“Someone can grab a HoloLens, start a Guides session, and literally have a trainer in their head,” he said. “If they do need help, they can call an expert right from the app.”
Toyota feedback also helped improve other aspects of the Guides experience. For example, technicians used to put a QR code on the hood of a vehicle, scan it, and then follow the holographic instructions.
But those holograms could appear to drift as a worker moved around the car. Toyota worked with Microsoft to develop “object understanding.” That meant Toyota technicians could scan the entire vehicle, which helped lock a hologram in place and eliminate the parallax problem. A hologram pointing toward a bolt would always point to the exact location, no matter the viewer’s angle.
Over the years, the authoring experience in Guides has improved to where creating holographic instructions is as easy as creating a PowerPoint, Kleiner added.
“I don’t have to hire an army of consultants to build this. I don’t have to have a bunch of people with computer science degrees. I can give it to the experts on the frontlines, and they can generate their own content to train other folks or share,” he said.
Toyota found immediate value in Guides as a training tool, Kleiner said. Instead of working one-on-one with trainees, Toyota trainers can let trainees work independently and supervise multiple trainees at the same time – increasing their efficiency many times over.
During a pilot project at their San Antonio plant, Toyota used HoloLens 2 and Guides to train employees on how to assemble a new version of the Toyota Tundra. The data showed it was a success, Kleiner said. Defects were cut in half. Depending on the individual, training time fell between 20% and 50%, he said.
Partners in mixed reality
While HoloLens 2 devices have helped define what’s possible in the industrial metaverse, Microsoft is a platform company, Taylor said. That’s why Microsoft is committed to making its mixed reality software available wherever its customers are – whether that’s on a HoloLens 2 or another company’s device. And while Dynamics 365 Mixed Reality Apps provide enterprise-grade software so customers can get to work immediately, Microsoft has also built a Mixed Reality partner network of ISVs who can extend solutions to meet unique needs in different industries, from construction and education to healthcare and pharmaceutical.
The U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) turned to one of these partners to improve worker safety during trench excavation. On construction sites, trenching and excavation are risky but essential jobs. One cubic yard of soil can weigh as much as a car, according to OSHA, and that delicate balance with gravity can be upset in an instant. That is why trench collapses are the leading cause of death in the construction industry.
To help mitigate this danger, OSHA instructors are using a custom mixed reality app to give trench safety inspectors immersive, hands-on hazard training without real-world risk. The app, created by the software studio Clirio, consists of six different scenes using realistic and immersive graphics to show variables like ground conditions, hazards, safety equipment and best practices for mitigating risk. Sophisticated sound design and animation add to the lifelike experience.
“Whenever you teach somebody something, it’s one thing to tell them, it’s one thing to show them, and it’s another thing to let them do it,” said Anthony Towey, Director of the OSHA Training Institute. “We can actually go into a trenching and excavation environment that’s as close as they’re going to get in the field.”
Thousands of construction contractors could use this training, he added. “And now they’ll be able to do it in a safe environment, where they can practice and make mistakes.”
Hokkaido Electric Power Company is using HoloLens 2, Dynamics 365 Remote Assist and a custom app to help staff inspect critical equipment at a thermal power plant. On every inspection patrol, workers navigate a vast labyrinth of boilers, turbines and generators and examine thousands of pieces of equipment for often subtle changes that can help them avoid larger problems, said Takaharu Umemoto, who works in the company’s Information Technology Section, Thermal Power Department. That requires extensive know-how and experience, he said. It would often take new hires one year of shadowing experienced technicians before they could handle everything.
Today, new hires get up to speed much quicker, he said, and the app has improved the efficiency of patrol inspections. The experience has made the company enthusiastic supporters of mixed reality technology, Umemoto said.
“I had an image of (mixed reality) as a technology for games, but it was a revelation to find that it can be used as an intuitive and easy-to-understand solution from the perspective of transferring patrol inspection skills,” Umemoto said.
HoloLens 2, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Remote Assist and a custom app help Hokkaido Electric Power Company staff inspect critical equipment at a thermal power plant. (Image courtesy of Microsoft)
‘Everyone has a voice now’
As early customer pilots with HoloLens 2 have led to larger deployments, Microsoft has invested heavily in making the cloud-connected technology easier to manage at scale. That means IT departments can manage a HoloLens 2 headset just like any other laptop, phone or tablet, Evans said.
Those improvements helped Toyota move HoloLens 2 from the lab to the enterprise seamlessly, Kleiner said. “Usually when we leave the lab, there’s a huge learning curve: how do we maintain and operate these at the enterprise level?” Kleiner said. “All that was avoided because when we took the device to the IT department they said ‘Oh, this is just another Windows machine. We know how to handle it.’”
Microsoft will continue to work with customers to solve unique and tough challenges, Evans noted.
Customers like the U.S. Army are helping improve both software and hardware, while others are helping drive industry-specific improvements that may eventually have broader application, Evans said. It’s akin to how technologies like ceramic brakes and variable valve timing first appeared in Formula 1 but ultimately went from the racetrack to everyday streets.
“The military program has its own set of requirements that are tuned to the needs of the soldier. So, it’s helping push the whole platform forward. It’s great to have early adopters that are driving requirements because you end up with this trickle-down effect,” Evans said.
One thing Evans has said Microsoft hears from customers is that, unlike consumers who expect a constant crop of new gadgets, businesses don’t want to have to replace their devices every two years. That causes too much churn. “No one wants to be obsoleted for 10% better capabilities. They don’t need a successor yet, but they want to know it will be there at the right time,” he said.
