their skills and tools. New security threats continue to evolve, and hackers invent new ways to attack devices. So, what does it take to stay ahead?

As a Microsoft security product team, we believe in finding and fixing vulnerabilities before the bad guys do. While Azure Sphere continuously invests in code improvements, fuzzing, and other processes of quality control, it often requires the creative mindset of an attacker to expose a potential weakness that otherwise might be missed. Better than trying to think like a hacker is working with them. This is why we operate an ongoing program of red team exercises with security researchers and the hacker community: to benefit from their unique expertise and skill set. That includes being able to test our security promise not just against yesterday’s and today’s, but against even tomorrow’s attacks on IoT devices before they become known more broadly. Our recent Azure Sphere Security Research Challenge, which concluded on August 31, is a reflection of this commitment.

Partnering with MSRC to design a unique challenge

Our goal with the three-month Azure Sphere Security Research Challenge was twofold: to drive new high-impact security research, and to validate Azure Sphere’s security promise against the best challengers in their field. To do so, we partnered with the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) and invited some of the world’s best researchers and security vendors to try to break our device by using the same kinds of attacks as any malicious actor might. To make sure participants had everything they needed to be successful, we provided each researcher with a dev kit, a direct line to our OS Security Engineering Team, access to weekly office hours, and email support in addition to our publicly available operating system kernel source code.

Our goal was to focus the research on the highest impact on customer security, which is why we provided six research scenarios with additional rewards of up to 20 percent on top of the Azure Bounty (up to $40,000), as well as $100,000 for two high-priority scenarios proving the ability to execute code in Microsoft Pluton or in Secure World. We received more than 3,500 applications, which is a testament to the strong interest of the research community in securing IoT. More information on the design of the challenge and our collaboration with MSRC can be found here on their blog post.

Researchers identify high impact vulnerabilities before hackers

The quality of submissions from participants in the challenge far exceeded our expectations. Several participants helped us find multiple potentially high impact vulnerabilities in Azure Sphere. The quality is a testament to the expertise, determination, and the diligence of the participants. Over the course of the challenge, we received a total of 40 submissions, of which 30 led to improvements in our product. Sixteen were bounty-eligible; adding up to a total of $374,300 in bounties awarded. The other 10 submissions identified known areas where potential risk is specifically mitigated in another part of the system—something often referred to in the field as “by design.” The high ratio of valid submissions to total submissions speaks to the extremely high quality of the research demonstrated by the participants.

Jewell Seay, Azure Sphere Operating System Platform Security Lead, has shared detailed information of many of the cases in three recent blog posts describing the security improvements delivered in our 20.07, 20.08, and 20.09 releases. Cisco Talos and McAfee Advanced Threat Research (ATR), in particular, found several important vulnerabilities, and one particular attack chain is highlighted in Jewell’s 20.07 blog.

While the described attack required physical access to a device and could not be executed remotely, it exposed potential weaknesses spanning both cloud and device components of our product. The attack included a potential zero-day exploit in the Linux kernel to escape root privileges. The vulnerability was reported to the Linux kernel security team, leading to a fix for the larger open source community which was shared with the Linux community. If you would like to learn more and get an inside view of the challenge from two of our research partners, we highly recommend McAfee ATR’s blog post and whitepaper, or Cisco Talos’ blog post.

What it takes to provide renewable and improving security

With Azure Sphere, we provide our customers with a robust defense based on the Seven Properties of Highly Secured Devices. One of the properties, renewable security, ensures that a device can update to a more secure state—even if it has been compromised. While this is essential, it is not sufficient on its own. An organization must be equipped with the resources, people, and processes that allow for a quick resolution before vulnerabilities impact customers. Azure Sphere customers know that they have the strong commitment of our Azure Sphere Engineering team—that our team is searching for and addressing potential vulnerabilities, even from the most recently invented attack techniques.

