Tag: Artificial Intelligence

A cytopathologist at SRL Diagnostics’ Central Reference Laboratory in Mumbai, screens a Pap smear sample for the screening of cervical cancer under his microscope. His trained eyes work with an apparent effortlessness. However, there is an unspoken urgency in his actions as he strives to complete the set of samples for the day. Along with his team of five members, he screens about 200 slides for cervical cancer every day, apart from another 100 slides for diagnosing other types of cancers.

SRL Diagnostics, the largest diagnostics laboratory company in India, has been witnessing an increase in the demand for cervical cancer screening.

According to estimates by the World Health Organization (WHO), cervical cancer is the fourth most frequent cancer among women worldwide. India accounts for 16% of the global burden of the disease. Unlike breast cancer, which is more prevalent in urban India, cervical cancer is frequent in the rural regions of the country where literacy and awareness of the fatal disease is low. Effective screening and early detection are the key measures to reduce its incidence.

“The proportion of cytopathologists in India is very low with respect to the number of patients. At SRL Diagnostics, we receive more than 100,000 Pap smear samples every year and there are only a few trained cytopathologists who are supposed to examine such slides. What’s more, nearly 98% of these samples are normal and it’s only the remaining 2% that requires further intervention. We were looking for ways to ensure our cytopathologists were able to find those 2% abnormal samples faster,” says Dr. Arnab Roy, Technical Lead – New Initiatives & Knowledge Management, SRL Diagnostics.

In September 2018, SRL Diagnostics partnered with Microsoft to create an AI Network for Pathology to ease the burden of cytopathologists and histopathologists. The idea was to co-create an AI-powered API that would do the first-level check and offload normal slides to help cytopathologists spend more time on what matters most – slides that show signs of abnormality.

“SRL Diagnostics has always been committed to championing innovation in the field of clinical diagnostics in India and has led the industry by embracing change as early adopters of many in vitro diagnostics technologies. Our partnership with Microsoft to co-create solutions having the potential to generate both social and business value, is another first-of-its-kind effort in the Indian diagnostics industry,” says Arindam Haldar, CEO, SRL Diagnostics.

“We looked at various elements of histopathology and homed in on the early detection of cervical cancer because it is a leading killer disease for women and cervical smear based screening, which is the gold standard, is patchy in implementation across the planet. We thought it was a good opportunity to apply AI and automation to drive efficiency and save lives,” says Prashant Gupta, Program Director, Microsoft Azure Global Engineering.

Building the cervical cancer image detection API

Developing the Cervical Cancer Image Detection API required the AI algorithm to assess smear tile images (region of interest) as a trained cytopathologist would examine them. To enable this, cytopathologists studied digitally scanned versions of Whole Slide Imaging (WSI) slides manually and marked their observations, which were used as training data for the AI model.

Initially, SRL Diagnostics appointed one cytopathologist to annotate the image slides. Each WSI comprises as many as 1,800 tile images and it was difficult for a single individual to interpret a large quantity of image tiles from each slide in ways that can be consumed by the AI algorithm. And, then, there was the challenge of subjectivity too.

“Different cytopathologists examine different elements in a smear slide in a unique manner even if the overall diagnosis is the same. This is the subjectivity element in the whole process, which many a time is linked to the experience of the expert,” reveals Dr. Roy.

“We wanted to create an AI algorithm that could identify areas that everybody was looking at and create a consensus on the areas assessed,” adds Manish Gupta, Principal Applied Researcher, Microsoft Azure Global Engineering, who worked closely with the team at SRL Diagnostics to develop the Cervical Cancer Image Detection API.

The project was then expanded to include five cytopathologists across multiple labs and different locations. Their efforts resulted in the annotation of thousands of tile images of cervical smear, each comprising about 300-400 cells. The issue of subjectivity was addressed by creating discordant and concordant notes on each sample image. The images for which annotations were found to be discordant – that is if they were viewed differently by three team members – were sent to senior cytopathologists for final analysis.

The collaboration has already started showing results with the first API for screening cervical cancer ready for internal preview at SRL Diagnostics.