Evans said Microsoft is pushing forward on all core hardware technologies: display, tracking, sensors, battery life. “We’re just looking for the right design point to make it a meaningful update. They want a successor device that’s going to enable an even higher return on investment,” Evans said.
As the HoloLens hardware and software continue to evolve, Toyota’s Kleiner expects Guides to remain “the killer mixed reality app” for frontline workers. One day, it could be like Word, available on any device. But for now, Toyota will keep rolling out HoloLens 2 headsets across the company, giving frontline workers the tools to work and collaborate in new ways.
“We now have a device we can deploy to every person,” Kleiner said. “It’s easy to maintain, and it allows our workers to participate in the larger conversation, regardless of rank or team structure. Everyone has a voice now.”
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Top image: Desktop collaborators can annotate in 3D space and augment what a frontline worker wearing a HoloLens 2 is seeing with the latest update to Dynamics 365 Guides. (Image courtesy of Microsoft)
Jake Siegel writes about Microsoft research and innovation.
When it comes to a complex issue such as computer security, there are no simple answers. As the effects of hacking run the gamut from the annoyingly personal – like never-ending popup windows on your computer screen – to a large-scale, global level – such as the gasoline shutdowns that crippled the East Coast in 2021 – it makes sense that there’s no single approach to attacking the problem.
It takes more than just one angle to handle what has become an increasingly important aspect of technology development. Many organizations simply focus on patching problems after they occur. But Microsoft is taking a holistic direction in its security measures, covering the entire spectrum with a team that is working to stop vulnerabilities before they even spawn, eliminating code flaws before they reach your computer and the prying keyboards of hackers across the globe. For the security team, the thinking goes, it’s never an if, but when an issue will arise.
“It’s a perennial cat and mouse game,” said Justin Campbell, principal security software engineering lead, Microsoft Security. “Things are evolving. Windows isn’t stagnant. There are new things added, new considerations, new technologies and new procedures researched. That’s not just in security, but how we build our software. There’s still code from 30 years ago that’s in equal consideration with new items we are shipping today. It’s a tremendous spectrum.”
Campbell leads a new global security team comprised of more than 60 members called Microsoft Offensive Research & Security Engineering (MORSE), which takes a three-pronged approach to securing code within the operating system. Red, blue and green teams, each with a different role to play, help MORSE aggressively battle security threats, repair broken code and prevent issues from ever happening.
The overlapping work done by the trio of teams helps develop new technology that benefits each side, from identifying potential weak spots in code to building new tools for the latest threats to strengthening security capabilities that have short- and long-term effects.
Many cybersecurity terms have their roots in computer simulations, video games, military exercises and real-time simulators that many of the experts have studied to learn the tricks of the trade. So, red teams try to identify an attack path to breach organizations’ security defenses through real-world attack strategies. Blue teams attempt to defend those attacks and prevent the red team from breaching existing defenses. Green teams help mitigate high-risk, systemic security issues and fix them at scale by building in learnings and tools from the red and blue teams.
Nearly 400 wind farms in Ireland today collectively generate more than 35% of the island’s electricity. These carbon-free electrons travel on power transmission lines to farms, businesses and homes, helping utilities avoid emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels to generate electricity.
Like everywhere around the world, the intensity of the wind in Ireland fluctuates throughout the day and over the course of the seasons, which causes variable power production. As the supply of renewable energy increases, a growing problem for electric power grid operators is created. That’s because they need to only put on the exact amount of energy that users are pulling out. No more, no less.
Banks of lithium-ion batteries at a Microsoft datacenter in Dublin will be a part of the solution to this problem later this year.
These batteries, which typically provide backup power for the datacenter in case of emergency, have been certified, tested and approved for connection to the grid in a way that helps grid operators provide uninterrupted service when demand exceeds the supply generated elsewhere on the grid by wind, solar and other sources.
Providing this grid service “is a way for us to unlock the value of the datacenter,” said Nur Bernhardt, a senior program manager for energy at Microsoft.
Grid decarbonization
Power grid operators around the world typically rely on running coal and natural gas fired power plants to maintain what is called spinning reserve, or excess capacity, that can respond quickly to provide grid services.
The ability to use the datacenter’s batteries to provide these services reduces the need to maintain spinning reserve at power plants, which lowers power sector carbon emissions, Bernhardt explained.
The batteries are part of what’s called the uninterruptible power supply, or UPS, for the datacenter. The UPS in Microsoft’s Dublin datacenter includes new technology that enables real-time interaction with the electric power grid.
If grid-interactive UPS systems replace the grid services currently provided by fossil fuel power plants in Ireland and Northern Ireland, about two million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions could be avoided in 2025, according to Baringa, an energy advisory firm that Microsoft commissioned to analyze the potential impact of the technology.
“This is definitely moving the dial on emissions at a national level,” said Mark Turner, a partner in Baringa’s energy practice who helped perform the analysis.
Two million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions is about one-fifth of the total emissions expected across the island of Ireland from the power sector in 2025, he explained.
What’s more, by relying on grid-interactive UPS technology for grid services, end consumers across Ireland would save tens of millions of dollars on fuel and other costs required to maintain the spinning reserve at coal and natural gas fired power plants.
“The third win is you reduce the amount you have to turn down renewables,” Turner said. “That’s because if you turn gas-fired power stations on to provide this service, you’ve got to turn something else off. Often that’s renewables. If you provide this with UPS, you no longer have to do that.”
John Byrne (right), head of operations for Enel X UK & Ireland, and Michal Frąckowiak, field operations engineer at Enel X UK & Ireland examine data on computer screens during a system test of the grid-interactive UPS inside a Microsoft datacenter in Dublin, Ireland. Photo by Naoise Culhane.