We take this commitment to heart, as evidenced by all the fixes that went into our 20.07, 20.08, and 20.09 releases. In less than 30 days of McAfee reporting the attack chain to us, we shipped a fix to all of our customers, without the need for them to take any action due to how Azure Sphere manages updates. Although we received a high number of submissions throughout multiple release cycles, we prioritized analyzing every single report as soon as we received it. The success of our challenge should not just be measured by the number and quality of the reports, but also by how quickly reported vulnerabilities were fixed in the product. When it came to fixing the found vulnerabilities, there was no distinction made between the ones that were proven to be exploited or the ones that were only theoretical. Attackers get creative, and hope is not part of our risk assessment or our commitment to our customers.

Our engagement with the security research community

On behalf of the entire team and our customers, we would like to thank all participants for their help in making Azure Sphere more secure! We were genuinely impressed by the quality and number of high impact vulnerabilities that they found. In addition, we would also like to thank the MSRC team for partnering with us on this challenge.

Our goal is to continue to engage with this community on behalf of our customers going forward, and we will continue to review every potential vulnerability report for Azure Sphere for eligibility under the Azure Bounty Program awards.

Our team learned a lot throughout this challenge, and we will explore and announce additional opportunities to collaborate with the security research community in the future. Protecting our platform and the devices our customers build and deploy on it is a key priority for us. Working with the best security researchers in the field, we will continue to invest in finding potential vulnerabilities before the bad guys do—so you don’t have to!

If you are interested in learning more about how Azure Sphere can help you securely unlock your next IoT innovation:

Posted on October 6, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Annual IoT trends report: impact of COVID-19 and more

If your business is already harnessing IoT, you likely believe IoT is critical to your long-term success. You are not alone. According to our latest annual report, IoT Signals edition 2 released today, 90 percent of decision makers now believe IoT is critical to their company’s success. The last six months have been tumultuous to say the least, however for many business decision makers it has actually accelerated their work towards a connected and secured future.

On our daily Microsoft Teams calls with customers and partners, we often say that it feels like a year’s worth of digital transformation is happening each and every month in 2020. For IoT, that transformation is providing near real-time visibility into physical assets and environments, enabling increased efficiency, reduced downtime, and keeping employees safe as they return to work during COVID-19.

Customers have shared that they are seeking guidance on what we see happening in IoT around the world in industries like Healthcare, Retail, Manufacturing, Oil and Gas, and Power and Utilities, and how other leaders are navigating rapid transformation.

We learned that looking ahead to the next two years, two out of three organizations are planning to use IoT even more than they do today; from connecting and securing factories, to enabling remote patient monitoring, to optimizing supply chains, and thousands of other scenarios. We’re also seeing a monumental shift in companies moving from simply connecting assets (for example manufacturing equipment), to connecting entire environments; the factories, supply chain, distribution network and more. This shift from connected assets to connected environments provides an order of magnitude increase in the value of IoT to a business.

Learnings from IoT Signals edition 2: IoT has become a critical part of organizations’ business strategies

During April, May, and June of this year, we sought to uncover the current and future trends of IoT to better serve our partners and customers around the world to develop their own IoT strategies. In IoT Signals edition 2, we learned from over 3,000 business and technical decision makers, and developers who are currently making decisions for IoT solutions at their organization. Here are five things to know about IoT in 2020:

1. COVID-19 is accelerating IoT adoption.

The study revealed that 91 percent of organizations have now adopted IoT (up from 85 percent last year). COVID-19 is having an undeniable impact on the world around us, and IoT is no exception. While the pandemic has slowed business across the globe, IoT is an area with upward trajectory in the wake of the virus. One in three decision makers say their organizations will increase their investment in IoT due to COVID-19, while another 41 percent say they’ll maintain the same level of commitment. For the few not intending to strengthen their investment, these organizations tend to be in the earlier stages of IoT—and those already behind may struggle to catch up quickly.

“During the coronavirus we had a problem with the return of empty bottles. We didn’t get any back, everybody kept them at home. So we had to get in touch with the glass manufacturers. It wasn’t easy to fill in the gap but we noticed the gap in the first place because of the data that we had through our IoT solution. The manufacturing plant can automatically adapt to increased demand. We also call it the smart factory, we don’t have to control and adjust things so much.”—ITDM, German Beverage Manufacturing

Those who expect to invest the same or more in IoT have fewer projects in the learn phase:

2. Security is integral.
A full 97 percent of IoT decision makers have security concerns when connecting new assets, and data privacy is a top security concern for about half of all organizations. Apart from data privacy, ensuring network-level security and securing endpoints are critical, while security management and managing default passwords is a lower priority.