As part of the new workflow, the large digital WSI scans from Device Image Scanners are uploaded to Azure where the Cervical Cancer Image Detection API runs. The AI-powered Cervical Cancer Image Detection API can quickly screen liquid-based cytology slide images for detection of cervical cancer in the early stages and return insights to pathologists in labs.

The AI model can now differentiate between normal and abnormal smear slides with accuracy and is currently under validation in labs. It can also classify smear slides based on the seven-subtypes of cervical cytopathological scale. The classification includes interpretations ranging between normal and the pre-cancerous to cancerous stages. The purported use of the model lies in assisting cytopathologists to review fewer areas, 20 as of now, on a whole slide liquid-based cytology image and validate the positive cases thus bringing in greater efficiency and speeding up the initial screening process.

“The API has the potential of increasing the productivity of a cytopathology section by about four times. In a future scenario of automated slide preparation with assistance from AI, cytopathologists can do a job in two hours what would earlier take about eight hours!” exclaims Dr. Roy.

“I can immediately address weaknesses I didn’t even know that I had. I’m feeling more confident about performing my best.”

RaceFit’s solution has also been extended to other sports like high-intensity interval training (HIIT) training, cycling and tennis. Soon, RaceFit plans to expand the usability of its app to team sports, like football.

Beyond fencing

The technology is not just for coaches and high-end competitors. Anyone can use RaceFit in their regular lives. It comes with an exercise app with customizable routines. The app lets you know immediately if any of your movements need improvement, like if your hip position is too high while planking. It can keep track of your progress over time and prescribe new exercises to help you reach your fitness goals.

Additional sports, like cycling and running, are supported by downloadable modules.And more sports and exercises are being added to the list.

RaceFit co-founder and CEO Graham Mak says, “We are not limited to those exercises. We are only limited to human motion. If a customer says, ‘I’m in a canoe club and I want a canoe program,’ then we can do something like that.”

Mak also has plans to aid physical therapists. Wearing a simpler version of the sensor contained in a single band, patients can perform exercises as instructed by the therapists. The device will help the physical therapist determine if they do it correctly. “This will save a lot of time and it can be done with multiple patients at the same time.”

Dennis Poon, the company’s Chief Experience Officer, says physiotherapists who use the RaceFit system “can definitely take care of more patients and, more importantly, they will be able to monitor their recovery.”

A similar use is applicable to older people, especially those who live alone. According to the Hong Kong government, around 20% of adults over 65 have a fall at least once a year. Most of those report some kind of injury and nearly 10% break a bone. Since the RaceFit sensors give a complete picture of human movement, the system would know, for example, if a person has fallen down and needs assistance.

“What is the active and inactive times in a day? And, what about the time walking or sitting or lying on the bed? What does it represent? And, how can it affect health outcomes?” Mak says.

A long way from the garment industry

RaceFit’s journey to understanding human movement began with a much more pedestrian goal. According to Mak, his team just wanted to make a smart garment to revitalize the traditional apparel industry.

After three years of R&D, they decided to change direction and were inspired by the kind of motion-capture suits you see used in a Hollywood special effects production.

That led Mak to ask:  “What if we understand motion and make recommendations afterwards?” They realized that by using Microsoft Azure cloud, they could build their own AI solution to focus on fitness ability management. “For example, when you do a push-up, did you do it correctly or incorrectly?”

By being nimble, changing direction, and embracing new technologies, Mak and his team have created new business models that have transformed the company.

Poon sums it up this way, “We started our company focusing on Sports and Fitness, but we’ve gone way beyond that already.”

Developing a master plan to transform John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. Replacing a double-deck road with a massive tunnel in Seattle. Keeping beachgoers safe from polluted waters in New Zealand with advanced analytics.

Those are just a few of the thousands of complex projects delivered each year by Mott MacDonald, a global engineering, management and development consulting firm headquartered in London. With 180 principal offices in 50 countries, the company helps solve some of the world’s most urgent social, environmental and economic challenges.