Datacenters as grid assets
People who run datacenters often talk about the “five nines” of reliability, which is shorthand for a promise to customers that the datacenter is online 99.999% of the time. To do that, datacenter operators rely in part on the batteries in the UPSs to kick on the moment a power outage occurs and provide power to the servers while the backup generators are fired up.
The main purpose of the UPS system is to provide power conditioning for the servers. The UPS system is always on, providing protection to the servers. In 2017, Microsoft started to explore the potential to leverage these assets.
“The concept was to use the UPS, which is providing continuous protection, change the controller on the UPS and provide services back to the grid,” said Ehsan Nasr, a senior design researcher who works in Microsoft’s datacenter advanced development group.
Grid frequency is becoming more volatile as the supply of variable renewable energy on the grid increases, noted Christian Belady, distinguished engineer and vice president of Microsoft’s datacenter advanced development group.
This increase in volatility, in turn, increases the value of assets such as batteries that can help maintain the balance between supply and demand, he explained.
“We have this battery asset in the datacenter that is just sitting there,” Belady said. “Why don’t we offer it to the grid and come up with a dynamic way of managing it as a dual-purpose asset and thus drive more efficiency and asset utilization? That’s what drove this win-win situation.”
To that end, his team partnered with intelligent power management company, Eaton, to develop and test a grid-interactive UPS. They performed proof-of-concept experiments in 2020 at a Microsoft datacenter in Chicago and have continued to refine the technology at Microsoft’s datacenter in Quincy, Washington.
“We are making sure that we can provide the exact functionality of the UPS and, at the same time, provide ancillary services back to the grid with secure communication between the datacenter and the utility,” Nasr said.
Christian Belady, distinguished engineer and vice president of Microsoft’s datacenter advanced development group, stands next to a two-phase immersion cooling tank at a Microsoft datacenter. Photo by Gene Twedt for Microsoft.
A business case in Ireland
With the grid-interactive UPS technology demonstrated as a viable provider of grid services, the next step was to find a market with a business case for deployment, said Mycah Gambrell-Ermak, a principal program manager at Microsoft who worked on this project and is now on the supply chain strategy team.
Microsoft found an opportunity in Ireland, where variable renewables already account for more than 35% of the island’s electricity and that figure is expected to grow to 80% by 2030. This level of variable power production requires grid-stabilization services typically provided by fossil fuel power plants.
“In areas where municipalities or utilities are trying to get away from fossil-based solutions, if there is a dip in renewable reserves, what we can do as a company is take our large amount of load and we can reduce our load by putting our own batteries to use,” Gambrell-Ermak said.
EirGrid, the transmission system operator in Ireland, runs a market for grid services that prioritizes non-carbon-emitting solutions. Microsoft is participating in this market through Enel X, an energy services and solutions provider that aggregates industrial and commercial energy consumers into virtual power plants.
“Utilities, by way of aggregators, can give us a signal that tells us to discharge our batteries to compensate for our load, which then takes the burden off of the grid,” Gambrell-Ermak explained.
John Byrne, head of operations for Enel X UK & Ireland, performs a system test on the grid-interactive UPS inside a Microsoft datacenter in Dublin, Ireland. Photo by Naoise Culhane.
Blueprint for the world
EirGrid’s market for grid services is a blueprint for how technologies, such as grid-interactive UPS systems at datacenters and other industrial facilities, can help decarbonize electric power grids around the world, according to Paul Troughton, senior director of regulatory affairs for Enel X.
“I often think of Ireland as a vision of the future of what other systems’ grids will be like,” he said.
As other countries transition to a greater reliance on renewable energy, they will encounter a similar situation.
“As you add renewables, your conventional plants will retire and you can’t call on them to provide the services they would traditionally provide,” Troughton said. “You need to do something to get better at managing frequency.”
Microsoft is exploring opportunities to provide grid-stabilization services with grid-interactive UPS technology at its datacenters around the world to further accelerate progress toward grid-decarbonization, Bernhardt said.
The grid-interactive UPS initiative is part of the company’s commitment to be carbon negative by 2030, which also includes experiments at datacenters with liquid immersion cooling for servers, hydrogen fuel cells for backup power generation, along with changes in operation to increase efficiency and design such as high-density cold plate solutions.
“The long-term vision is to turn the datacenter assets into something that can provide social benefit outside of our own operations,” Bernhardt said.
EirGrid’s grid-services market, he explained, provides an opportunity for companies like Microsoft to deploy solutions that address grid reliability concerns associated with the growth of renewables.
“We can still maintain our requirements around reliability to our customers but at the same time utilize our infrastructure to provide reliability to the grid, as well as lower CO2 emissions and reduce costs for all energy consumers.”
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John Roach writes about Microsoft research and innovation. Follow him on Twitter.
Top image: Top image: Nearly 400 wind farms in Ireland generate more than 35% of the island’s electricity. Microsoft’s grid-interactive UPS system helps balance the electric power grid at times when demand outstrips available supply from wind and other sources. Photo by Paul Briden, Adobe Stock.
For more than a quarter of a century, violence was nearly constant in Ovejas, Sucre, a small town in the foothills of the Montes de María in northern Colombia. The region was the scene of fierce clashes between armed groups and a mass exodus of its inhabitants. Their cultural richness, music and traditions stopped in time, along with the region’s development.
With the signing of a national peace agreement in 2016, the people began to return along with opportunities: previously impenetrable territories managed to connect again with government and private organizations, and Ovejas came out of isolation.
With Microsoft’s Airband Initiative, which aims to close the digital divide and bring high-speed internet connectivity to communities around the world, connectivity has arrived in this remote region of Colombia and opened a new world for hundreds of children and young people.