“Security is extremely important—it’s paramount when we look to implement IoT solutions. We are a big brand, and therefore a big target. Obviously customer data system integrity is very important for us. So we have a very, very talented group of security personnel that are monitoring and developing within IoT all the time. We have different security teams—technical security, physical security, architecture security. It’s an area that we invest in a lot.”—UK Retail ITDM in Fashion Retail

3. AI, Edge Computing, and Digital Twins technologies are becoming mainstream.
However, there is significant room to educate more about these technologies and to test and trial to harness the full potential of IoT. We found that those who incorporate emerging technologies into their IoT solution realize more success with IoT overall, since once the value is proven it’s easier to build buy-in across the organization.

79 percent of organizations adopt AI as part of their IoT solution, and those who do perceive IoT to be more critical to their company’s success (95 versus 82 percent) and are more satisfied with IoT (96 versus 87 percent).

4. IoT projects are evaluated by return on investment, often measured first by how much they move the needle against automation and efficiency goals.
Reduction of operating costs and production efficiency stand out as key benchmarks for determining whether IoT has achieved success—even more so than the number of IoT projects or direct impact on revenue. Not surprisingly, organizations are also adopting IoT as part of a broader culture change to lead new investments for safety and security, rising three spots from IoT Signals edition 1 to the number one reason for IoT adoption in 2020.

Productivity is a top benefit of IoT (79 percent), specifically operations productivity (54 percent) and employee productivity (47 percent). In addition, the top uses of IoT include operations optimization (47 percent) and employee productivity (43 percent).

“We have to prove the impact of IoT to demonstrate the value. If we can explain how IoT helped prevent a hundred thousand truck rolls this year, then ascribe a cost to every single one of those, that’s when we show impact to the bottom line. And on top of that, I’ve got a hundred thousand customers that didn’t wait for an hour or more. In each of those cases we immediately started to triage with customers versus making them wait.”—US Energy ITDM in Power and Utilities

5. Internal resourcing and complexity continue to be top challenges.
While budget constraints can hold back the pace to progress from testing, through proof of concept, and into full use stage, IoT solutions will truly succeed when solution implementers gain deep internal alignment. Scaling an IoT solution presents a formidable shift for organizations which can create internal systems and technical obstacles. Those who adopt IoT as part of a broader culture change and prioritize investing in the right staff are well positioned to overcome barriers sooner.

“We had a lesson learned and realized we weren’t really going to be ready to go to market when we thought. There was more build to be done as we started to use the tool and started to realize—how do we manage this data?”—US Healthcare provider ITDM in Blood Labs

Interested in developing with Azure IoT?

If you’re interested in developing with Azure IoT there has never been a better time to reach out, find a partner, or build a solution to accelerate your business with IoT. When IoT is a foundational part of your transformation, we’ve seen the positive effects it can have on productivity, growth, safety, customer experiences, and much more.

We are committed to helping you turn your vision into reality with secure, scalable, and open edge-to-cloud solutions.

Develop with choice: Simplify building open and flexible IoT solutions quickly, on your terms.
Secure data everywhere: Trust your data estate is secure from endpoints to the cloud.
Power the edge: Seamlessly move your AI workloads and business intelligence to the edge.
Prepare for future innovation: Integrate continuously enhanced data, AI, mixed reality, and analytics solutions.
Scale globally: Grow effortlessly with the largest IoT ecosystem to unlock global scale.

Download IoT Signals edition 2 and learn more.

Posted on October 6, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Rockwell Automation and Microsoft expand partnership to simplify industrial transformation

Partnership aims to empower manufacturers with agility, intelligence, and scale to deliver digital transformation initiatives—from the cloud to the edge

MILWAUKEE – Oct. 6, 2020 – Rockwell Automation, Inc. (NYSE: ROK) and Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) today announced a five-year partnership expansion to develop integrated, market-ready solutions that help industrial customers improve digital agility through cloud technology. By combining each company’s expertise in the industrial and IT markets, respectively, teams can work together more seamlessly, enabling industrial organizations to save on infrastructure costs, speed time-to-value, and increase productivity.