Because Mott MacDonald doesn’t create physical products, its success relies on the knowledge and expertise of its 16,000 employees. To help them share and learn more easily, the company uses Project Cortex, a new service in Microsoft 365 that is part of Microsoft’s vision to transform knowledge and help people learn and grow their skills and expertise.

Announced this week at Microsoft Ignite, Project Cortex uses artificial intelligence to create a knowledge network that automatically connects and organizes organizations’ content into topics and generates topic cards, wiki-like “topic pages” and other new experiences in Microsoft 365.

The experiences will appear seamlessly in familiar tools like Office, Outlook and Microsoft Teams to help people find information, learn quickly and get up to speed faster within the apps they use every day. When employees see an unfamiliar acronym or project in email or chat, for example, they’ll be able to hover on the word and pop out a topic card with a description and related experts, documents and videos. A click on the card will call up a topic page, curated by AI and experts, with richer information like diagrams that link related and adjacent topics.

These capabilities “are going to further enhance our ability to reach our business goals with quicker access and connection to colleagues and their expertise — what we call our connected thinking,” says Simon Denton, Mott MacDonald productivity applications architect. “They’re going to help us build an even stronger knowledge network so people can have the right knowledge at the right time to deliver more excellent project outcomes for our clients. It’s going to be brilliant.”

The company already organizes its many experts and vast business knowledge into 47 communities that cover aviation, bridges and other practice areas. It began building its initial knowledge management system a few years ago to classify content in SharePoint and add people to Yammer groups based on interest.

Project Cortex, currently in private preview, will give Mott MacDonald even more advanced capabilities. Already secure and compliant, the product will allow automated policies based on precise document tags for added security. Its knowledge experiences, which build on an organization’s existing SharePoint content services, will permeate everyday work tools in Microsoft 365 and could one day include learning content from such platforms as LinkedIn Learning.

The solution will have powerful capture technology to make ingested content smarter. Powered by AI, it can extract information from structured content like forms, receipts and invoices. With machine teaching – having experts teach the AI how to respond – Project Cortex can also pull information from unstructured content like legal contracts and employee agreements.

It then adds metadata and classifies the documents into topics, automatically doing tasks that are traditionally manual and slow.

“We’re really excited about that,” says Denton. “We’re already talking about processing 30 years’ worth of drawings with good information on how something was built and how it needs to be maintained for the future. It’s going to unlock a lot of latent knowledge.”

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The knowledge vision

Scheduled for general availability in the first half of 2020, Project Cortex is the first new product to emerge from Microsoft’s knowledge vision, which includes new capabilities in other Microsoft 365 services such as Yammer, for communities of practice; Microsoft Stream, for intelligent video creation and sharing; and Workplace Analytics, for organizational insights.

As a longtime concept for organizing and re-using information, knowledge management has never fully solved the challenges it seeks to address due to disconnected information silos, technical limits and clunky end-user experiences, says Seth Patton, general manager of Microsoft 365 marketing.

But demand for knowledge has become particularly timely due to sweeping changes in the workplace. Automation, gig economies, flex work, skills shortages and retiring baby boomers have heightened the need for organizations to retain knowledge, share it with employees and help them learn new skills and expertise faster, Patton says.

“Business leaders and CEOs are recognizing the importance of their people’s skills and talent in their organizations’ ability to succeed,” he says. “It’s a recognition that upskilling and learning are the new workplace competitive advantage.”

Microsoft’s advances in AI and machine learning, SharePoint’s massive cloud content repository, the intelligence of the Microsoft Graph and integration with Office 365 apps have helped overcome previous challenges in knowledge management to help customers solve unmet needs.

 “All of us have had the experience of joining a new project, team or company,” Patton says. “It takes a long time to understand the language before you can contribute and participate. With Project Cortex you can get up to speed quickly and start contributing right away.”

Microsoft Search will also integrate Project Cortex, so people will be able to find topic cards and knowledge pages when they search. Microsoft Search is an important component in the company’s knowledge vision, bringing a unified, intelligent search experience across Microsoft 365 and Bing. It also extends to externally connected content, such as file shares. As content is crawled, it’s added to the knowledge network.