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“My children tell me they have learned so much from the internet, and that is so important,” said Wilmar Hernández, who shares the courtyard of his house with the San José de Almagra school. He makes a living growing tobacco, and today his children teach him how to handle a cell phone.
“Now one’s children have all the possibilities,” he said.
Thanks to broadband access provided through the Airband initiative and Microsoft’s local broadcasting partner Telecaribe, 650 children from eight schools tucked among the dusty streets and green mountains around Ovejas have been able to experience internet connectivity for the first time. Colombia is one of the Latin American countries that has made the most progress with the Airband Initiative, which has connected more than 180 schools and community centers there.
To get to school, many children and young people living near Ovejas must walk kilometers under the sun and rain on difficult roads. Some children from the indigenous reserves arrive on donkeys’ backs, while others ride on the motorcycle of a neighbor traveling to town.
On a typical day they now arrive punctually to learn on the screens of cell phones that relatives or friends lend them. They read, review video sessions and download curriculum guides with the help of teachers such as Wílmer García, multigrade teacher of the San José de Almagra Educational Institution, headquarters of Escuela Nueva Activa Las Mercedes.
Research shows that that 77 million people living in rural Latin America lack internet connectivity with minimum quality standards. Microsoft’s Airband Initiative aims to change that. Photos by Nicolás Congote.
In a single classroom of about 40 square meters (430 square feet), García improvises virtual learning guides in which he shares material interactively. His goal is to inspire children and young people to finish school and then take the next step to professional, technical or technological university careers.
Forty minutes from there, at the El Camping Education Center, his colleague Julio Hernández teaches natural science lessons to a handful of children in a classroom that 20 years ago sheltered workers who built the road that connects Ovejas with Sincelejo, the capital of the Sucre Department.
“The internet connection…came when children needed it most, just in time for virtual classes,” said Hernández. “People came from other schools to connect, and it was also very useful for students of technical education programs. Here they had connectivity, a roof and furniture to do their projects and assignments and even to connect to their online classes.”
Connectivity with purpose
Research conducted by the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA), the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and Microsoft in 24 countries in Latin America indicates that 77 million people living in rural populations lack connectivity with minimum quality standards. This connectivity gap limits the social, economic and productive potential of the region.
In Colombia, the differences in broadband access between cities and the countryside remain stark, with 71% coverage for urban areas and only 37% for the countryside. Some remote areas are completely cut off from a world that is increasingly digital. According to the study conducted by IICA, Microsoft and the IDB, only 9.4% of households in rural areas have a desktop, laptop or tablet computer, which has hindered access to educational and professional opportunities in these communities.
García, who has been teaching in the region for 21 years, sees technology, but above all connectivity, as essential for young people to succeed today.
Colombia is one of the Latin American countries that has made the most progress with Microsoft’s Airband Initiative, which has connected more than 180 schools and community centers there. Photos by Nicolás Congote.
“For decades they were lagging behind in the countryside, dedicated exclusively to agriculture, and did not envision living here. Today this technology is giving them a new vision because they can go to study and, if they want, return to work in their field, but with better tools and knowledge,” he said.
Paula Imitola lives next to the El Camping Education Center, which she first attended when she was five years old. Today, she has a preschooler and fifth grader who study there. In addition to her children’s classes, Imitola found support to finish her studies there — with her computer in hand, she sat outside the school for two, three hours to do her work and take virtual classes.
‘When the internet came, many kids who are in college or high school, as well as parents and the community in general, benefited. Even people who are not part of the community came here to connect, to do errands, to make their resume, to look for a job,” she said.
In addition to its educational component, Airband Colombia has projects in agriculture, health and local empowerment aimed at reactivating the economy and promoting rural development. “There are projects in the coffee, cocoa, livestock and cotton production chains where technology is helping people be more productive, so their costs are lower and they receive more money at the end of the day,” said Germán Otálora, Airband’s director for Latin America.
650 children from eight schools tucked among the dusty streets and green mountains around Ovejas have been able to experience internet connectivity for the first time. Photo by Nicolás Congote.
Telemedicine solutions have also enabled people living in remote areas to access essential medical services as well as specialists in dermatological, cardiovascular and respiratory diseases who have improved their quality of life — without having to journey several days to reach a doctor.
“Progress cannot leave anyone behind,” said Otálora. “Technology is only a means, the true end is to generate development, opportunities and well-being.”
Top image: Microsoft’s Airband Initiative has brought internet connectivity for the first time to Ovejas, Sucre, a small town in the foothills of the Montes de Maria in northern Colombia. Photo by Nicolás Congote
When Microsoft unveiled Azure Synapse Analytics a year ago, the company promised to put data and the power of analytics at people’s fingertips – anywhere in an organization – while freeing up skilled tech workers to focus on higher-value tasks than managing data infrastructure.
“We started with the hypothesis that it’s too difficult for many organizations to use their own data and deploy AI, and there aren’t enough software engineers on the planet to fill the shoes of all of the analytics that’s going to need to get done,” said John Macintyre, director of product, Azure Synapse and Analytics Platforms at Microsoft. “We knew we could make this tremendously simpler.”
With Azure Synapse, Microsoft offers limitless data warehousing and analytics, connecting and simplifying multiple sources of data so any organization can get more utility out of its own information.
On Thursday, Microsoft announced that the latest version of Azure Synapse is generally available, and the company also unveiled a new data governance solution, Azure Purview.
In the year since Azure Synapse was announced, Microsoft says the number of Azure customers running petabyte-scale workloads – or the equivalent of 500 billion pages of standard printed text – has increased fivefold.