Microsoft and Rockwell are working to deliver innovative edge-to-cloud-based solutions that connect information between development, operations and maintenance teams through a singular, trusted data environment. This will allow development teams to digitally prototype, configure and collaborate without investing in costly physical equipment. This unified data environment also enables IT and OT teams to not only securely access and share data models across the organization, but with their ecosystem of partners as well.

“Today, one thing we know for sure is that no business is 100% resilient. Those fortified with digital capabilities and assets are more resilient than others, and the cloud is how they will thrive,” said Judson Althoff, executive vice president of worldwide commercial business, Microsoft. “We are pleased to deepen our already strong, decade-long relationship with Rockwell Automation to help businesses simplify industrial transformation, accelerate business outcomes and innovate with agility.”

To date, the companies have co-developed over 20 use cases across Food & Beverage, Household and Personal Care and Life Sciences industries. The solutions developed from this partnership will augment and enhance their current offerings.

“This partnership provides Rockwell Automation and Microsoft customers with a holistic, simple solution for IIoT development and operations and removes data silos that hinder industrial digital transformation initiatives,” said Blake Moret, Chairman and CEO of Rockwell Automation. “By eliminating a core barrier to automation initiatives, industrial organizations establish a digital thread connecting the entire enterprise, which in turn accelerates innovation, maximizes productivity and optimizes operations.”

“Our team has seen the preview release of this new solution and we are excited about collaboration between our strategic partners, Rockwell Automation and Microsoft,” said Tristan Hunter, GM Automation & Operational Technology at Fonterra Co-operative Group Limited, New Zealand’s largest company and responsible for 30% of the world’s dairy exports. “Moving data from our on-premise assets securely with context and providing new workflows for us to analyze and drive better outcomes is important to maintaining Fonterra’s high standards across our many plants globally.”

Organizations can access Rockwell Automation solutions now via the Microsoft Azure Marketplace with more solutions currently in development. The next phase of co-innovation solutions will be available to joint customers of Rockwell Automation and Microsoft customers in Q1 2021 at Automation Fair At Home.

About Microsoft

Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

About Rockwell Automation

Rockwell Automation Inc. (NYSE: ROK), is a global leader in industrial automation and digital transformation. We connect the imaginations of people with the potential of technology to expand what is humanly possible, making the world more productive and more sustainable. Headquartered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Rockwell Automation employs approximately 23,000 problem solvers dedicated to our customers in more than 100 countries. To learn more about how we are bringing The Connected Enterprise to life across industrial enterprises, visit www.rockwellautomation.com.

Forward-Looking Statements

This news release contains statements about future growth and growth acceleration, business performance, the integration and development of solutions, the closing of the equity transaction and the use of proceeds and share repurchases. These statements are “forward-looking statements” as defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as “believe”, “estimate”, “project”, “plan”, “expect”, “anticipate”, “will”, “intend” and other similar expressions may identify forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from those projected as a result of certain risks and uncertainties, including the fact that growth may not occur or accelerate as expected, subscription may not grow profitably as expected, the equity investment may not close when or as expected and any use of proceeds or share repurchases may not occur as expected, and the integration of the solutions and development of future solutions may not occur as expected, and those risks and uncertainties described in the companies’ filings with U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission . These forward-looking statements reflect our beliefs as of the date of filing this release. We undertake no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

MEDIA CONTACT

Kyra Tillmans
10Fold (For Rockwell Automation)
rockwell@10Fold.com

Microsoft Media Relations

WE Communications for Microsoft
(425) 638-7000
rrt@we-worldwide.com

Posted on October 5, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

First-ever Minecraft Education Global Build Championship invites students to develop environmental solutions

Over the past nine months, we’ve seen wildlife roam free while people isolate to stay healthy. Whales have changed their migration patterns due to fewer ships, sea turtles have laid record amounts of eggs on beaches empty of humans, and wild monkeys have taken over city streets.