As video becomes an increasingly powerful way to capture and share knowledge, Microsoft Stream applies AI to provide automatic transcription for things like recorded meetings. AI-powered voice enhancement helps reduce background noise so people can better focus on what was discussed, and they can also now create short videos from mobile devices to share in Teams and Yammer.

More than a decade after it was created, Yammer has been completely redesigned with dozens of new capabilities, as well as new integrations with Teams, SharePoint and Outlook. These new features allow people to connect and share knowledge across teams and geographic locations.

Mott MacDonald connects people in Yammer communities that span 47 practice areas so they can share knowledge, ask questions and get answers.

As another way Microsoft 365 helps people share knowledge, Workplace Analytics provides business leaders insights into how people collaborate and spend their time with new self-service dashboards. These insights provide the context of industry benchmarks, as well as AI-driven analyses of business processes and networks of people.

This information can help identify high-performance trends such as close relationships between effective salespeople and engineers, or correlations between good onboarding experiences and more managerial one-on-ones. Leaders can then encourage and replicate similar patterns elsewhere.

The solutions are designed to be easy-to-use, customizable solutions. For the new Project Cortex, AI does the behind-the-scenes “heavy lifting” of mining and collecting useful, internal information, says Naomi Moneypenny, Microsoft director of content services and insights. Then experts can edit, update and add content to make sure knowledge pages are current and relevant.

“Our goal is to put intelligent content and knowledge services into the flow of the work you do every day to help you find the information you need, discover what you want and make your business processes more efficient,” says Moneypenny, who leads the Project Cortex product team. “All while enhancing and enforcing your security and compliance policies.”

At Mott MacDonald, Project Cortex will help build stronger connections across the company’s large, global communities and deliver timely information that helps employees create solutions to many complex challenges, build expertise and save time, all while enhancing service to customers, Denton says.

“I’m really excited by Microsoft’s vision for creating Project Cortex,” he says. “It fits completely with our strategy for knowledge networks. The idea of connecting people to content and content to people and building this network out, powered by Microsoft 365 — it’s going to be a game-changer for us.”

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Lead image: From left to right, civil engineer James Balla, project principal Jonathan Hine and civil engineer Cleopatra Meade work together at Mott MacDonald offices in London. (Photos by Mark Mercer)

Turning digital data into physical artifacts

With a nearly 100-year history in film and television, Warner Bros. owns one of the world’s deepest and most significant entertainment libraries. Re-releasing older films in new formats or for new audiences is an important part of the business. It’s also a tremendous cultural responsibility to preserve some of the world’s most beloved stories in perpetuity, Colf said.

“Imagine if a title like the ‘Wizard of Oz’ or a show like ‘Friends’ wasn’t available for generation after generation to enjoy and see and understand,” she said. “We think that’s unimaginable, and that’s why we take the job of preserving and archiving our content extremely seriously.”

The company has redundancy plans in place to handle multiple worst-case scenarios: an earthquake or hurricane that strikes one of the coasts, a fire where the suppression systems don’t kick in or a climate control failure that allows moisture to build up and ruin film stock.

The goal is to have three archival copies of each asset stored in different locations around the world: two separate digitized copies, along with the original physical copy on whatever medium a film or television episode or animated cartoon was created.

Fortunately, original film negatives will last for centuries if stored in the right conditions. But for some older television shows — think episodes of “Alice” shot in the 1970s — the original physical copy has a limited shelf life that requires migration to newer formats. And for today’s films and television shows that are shot digitally, the archival-quality third copy has a very short migration cycle of three to five years, which is challenging to manage.

“Let’s say a TV show is pushing directly into our digital archives; there’s nothing physical,” said Steven Anastasi, Warner Bros. vice president for global media archives and preservation services. “The digital file is going in but I don’t have something I can put in a vault or in a salt mine or anything physical coming into the building.”

Warner Bros. is potentially looking at Project Silica to create a permanent physical asset to store important digital content and provide durable backup copies. Right now, for theatrical releases that are shot digitally, the company creates an archival third copy by converting it back to analog film. It splits the final footage into three color components —cyan, magenta and yellow — and transfers each onto black-and-white film negatives that won’t fade like color film.