That includes global delivery giant FedEx. The company is collaborating with Microsoft to build FedEx Surround, a new platform using Azure ecosystem products including Azure Synapse that helps its customers digitize their supply chains and use data to manage and track inventory in real time.
FedEx scans each of the 16 million packages it delivers daily more than a dozen times before the packages reach their destinations. That generates enormous amounts of useful logistics intelligence. That data is combined with information about traffic and weather and stored in Azure Data Lake Storage, a scalable data storage and analytics service. Using Azure Synapse and FedEx Surround, the company extracts insights that can enable faster, more efficient deliveries.
“The ability to respond to digital signals and adjust the supply chain for the benefit of our customers and their customers is a key differentiator for us. That’s the next-generation value that we want to bring to customers, and it can’t be done without leveraging the power of data,” said Sriram Krishnasamy, senior vice president, strategic programs at FedEx Services.
In the coming months, the company plans to deploy FedEx Surround to support the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, which will require careful orchestration to keep them preserved in the necessary temperature range while moving them quickly through the company’s network.
“The insights we gain from continuous analysis help us optimize our network. So as FedEx moves critical high value shipments across the globe, we can often predict whether that delivery will be disrupted by weather or traffic and remediate that disruption by routing the delivery from another location,” Krishnasamy said.
For Wolters Kluwer, data plays an integral role in its strategic operations, notably in its Health division. Photo courtesy of Wolters-Kluwer.
Using data to better serve patients
Being able to predict and plan for changes – both immediate and longer-term – can make a difference in almost any business. For Wolters Kluwer, a global provider of professional information, software and services, data plays an integral role in its strategic operations, notably in its Health division.
For example, Wolters Kluwer built capabilities into its patient engagement platform that help healthcare providers personalize the approach to following up with a patient after they leave a hospital, based on their preferences. In addition, its clinical surveillance systems leverage real-time patient data from electronic health records to provide timely alerts about critical conditions using predictive models.
Another key area of focus for Wolters Kluwer is data standardization.
“Our customers are trying to normalize and make sense of massive amounts of data. With our Health Language solutions, we have the ability to clean and standardize data and medical terminology to enable analytics on top of it,” said Jean-Claude Saghbini, chief technology officer for Wolters Kluwer, Health.
Prior to adopting Azure Synapse, Wolters Kluwer consolidated much of its health data from multiple locations into Azure Data Lake, eliminating the “data siloes” that made it difficult to access and work with multiple sources of data. Azure Synapse provided the robust machine learning operations (MLOps) needed to create a data lake across products and data sources, as well as data pipelines to support analytics and advanced AI.
“That brought many of our key data assets into one place, so that people can use them and compute on them, and using Azure Synapse to process all of this data is one of the big enablers of that strategy,” Saghbini said.
In another example of the value of optimized data management, Wolters Kluwer was able to tailor its content to the 2 million clinicians who use its clinical decision support platform UpToDate every day. The company’s anonymized clinician search data has even been used by researchers to try to identify early signals of local or global healthcare trends. For example, one study showed that an increase in COVID-19 related searches on UpToDate could signal a spike in COVID-related deaths a month in the future.
A homegrown solution to cataloging data
As customers were previewing Azure Synapse over the past year, Microsoft engineers were busy developing a new data governance service to automate the discovery and cataloging of all data, whether from on-premises, multi-cloud or software as a service (SaaS) locations. Azure Purview, now available in public preview, will initially enable customers to understand exactly what data they have, manage the data’s compliance with privacy regulations and derive valuable insights more quickly.
Azure Purview began as a multi-year internal effort to assist in Microsoft’s own digital transformation and privacy compliance efforts. Mike Flasko, director of products for Azure Purview, heads the team that works with the company’s chief data, privacy and security officers to design analytics products and manage the company’s own volumes of data, as well as the complicated systems Microsoft deploys to manage them.
Like many companies, Microsoft’s data engineers, data scientists and business analysts all need to process and understand these large, intricate data streams.
“As we modernize and work through our own needs, we’ve learned a lot about what it takes to digitally transform Microsoft and manage data privacy,” Flasko said. “More and more customers were telling us that they needed to understand where all their data was, how it moves around and how they could access it. Their challenges were similar to what we were experiencing inside of Microsoft.”
Just as Azure Synapse represented the evolution of the traditional data warehouse, Azure Purview is the next generation of the data catalog, Microsoft says. It builds on the existing data search capabilities, adding enhancements to help customers comply with data handling laws and incorporate security controls.
“Azure Purview was designed to help customers maximize compliant use of their data,” Flasko said. “It ensures you have a comprehensive understanding of your data and how it moves and who you have shared it with, which is critical to effective data use and governance.”
The service includes three main components:
Data discovery, classification and mapping: Azure Purview will automatically find all of an organization’s data on premises or in the cloud and evaluate the characteristics and sensitivity of the data. Beginning in February, the capability will also be available for data managed by other storage providers.
Data catalog: Azure Purview enables all users to search for trusted data using a simple web-based experience. Visual graphs let users quickly see if data of interest is from a trusted source.
Data governance: Azure Purview provides a bird’s-eye view of a company’s data landscape, enabling data officers to efficiently govern data use. This enables key insights such as the distribution of data across environments, how data is moving and where sensitive data is stored.
Microsoft says these improvements will help break down the internal barriers that have traditionally complicated and slowed data governance.
“We wanted to make it as easy as possible for our applications, and our customers’ applications, to interact with each other. We did that by integrating and automating the data systems and teaching them how to speak to Azure Purview. That lets data engineers just be data engineers, and data scientists can just be data scientists,” Flasko said.