These stories cause us to wonder: What if we could redesign our human environment to accommodate the animal world? What would it be like if animals could still roam free within human environments?

For the first-ever Minecraft Education Global Build Championship, we’re inviting students around the world to develop creative environmental solutions that allow animals and humans to share space together. Students can choose between designing a school, home, work, or public space, and select one of five biomes for their build in the Global Championship World Template.

Submissions are open now through November 6, 2020. Here are the steps to submit:

1. Register!

To register teams of one to three students ages 8-18, read the rules and regulations and download the submission materials. Students under 18 will need a parent, educator, or guardian to complete their registration.

2. Build!

Design and build a space for humans and animals to coexist together! You can find prompts and build areas in five biomes in the Global Championship World template. Teams will receive extra credit for incorporating one of the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

3. Submit!

Each team will need to record a short game recording of their finished build and provide a description in the submission template. Submissions are due November 6, 2020. Students under 18 will need a parent, educator, or guardian to complete their submission.

Prizes include Minecoins, awesome Minecraft gear, and a chance to video chat with the Mojang Studios team.

The Global Build Championship keeps students connected and engaged in friendly competition with teams from all over the world. It’s designed to work for remote learning or classroom environments. We’ve seen the power of student creations in our monthly build challenges and challenges run by teachers, districts, and ministries around the world. We can’t wait to see what you create!

Winners will be announced on December 4, 2020. Register your team today!

Posted on October 1, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Imagine Cup Junior AI for Good Challenge for secondary students launches

By Anthony Salcito, Vice President, Education

During Microsoft’s recent global skills announcements, it was shared that over 149M new jobs will be created in technology over the next 5 years. While this shows the immediate need to upskill and reskill on technology to fuel economic growth and talent pipeline, the question remains – how we can ensure a more sustainable solution for many years to come?

At Microsoft, our mission is to empower every student on the planet to achieve more. Connected to this mission, Microsoft continues to work hard to spark student interest in STEM and Computer Science and prepare them for a path where technology is a core subject area connected to success in every role in the future. That’s why I’m excited to share today’s launch of Imagine Cup Junior AI for Good Challenge 2021. This is the second year we’ve run this challenge for secondary students, inviting young and talented minds to come up with ideas to make their world a better place with the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI). In our inaugural year we celebrated 9 winning teams from the hundreds of students across 23 countries who took part, and I was amazed by the imagination of students, the quality of their ideas and submissions.

Imagine Cup Junior AI for Good Challenge brings new skills to students across all subject areas regardless of their experience in technology. No longer is technology a separate discipline but rather a foundational capability that will enhance every students’ future opportunities, no matter what job role they pursue in their future. Students aged 13 to 18 can take part, individually or in teams up to 6, by developing an AI concept based on Microsoft’s AI for Good initiatives. These include AI for Humanitarian Action, AI for Earth, AI for Cultural Heritage, AI for Accessibility and new to our 2021 challenge, AI for Health.

While it’s been a challenging year with remote and blended learning becoming a part of many school days for students, we have introduced a number of new elements to Imagine Cup Junior AI for Good Challenge to increase the opportunity for all students to participate including webinars, hackathons and a beginners kit. To get started, educators need to register at https://imaginecup.com/junior which will provide access to the Imagine Cup Junior resource kit which includes:

Imagine Cup Junior for Beginners Kit – five 45-minute lessons that will prepare students for their challenge submission
Educator guides, student guides, and slides for the following modules for those who would like to take learning further:
- Imagine Cup Junior for Beginners
- Fundamentals of AI
- Machine Learning
- Applications of AI in real life
- Deep learning and neural networks
- AI for Good
Build your Project in a Day hackathon kit with videos from members of Microsoft’s Education, Artificial Intelligence and Cloud teams. This can be used in class to inspire students and coach them on how to get started, and perhaps even spark excitement to one day work in the field of AI
Engagement plans for educators on how they can embed the learning within their curriculum
Access to a series of AI webinars throughout the challenge and regional virtual hackathons for students to build out their projects live

Plus lots more, including challenges using Azure, Minecraft: Education Edition, and social kits and templates to celebrate taking part.