Those negatives are put into a cold storage archive. In these highly managed vaults, temperature and humidity are tightly controlled, and air sniffers look for signs of chemical decomposition that could signal problems. If they need the film back, they must reverse those complicated steps.

That process is expensive, and there are only a handful of film labs left in the world that can do it. And the process is not optimal from a qualitative point of view, said Brad Collar, Warner Bros. senior vice president of global archives and media engineering.

“When we shoot something digitally — with zeros and ones representing the pixels on the screen ­— and print that to an analog medium called film, you destroy the original pixel values. And, sure, it looks pretty good, but it’s not reversible,” Collar said.

“If we can take the digital representation of those pixels and put it on a medium like silica and read it back off exactly as it was when it came out of the camera, we’ve done our preservation job to the very best of our ability. That’s what I love about this,” he said.

It’s not economical to create archival film negatives for every digitally shot television episode in the Warner Bros. library. The company hopes Project Silica might prove to be a cheaper, higher quality alternative to create physical archives of digital content.

There’s much more work ahead to reach that scale — Microsoft researchers would need to significantly increase the speed at which data can be written and read, as well as its density. Warner Bros. envisions its own infrastructure to read data from the glass archives. But both partners see promise in how far they’ve come.

“If Project Silica’s storage solution proves to be as cost-effective and as scalable as it could be — and we all recognize it’s still early days — this is something we’d love to see adopted by other studios and our peers and other industries,” Colf said.

“If it works for us, we firmly believe that this will be a benefit to anyone who wants to preserve and archive content,” she said.

Last year, Cape Town, South Africa, came within days of running out of water. This summer, Chennai, India, ran dry, with residents standing in line for hours for government water supplies.

Global demand for water is rapidly growing – but it is becoming increasingly scarce. Almost a third of the world’s population is estimated to be living in water-scarce areas, according to the World Data Lab.

With an increase in shortages driven by climate change and a growing global population, better management of this resource is crucial.

Here’s how some grantees from Microsoft’s AI for Earth program are trying to help

[READ MORE: How clean water data is helping to protect Brazil’s precious ecosystems] 

Monitoring drinking water supplies

A team of researchers at Stanford University’s Natural Capital Project is combining remote-sensing data with machine learning to detect smaller dams and reservoirs. These structures deliver drinking water and generate hydropower, but they can also risk threatening ecosystems if not built and managed carefully.

Developed using Microsoft Azure, the algorithm will be made freely available to the sustainable development community.

Managing water in megacities

The rapidly growing demand for water in India will soon significantly outpace its supply. Dr. Yogesh Simmhan is using the Internet of Things (IoT) to help ensure people have access to an affordable, safe water supply. This can be an issue in areas with dense populations, particularly megacities (those with populations over 10 million), many of which experience water scarcity and inequitable access.

As part of his work with the EqWater project, Dr. Simmhan is using data analytics and machine learning to understand the causes of variations in access to water for individual neighborhoods; algorithms can be used to better manage supplies, such as improved water scheduling or detecting leaks.

Pooling data on areas such as flow from reservoirs, seasonal weather and residential use, the team can predict peak demand and identify shortfalls.

[READ MORE: A shift in perspective: Taking a new view on water security through technology]

Better understanding of the weather

Improved forecasting of droughts and floods will become increasingly important as climate change drives more extreme weather events. The Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes project, based at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, is working to increase its understanding of some of the less well-recognized weather phenomena affecting the western U.S.

Such phenomenon is atmospheric rivers – large bodies of water vapor in the sky. Although little is understood about them, they are known to trigger intense storms and flooding, and are major contributors to water supplies. Equally, droughts can occur if they fail to arrive at the expected time or place. Deep learning is helping the team predict their behavior.

Investigating the effect of tree loss

Drought, climate change, wildfires and insect infestation have all contributed to an increase in tree loss in the western U.S., where forest health is a major concern. Trees help prevent flooding by absorbing rain and slowing run-off; they contribute to drinking water supplies by helping replenish aquifers and purifying water; and they play a vital role in carbon capture.