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Top image: FedEx is collaborating with Microsoft to build FedEx Surround, which helps its customers digitize their supply chains and use data to manage and track inventory in real time. Image courtesy of FedEx.
Chris Stetkiewicz writes about technology and innovation for Microsoft.
Sitting beside their son during one of his weeks-long hospital stays over the Christmas holidays a few years ago, David and Kirsty Hill had plenty of time to worry and think.
As 12-year-old George lay in an isolation room, receiving antibiotics to treat a bacterial infection related to his cystic fibrosis, a progressive genetic disease that damages the lungs and digestive system, the couple thought about what managing their younger son’s disease involved — the daily regimen of medications and nebulizers, the yearly stints in the hospital, the frequent interruptions to school and work, the dread and worry each time George developed a cough.
David and Kirsty were actively involved in cystic fibrosis charities, running half-marathons and doing 100-mile bike rides to raise funds and awareness. But could they do more? As a domain solution architect for Microsoft UK, David was using his technical skills daily to benefit customers. How, he wondered, could he channel those abilities and tap the expertise of his colleagues to use technology to improve the quality of life for George and other people with the disease?
Those musings in a lonely hospital room led to what could be a groundbreaking approach to managing cystic fibrosis — a solution called Project Breathe that seeks to give patients greater control over their health, might reduce the need for time-consuming and risky hospital visits, and could even prolong life.
The smartphone-based solution allows people with cystic fibrosis to monitor their health at home with devices that measure key indicators such as lung function, blood oxygen levels and activity. That data is then stored in the cloud and can be accessed by clinicians on a dashboard using Power BI, Microsoft’s data visualization platform, to look for trends and determine when patients are becoming unwell. By tracking their own data, patients can intervene earlier and potentially head off serious, lung-damaging infections.
The solution was developed through a consortium involving Microsoft, the U.K.-based Cystic Fibrosis Trust, the University of Cambridge, Royal Papworth Hospital in Cambridge, Microsoft Research and Magic Bullet, a social enterprise company Kirsty Hill runs whose purpose is to improve quality of life and outcomes for people with CF.
The consortium launched a research project on Project Breathe in 2019 to investigate the viability of home monitoring for cystic fibrosis patients. The project was humming along and showing promising results when the coronavirus pandemic hit, bringing the need for remote health monitoring acutely into focus.
Health authorities advised patients with cystic fibrosis, who are particularly vulnerable to respiratory infections, to isolate at home. In-person clinics were canceled across the U.K. and the Project Breathe team shifted into high gear to make its app more broadly available to people who suddenly found themselves trying to manage their cystic fibrosis at home.
“We realized we were sitting on this solution that was restricted to a 100-person research project and thousands of people could benefit from it,” Kirsty Hill says. “Suddenly there was an opportunity to have a much bigger impact.”
Cystic fibrosis, or CF, causes the body to develop thick mucus that can clog lungs and lead to infections and respiratory failure. Better screening and treatments have greatly improved life expectancy, but the disease requires time-intensive daily regimens and is often unpredictable, causing frequent disruptions in patients’ lives — including routine clinics every four to six weeks that involve a multidisciplinary team of specialists and take the better part of a day.
John Winn has cystic fibrosis and says Project Breathe “is incredibly close to my heart.” Photo by Jonathan Banks.
John Winn, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge and part of the Project Breathe team, understands the burden of CF as well as anyone. Winn has cystic fibrosis, and when the pandemic struck, he moved out of the house he shares with his wife and two young children near Cambridge and into a rental home a few minutes away.
He isolated alone there for four months with a supply of food so he didn’t have to come into contact with other people, eating meals with his family twice a day over video chat. Winn moved back with his family for the summer but is prepared to isolate alone again during the school year if need be.
Since Winn’s lung function is diminished by about 30% because of the disease, contracting COVID-19 would pose a serious risk for him, he says. Being able to manage his health at home and stay out of the hospital is critical.
“In the last few years we’ve seen a huge step forward in the drugs available to treat CF, but the processes around managing the disease and the practice of managing it in clinics has not really changed much in 20 years,” Winn says. “Project Breathe is about revolutionizing that.
“I’m very, very excited about it. This project is incredibly close to my heart.”
Dealing with CF was already challenging for Caroline Powell, a busy teacher who lives near Cambridge. She has frequent lung and chest problems, takes about 80 pills a day and has “always had to work hard” at her health. Each time she has a medical appointment or requires hospitalization, Powell worries about who will cover for her and about arranging lessons for her students. After her son was born almost a year and a half ago, those concerns intensified.
“I don’t want him coming to hospital with me all the time or being away from me when I’m hospitalized,” Powell says. “That’s now my biggest incentive to make everything more manageable.”
When Powell heard about Project Breathe during a routine clinic visit to Royal Papworth Hospital in late February, she was eager to try it. She hoped the approach might allow her to head off hospitalizations and avoid some of the clinics she was attending every four weeks. Having more insight into her health also appealed to her.
Project Breathe is helping Caroline Powell gain better insights into her health. Photo by Jonathan Banks.
The Project Breathe kit, which is provided to study participants, includes a free smartphone app, a Fitbit to track activity and sleep, an oximeter that measures oxygen levels in blood and a spirometer that gauges lung function. That data is automatically uploaded to the app, and patients also enter self-reported data on how much they are coughing and how they’re feeling overall. By monitoring her data collected through the app over a period of weeks, Powell realized she needed to start on a course of antibiotics to treat a lung infection. After the pandemic lockdown started in the U.K., she had her first virtual clinic with a CF specialist nurse at Royal Papworth who was able to access her data through the Project Breathe dashboard, which provides graphs and other visual information, and get a clearer picture of her condition.