We are also empowering parents and guardians to register and submit on behalf of students in the event that learning from home continues, and the webinar and hackathon series will provide inspirational and exciting learning opportunities for students both at home or in school.

Registration opens today and will close May 21 2021. To ensure the privacy of students, all submissions must be made by educators/instructors/parents/guardians on behalf of their students. While we can’t wait to see ALL the amazing ideas of students around the world, Microsoft will be proud to recognize the top ten ideas globally and recognize their achievement with an Imagine Cup Junior trophy.

Challenge rules and regulations can be found here.

It is never too early to get started, and we hope by cultivating student creativity and passion for technology it will spark interest in and support the development of careers at the cutting edge of technology.

Register today at https://imaginecup.com/junior and empower students to truly change the world. I can’t wait to see their innovation and ideas to help positively change the world!

Posted on October 1, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

New innovations for the Microsoft customer data platform

Know your customers like never before

In every industry, we hear about the struggle to transform from a reactive to proactive organization that can respond to changes in the market, customer needs, and even within their own business. When we talk to customers who have rolled out Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform, the conversation shifts to the breakthrough outcomes they’ve achieved, often in very short time frames.

Customers talk about Microsoft’s unique ability to connect data holistically across departments and teams with AI-powered insights to drive better outcomes. This is precisely the business need that we identified and addressed with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Microsoft’s customer data platform (CDP).

Customer Insights has resonated with organizations across industries and, as a result, it’s the fastest growing application in the Dynamics 365 portfolio. Customers such as Walgreens Boots Alliance, Chipotle Mexican Grill, Campari Group, and Dayton Children’s Hospital recognize Customer Insights as a trusted platform to realize business outcomes.

Transforming vision into reality

At this time last year, I described our vision for Microsoft’s CDP, which has become reality for a number of our customers. For example, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is helping Tivoli Gardens, one of the world’s longest-running amusement parks, personalize guest experiences across every touchpoint—on the website, at the hotel, and in the park. American Electric Power Energy is using Customer Insights to better understand its customer needs, identify gaps in product offerings, and ensure delivery of efficient and sustainable energy solutions. Marston’s has onboarded Customer Insights to unify guest data and infuse personalized experiences across its 1,500-plus pubs across the United Kingdom.

Earlier this year, we announced that Customer Insights expanded its availability to the Microsoft Government Cloud, an environment built to meet the higher compliance needs of United States government agencies. The Microsoft Government Cloud meets the demanding requirements of the United States Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), enabling United States federal agencies to benefit from the cost savings and rigorous security of the Microsoft Cloud.

New capabilities to help customers drive business outcomes

Today, we’re meeting this growing customer demand for the Microsoft CDP by announcing new capabilities in Customer Insights to:

Deliver the most comprehensive view of their customers with the new engagement insights capability, currently in preview, that enables deeper understanding of customer intent and behavior with cross-channel analytics from their websites, mobile apps, and connected products. We bring yet another dimension to customer profiles though integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Voice. Organizations can automatically augment profiles with survey responses to truly uncover sentiment and drive detailed segmentation of customers, empowering agile actions that build brand loyalty and driving detailed understanding of customers. Furthermore, organizations can enrich customer profiles with proprietary audience intelligence on brand affinity and user interests or using third-party enrichments such as Experian and Leadspace.
Unlock powerful AI-driven insights through limitless analytics with deep integration with Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics. Organizations can leverage a library of prebuilt AI templates for churn prediction, product recommendations, and customer lifetime value, giving business users the ability to run AI/ML-based analytics on their data for quick insights without having to involve data scientists and IT.
Drive meaningful actions across the customer journey with turnkey integrations that make it easier to share insights with any application, be it Microsoft or third-party platforms. Customer Insights is designed and built to be vendor-agnostic, from ingesting data from any source to activating insights on multiple destinations including AutopilotHQ, Bing ads, dotdigital, Facebook, Google Ads, HubSpot, LiveRamp, Marketo, Mailchimp, SendGrid, and more.
Build on our commitment of unmatched data privacy and security by enabling organizations to better control and secure sensitive data with data classification and permissions from Microsoft Information Protection. This allows organizations to configure policies to classify, label, and protect data based on its sensitivity.