Tony Chang and a team at the research nonprofit Conservation Science Partners are using cloud computing and machine learning to assess tree health and biomass, using images from NASA, the U.S. Geological Society, the National Agricultural Imagery Program and others. This data is linked to information about regional water sources in order to uncover the connections between forest conservation and management and water supplies.

The analysis is initially being applied in California before being rolled out to rest of the western U.S.

[READ MORE: How scientists are confronting environmental challenges with the help of AI]

Predicting armful algae blooms

Africa Flores, a research scientist at the University of Alabama’s Earth System Science Center, and her team are using AI to analyze satellite images and weather models to help predict harmful algal blooms. These out-of-control colonies of algae deplete oxygen in the water and make it potentially toxic to humans and wildlife.

Working on Lake Atitlán in the Guatemalan Highlands, she uses machine learning to analyze data on variables such as rainfall, temperature and cloud cover. She hopes deeper insight into the conditions that may lead to such blooms will help authorities take preventive measures and potentially improve agricultural practices. Her plan is to use her algorithm in other freshwater bodies in Central and South America.

For more on AI, visit AI for Earth. And follow @MSFTIssues on Twitter.  

Artificial intelligence is a staple of many movie plots – and those thrilling stories often revolve around the potential dangers of AI, rather than the good it can do.

Since popular culture plays a part in shaping attitudes about technology, it’s not surprising that questions surrounding AI are informed by what we see in the movies.

People are asking whether we are creating a future that we’ll be able to control, and whether computers will remain accountable to people. This, too, has been the stuff of science fiction in popular films. Here are five times Hollywood has taken on AI.

[Subscribe to Microsoft on the Issues for more on the topics that matter most.]

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

HAL 9000 is a super-intelligent computer in charge of the operations of Discovery One, a spaceship undertaking a journey to Jupiter. Hal, as he’s known, has a personality and a human-sounding voice. However, he experiences a severe malfunction and stops listening to the humans he’s assisting in order defend the mission’s programmed directives.

Blade Runner (1982)

Replicants – humanoid robots that are almost indistinguishable from people – are used for dangerous jobs in this movie. They have a short lifespan, and some have started to rebel in a bid to live longer – no matter what. Blade Runner culminates in a standoff, where the leader of a band of rogue replicants delivers an impassioned monologue on the meaning of life.

Ghost in the Shell (1995 & 2017)

The French philosopher René Descartes believed the human mind was separate from the body – like a ghost in a shell. In this story, people can upgrade their bodies with cybernetic implants. Imagine a smart hearing aid or a prosthetic limb that’s integrated with the nervous system.

But when a scientist embeds an upgraded mind in the form of AI implanted into another person’s body, a conflict emerges. Memories of an unknown life begin to trouble the cyborg. Which internal monologue is the real one?

I, Robot (2004)

It is 2035 and robots are common, acting as servants to people. These robots are guided by the three laws of robotics:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws

Those three laws of robotics were drawn up by Isaac Asimov, who wrote Robot series of short stories and novels in the middle of the 20th century. The first in the series – “I, Robot” – was the inspiration for the movie.

The movie considers what happens when a robot is suspected of committing murder, and what it means when a robot claims to have its own thoughts and dreams.

Ex Machina (2014)

This is another movie where robots can be hard to differentiate from humans and have developed their own sense of self.

A computer programmer, Caleb Smith, spends time with a sociopathic robot creator, Nathan, and a robot, Ava. Nathan wants Caleb to help conduct a live Turing test – he wants to know if Caleb can be fooled by Ava.

Caleb and Ava form an emotional attachment. Not only does she resemble a human in form, but in her speech and mannerisms, too. After convincing himself that Nathan is a malevolent presence, Caleb plots to help Ava escape.

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While all these movies are set as fiction, the questions they raise are real. We should be asking hard questions about the technology we create. Can we control it? Who will it impact and how?  And perhaps instead of asking what technology can do, asking what technology should do. For example, AI can benefit the world in many ways including enhancing efficiency in the workplace, assisting in saving languages, preserving history and helping save the environment.