“We were able to go into a lot of detail because she had all my information there and she’d read over my data,” Powell says. “Unlike a physical clinic where they just use the data from that one appointment, she was able to spot the pattern of my symptoms increasing.”
Powell hopes the Project Breathe approach can enable earlier interventions that will help keep her out of the hospital and minimize disruptions to her life.
“It’s really helpful to give me insights into my own health and spot these patterns of deteriorations before it’s too late,” she says. “So far, it’s really proving to be useful in that way.”
Janet Allen is the director of strategic innovation for the U.K.-based Cystic Fibrosis Trust, which ran an earlier study on the feasibility of home monitoring for CF patients. Led by Andres Floto, a University of Cambridge professor of respiratory biology, in collaboration with Winn, the SmartCareCF study enrolled 148 patients across seven sites, who monitored their health daily for six months.
Allen sees Project Breathe as the way of the future, an approach that empowers people with CF to manage their health care and challenges dated standards of care.
“SmartCare CF has shown the power of providing health care data to individuals who understand and know their own condition, and initial data from the Project Breathe pilot has shown that technology can be safely harnessed to disrupt health care models,” she says.
“The idea that you have to go to hospital even when stable to have your chronic condition managed, whatever that condition is, in this day and age shouldn’t be required. There is a definite need for (Project Breathe).”
After that hospital stay with his son a few years ago, David Hill returned to work in early 2017 and met for coffee with a couple of Microsoft colleagues, Giri Tharmananthar and Tom Chapman, and relayed his idea of using technology to create a remote monitoring system for people with CF.
Kirsty Hill, left, and David Hill are part of the team that created Project Breathe. Photo by Jonathan Banks.
Hill had a chance meeting with Allen at Microsoft and learned that for every 10 CF patients who attend clinics, eight typically did not need to be there and the other two needed medical attention weeks earlier. His goal for creating a self-monitoring system was twofold — to help patients avoid time-consuming clinic visits if they were well and identify declines in their health so they could be treated earlier.
“It was kind of a light-bulb moment, that if we could do something to solve both of those problems, it would improve quality of life,” says Hill, who lives in Reading, west of London. “We built the solution around solving those two problems.”
Tharmananthar was part of a small innovation team incubated at that time in Microsoft Digital that had been looking into solutions for digital health care. The vision of using technology to enable patient-driven health care beyond traditional medical settings had been around for 15 years or more, Tharmananthar says, but hadn’t made much concrete, sustainable progress. Hill’s idea seemed like a promising opportunity.
“Everything Dave wanted to do for cystic fibrosis was a tangible example of this thing we’d been talking about, which is a patient-centric platform that allows clinicians to access patient data,” he says. “There’s a concept of treatment pathways in health care, but it’s usually about the condition, and we wanted to put the patient at the center of it.”
As the project moved forward, Microsoft employees from across the company volunteered their time to help, Tharmananthar says, inspired by the personal story behind Project Breathe and the potential to make a difference.
“It really embodies that thing that Satya (Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO) talks about,” he says. “It’s not about what you do for Microsoft. It’s about the impact you can have in the world with what Microsoft can bring. It really does speak to that.”
With initial funding from Microsoft Digital, Innovate UK and the Cystic Fibrosis Trust, a small team led by Kirsty Hill, with support from Microsoft employees and input from health care professionals and CF patients at Royal Papworth Hospital, developed the Project Breathe app and a back-end solution that securely stores patient data in Azure. The app and solution, built entirely with Microsoft technology, have since been extensively developed and are operated by Magic Bullet for several health organizations in the U.K.
During the SmartCareCF study, Floto and Winn, with help from a Ph.D. student, used patient data to develop a predictive model that uses machine learning to detect signals which might be hidden in the data and can indicate when a patient is becoming unwell. The model is now being tested as part of the current Project Breathe study at Royal Papworth.
The study, which Floto oversees, initially enrolled 95 patients at Royal Papworth and was quickly scaled up after the pandemic hit to include two additional sites in Wales and Scotland, with around 500 patients expected to be enrolled by the end of the year. Plans for the coming year include adding a fourth site in the U.K. and working with Cystic Fibrosis Canada to implement a research study in Toronto.
“Project Breathe is about turning the previous study into a reality, in terms of actually changing clinical practice,” Winn says.
Andres Floto is leading a study on home monitoring for cystic fibrosis patients. Photo by Jonathan Banks.
The first phase of the study aims to prove that home monitoring is safe and effective; later phases will involve testing novel new devices and capabilities with the solution and applying the predictive model to determine when patients are becoming sick. Early results show that the model can identify a decline in a patient’s condition an average of 11 days earlier than antibiotics would typically be started, Floto says. And almost all patients in the study have been able to skip clinics by using the app and reviewing their data with a clinician.
“We think Project Breathe may be a great solution to realize the widespread rolling out of virtual clinics,” Floto says. “If we can intervene earlier, we should be able to protect the lungs from long-term, ongoing damage.”
For Kate Eveling, who enrolled in the study in July 2019, being able to skip clinics has not only reduced the three-hour round trips required to attend them but alleviated her worries about going into hospitals.
“It’s just a scary thing. For me, it gives me a lot of anxiety,” she says. “I definitely think (the Project Breathe approach) is the future of CF clinics. It’s made things a lot easier.”
The novel coronavirus has raised new questions about what the future standard of care for CF patients might look like — whether there will be a return to in-person clinics at some point, more of a reliance on remote clinics, or a mix of both.