Real customers, real insights, real value

Across the world, so much has changed since last year. The global COVID-19 pandemic has impacted almost every organization and its customers. We’ve been inspired to see how many organizations are using Customer Insights to not only survive but thrive through this challenging environment.

In the healthcare space, Dayton Children’s Hospital uses Customer Insights to build a deep understanding of patient interactions across digital applications and in-person visits, and curate a secure single source of truth that complies with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and other essential regulations. This enables healthcare providers to improve the patient experience across every channel and touch point, helping transform the end-to-end healthcare journey. We are now scaling this use case through the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare solution.

The pandemic has also had an outsized impact on nonprofits who are facing difficult fundraising environments and reduced government aid; however, the demand for services from nonprofits has never been greater. Innovative organizations such as UNICEF Netherlands are leveraging Dynamics 365 applications such as Customer Insights, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing to increase engagement with high-value donors through personalized experiences and communications. Ultimately, they can raise more funds with precise segmentation and AI-driven insights.

Further, these demands are exactly why we’re launching Fundraising and Engagement for Dynamics 365 Sales, built with MISSION CRM. Nonprofits, schools, hospitals, and research institutions can utilize Fundraising and Engagement to uncover new funding sources, strengthen existing relationships, and drive fundraising efficiency. Dynamics 365, Common Data Model, and Microsoft Azure, bring the most modern digital platform to nonprofit organizations to engage with their donors, design campaigns, manage recurring giving programs and events. Learn more about our commitment to help nonprofits tackle the worlds’ biggest challenges.

Like many other fast moving-CPG companies, Campari Group is using Customer Insights to connect consumer and bartender engagement by integrating bespoke marketing and sales data into a single repository. Campari Group has grown rapidly through acquisitions, each bringing in another IT landscape to assimilate including more than seven martech vendors in the marketing domain. They chose Customer Insights for several reasons, including compliance with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Campari Group’s trust in Azure. Customer Insights unifies all the consumer and business partner data, across regions and brands, to gain a 360-degree customer view. They can now take one standardized approach to calculate CLTV and personalize marketing campaigns that support end-to-end customer journeys across marketing, sales, and customer service.

Learn more about the industry’s top-rated CDP

The Microsoft CDP empowers every organization to gain the most comprehensive view of their customers allowing any business professional the ability to learn from interactions and optimize engagement for delivering personalization at scale. For more information about Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, please visit us online or contact your Microsoft representative.

Watch the Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event today at 9:00 AM Pacific Time to learn about the incredible innovation across Dynamics 365 and Power Platform to help keep businesses moving forward. With updates, insights, and demonstrations from our experts, you’ll learn how to best leverage innovations to strengthen resiliency across your organization. Be sure to review the release plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform for details about the hundreds of new features and updated capabilities that will be released as part of this wave.

Posted on October 1, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Bing releases question answering feature to 100+ languages

Intelligent question-answering is one of the most useful and delightful features of search. As a user, you ask a question (e.g., “what are the benefits of eating apricots”) and can get the answer directly (e.g., info about health and nutrition benefits of apricots) at the top of the page without further need to search for relevant content by yourself. The feature aims to direct users to the most concise and precise answers from web documents, thus saving users time and efforts.

English-language question answering from web has been enabled on Bing for several years, and another dozen of languages, like French and German, have been added within the last year. But our work isn’t done – there are thousands of languages in the world! Not all of them have rich enough web content to derive good answers, but for those that do, uses of those spoken languages deserve the same useful, delightful, time-saving experience.