When it comes to AI, the benefits are real, but so are the risks. Tech companies have a responsibility to ensure products are developed responsibly, employ transparency and be guided by a principled approach. However, governments and civil society have an important role to play as well. It’s critical that we all work together to ask the hard questions and develop the right answers.

The New York Times Best Seller “Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age” by Brad Smith and Carol Ann Browne looks at the impact of AI, the rise of cyberattacks, threats to digital privacy and more. Order it here.

We live in an ever more digital, connected world. With the emergence of Artificial Intelligence, the opportunity we have to provide truly personalized, accessible learning and experiences to all students around the world is now upon us. Leaders in education have the opportunity to dramatically impact outcomes more than ever, from changing the way in which they engage with students throughout the student journey, to providing truly personalized learning, to improving operational efficiencies across the institution. At Microsoft, our mission in education is to empower every student on the planet to achieve more. Through that lens, we believe education leaders should consider opportunities to introduce new technologies like AI into the design of learning and technological blueprint to expand the horizon for driving better outcomes and efficiencies for every student and institution around the world.

That’s why I’m excited to share that Microsoft’s AI Business School now offers a learning path for education. Designed for education leaders, decision-makers and even students, the Microsoft AI Business School for Education helps learners understand how AI can enhance the learning environment for all students—from innovations in the way we teach and assess, to supporting accessibility and inclusion for all students, to institutional effectiveness and efficiency with the use of AI tools. The course is designed to empower learners to gain specific, practical knowledge to define and implement an AI strategy. Industry experts share insights on how to foster an AI-ready culture and teach them how to use AI responsibly and with confidence. The learning path is available on Microsoft Learn, a free platform to support learners of all ages and experience levels via interactive, online, self-paced learning.

The Microsoft AI Business School for Education includes a number of modules across sales, marketing, technology and culture, but most importantly, it calls upon the expert insights from education leaders including:

• Professor Peter Zemsky uses INSEAD’s Value Creation Framework to show the advantages AI presents for educational institutions and how an organization can determine the right approach that works with their strategy and goals.
• Michelle Zimmerman, author of “Teaching AI: Exploring New Frontiers for Learning,” shares her experience as an educator and why she sees believes AI can transform how students learn.
• David Kellerman of the University of New South Wales (UNSW) shares his perspective on what’s unique about AI in higher education and how using AI can transform the way institutions collaborate and encourage students to be lifelong learners. As a key research institution in Australia, the University of New South Wales (UNSW)is focused on being a learning institution that collaborates across academic and operational departments as it uses AI to create a personalized learning journey for students. Dr. Kellerman shares his perspective on what’s unique about AI in higher education and how using AI to transform the way institutions collaborate can create students that are lifelong learners.

The Microsoft AI Business School for Education joins a larger collection of industry-specific courses including financial services, manufacturing, retail, healthcare and government. With this holistic portfolio, the AI Business School can also help students learn about AI application across a number of industries and roles. We’ve already seen several universities and vocational colleges incorporate this curriculum into their courses across business, finance, economics and health-related degrees as a means of providing real-world examples of AI opportunity and impact.

New research has highlighted the importance of adopting AI to transform the learning experience for students. Last week at the Asian Summit on Education and Skills (ASES) in India, Microsoft and IDC unveiled the latest findings from the study “Future-Ready Skills: Assessing the use of AI within the Education sector in Asia Pacific.” The study found that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will help double the rate of innovation improvements for higher education institutions across the region. Despite 3 in 4 education leaders agreeing that AI is instrumental to an institute’s competitiveness, 68% of education institutions in the region today have actually yet to embark on their AI journey. Those who have started integrating AI have seen improvements in student engagement, efficiency and competitiveness, as well as increased funding and accelerated innovation.

Microsoft is proud to be working with schools and institutions around the world to improve understanding of Artificial Intelligence and support leaders, educators and students to get ready for the future, like the recent collaboration in India with CBSE to train up over 1000 educators.