Recently, Bing expanded its intelligent question-answering feature to more than 100 languages, making AI and Bing itself more inclusive and accessible. What is amazing is this is achieved by using a language agnostic approach. In other words, the AI model generating the intelligent question-answering in Urdu is the same one generating the intelligent question-answering in Romanian. Here are some examples of this experience in various languages (if you speak a language other than English, feel free to give it a try, but be reminded to set your browser to the relevant language):

Here are search results in different languages for “what are the benefits of eating apricots”:
Example 1 – { what are the benefits of eating apricots }
Example 2 – { hva er fordelene med å spise aprikoser }
Example 3 – { какие витамины есть в абрикосе }
Example 4 – { kayısı yemenin faydaları nelerdir }
Example 5 – { خوبانی کھانے کے کیا فوائد ہیں؟ }
Example 6 – { నేరేడు పండు తినడం వల్ల కలిగే ప్రయోజనాలు ఏమిటి }

The magic behind this language agnostic experience is the advanced universal deep pretrained models for natural language understanding and the combination of real-time and near real-time GPU model inference to scale question-answering to markets all around the world.

Universal Deep Models for 100+ Languages

Recently, multilingual pre-trained models such as M-BERT, Unicoder, XLM-Roberta and Turing Universal Language Representation model (powered by Microsoft latest cross-lingual innovation InfoXLM) have been developed to learn multilingual language representations by leveraging large-scale multilingual corpuses for cross-lingual pre-training. Those powerful multilingual models are capable of zero-shot or few-shot cross-lingual transferring capabilities. However, when shipping the models to 100 languages, the performance on low resource languages may still have a big gap with rich resource languages (such as English). To further close the gap, a series of cross-lingual techniques have been developed such as task/domain adaption, user feedback-based question answering, data augmentation, etc. Powered by these SOTA cross lingual technologies, our question answering system becomes truly language agnostic.

Serving Universal Models at Scale

Universal models are difficult to serve at web search scale because common approaches to reduce model complexity like distillation can lead to lower quality results. This is especially problematic for question-answering where precision is essential to ensure a positive user experience. However, without reducing model complexity, real-time model inference can take longer than would be acceptable for search engines where users expect fast results.

To address this serving challenge, we augmented our existing real-time question-answering models with a near real-time inference system. This system efficiently runs sophisticated universal models that would typically be too slow for users to generate high quality answers. These answers will be immediately available the next time a similar question is asked. By combining both instantaneous and near real-time model inference, we’re able to provide more users with direct answers to their questions in the languages they speak.

Summary

We successfully scaled Bing intelligent question-answering feature to over 100 languages and 200 regions in the world. Existing language understanding techniques and platform evolution have made a big break-through for more natural and language agnostic searching experience. We do believe there is still space to continue to improve answers to users’ questions, so stay tuned as there is more innovation to come.

Beyond question-answering, Bing and Microsoft researchers released XGLUE cross lingual benchmark, which aims to help the research community further advance language-agnostic models and make AI systems more inclusive.

Please give Bing intelligent question-answering a try with your language and region setting. We would love to hear your feedback or suggestions! You can give feedback by using either the thumbs up/down button below the answers or the feedback button in the bottom right corner of the search results page.

Posted on October 1, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Introducing Surface Laptop Go, new updates to Surface Pro X and new accessories

As we continue to expand our Surface family of devices with the new Surface Laptop Go and updates to Surface Pro X, our goal is to design a Surface for every person, work style and location. To give every person in your household or organization a laptop that’s not just something you need to use, but something you want to use. A virtual office you want to be in, a virtual classroom that engages you to learn, a place you can play your favorite game or watch a movie – with a bright vibrant screen, a fluid and comfortable keyboard, high quality cameras and mics, and the versatility of touch screens.

Posted on September 30, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Helping 10 million learners and counting

Six months ago, we found ourselves facing a global pandemic that threatened to take thousands of lives and majorly disrupt our global economy. And in a short period of time, many of those fears became reality and continue to impact the lives and jobs of millions around the world.

We realized quickly that we were in a unique position to help those looking for a job. And in June we came together across the Microsoft ecosystem to launch an ambitious global skills initiative designed to help 25 million people worldwide acquire needed digital skills by the end of 2020.

Our number one goal was – and still is – to help those who became unemployed or under-employed due to the pandemic, get the skills they need to find and land their next job. With a quarter of a billion people suddenly without a job, setting up the unemployed with the skills and tools they need became our top priority.

Today, I’m excited to share an update on the program’s progress. And the news is good! As part of the initiative, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and GitHub have collectively reached more than 10 million learners around the globe. Read Ryan’s full post on LinkedIn.