“The impact of COVID-19 is that everybody’s been forced to use a completely remote model for an unknown length of time,” Kirsty Hill says. “And what became apparent immediately is that patients already enrolled in Project Breathe have a huge advantage in that doctors can have a data-informed discussion with them, whereas for everybody else, there was no data reference to discuss.”
Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) is providing funding to supply spirometers to thousands of cystic fibrosis patients throughout the U.K., giving CF patients at least one of the pieces of equipment needed for the Project Breathe solution. The team hopes to find funding to cover the costs of making the solution’s back-end available to clinics beyond the study, which the NHS currently doesn’t cover. Ultimately, the goal is to enable Project Breathe to collect patient data passively and eliminate the need for self-monitoring, but reaching that point will require additional funding.
In the meantime, as coronavirus cases are again ticking upward in England and other countries, Project Breathe participants like Sammie Read are getting insights into their health from the safety of home. For years, Read was spending two weeks in the hospital about every three months being treated with antibiotics for infections caused by CF. She takes more than 40 pills a day and follows a daily routine of nebulizers, exercise and physiotherapy.
By monitoring her health at home, Sammie Read has been able to avoid hospitalizations and skip clinic visits. Photo by Jonathan Banks.
About five years ago, Read became so stressed between juggling work and caring for her school-aged son that her health spiraled dangerously downward. On her husband’s urging, she quit her job.
“With CF, it’s quite unpredictable. You can have a perfectly good day and be fine and the next day it’s like bang, you can’t breathe,” says Read, who lives in a rural area near Stowmarket, England. “It’s sort of like you’re just walking on eggshells.”
A longtime patient at Royal Papworth and a participant in the SmartCareCF study, Read heard about the Project Breathe study, enrolled and began monitoring her health at home.
By tracking her data and making adjustments as needed — exercising a little more if her lung function drops, starting antibiotics at home when an infection is coming on — Read went 18 months without being hospitalized. Even before the coronavirus halted in-person clinics, she was able to skip some of her scheduled visits after remotely reviewing her data with a nurse.
These days, with her son moved out of the house and her health more stable, Read is thinking about going back to work.
“Project Breathe has made a massive impact on my life,” says Read. “It’s definitely made my life easier. You’re in control, rather than CF being in control of you.”
Top image: David Hill, left, looks on while his son George uses a spirometer to gauge his lung function. Photo by Jonathan Banks.
Image captioning is a core challenge in the discipline of computer vision, one that requires an AI system to understand and describe the salient content, or action, in an image, explained Lijuan Wang, a principal research manager in Microsoft’s research lab in Redmond.
“You really need to understand what is going on, you need to know the relationship between objects and actions and you need to summarize and describe it in a natural language sentence,” she said.
Wang led the research team that achieved – and beat – human parity on the novel object captioning at scale, or nocaps, benchmark. The benchmark evaluates AI systems on how well they generate captions for objects in images that are not in the dataset used to train them.
Image captioning systems are typically trained with datasets that contain images paired with sentences that describe the images, essentially a dataset of captioned images.
“The nocaps challenge is really how are you able to describe those novel objects that you haven’t seen in your training data?” Wang said.
To meet the challenge, the Microsoft team pre-trained a large AI model with a rich dataset of images paired with word tags, with each tag mapped to a specific object in an image.
Datasets of images with word tags instead of full captions are more efficient to create, which allowed Wang’s team to feed lots of data into their model. The approach imbued the model with what the team calls a visual vocabulary.
The visual vocabulary pre-training approach, Huang explained, is similar to prepping children to read by first using a picture book that associates individual words with images, such as a picture of an apple with the word “apple” beneath it and a picture of a cat with the word “cat” beneath it.
“This visual vocabulary pre-training essentially is the education needed to train the system; we are trying to educate this motor memory,” Huang said.
The pre-trained model is then fine-tuned for captioning on the dataset of captioned images. In this stage of training, the model learns how to compose a sentence. When presented with an image containing novel objects, the AI system leverages the visual vocabulary to generate an accurate caption.
“It combines what is learned in both the pre-training and the fine-tuning to handle novel objects in the testing,” Wang said.
When evaluated on nocaps, the AI system created captions that were more descriptive and accurate than the captions for the same images that were written by people, according to results presented in a research paper.
“We are in a data desert,” said Mary Bellard, principal innovation architect lead at Microsoft who also oversees the AI for Accessibility program. “There’s a lot of passion and energy around doing really cool things with AI and people with disabilities, but we don’t have enough data.”
“It’s like we have the car and the car is packed and ready to go, but there’s no gas in it. We don’t have enough data to power these ideas.”
To begin to shrink that data desert, Microsoft researchers have been working for the past year and a half to investigate and suggest ways to make AI systems more inclusive of people with disabilities. The company is also funding and collaborating with AI for Accessibility grantees to create or use more representative training datasets, such as ORBIT and the Microsoft Ability Initiative with University of Texas at Austin researchers.
Mary Bellard, principal innovation architect lead at Microsoft who oversees the AI for Accessibility program. Photo provided by Bellard.
Today, Team Gleason announced it is partnering with Microsoft on Project Insight, which will create an open dataset of facial imagery of people living with ALS to help advance innovation in computer vision and train those AI models more inclusively.
It’s an industry-wide problem that won’t be solved by one project or organization alone, Microsoft says. But new collaborations are beginning to address the issue.
A research roadmap on AI Fairness and Disability published by Microsoft Research and a workshop on Disability, Bias and AI hosted last year with the AI Now Institute at New York University found a host of potential areas in which mainstream AI algorithms that aren’t trained on inclusive data either don’t work well for people with disabilities or can actively harm them.
If a self-driving car’s pedestrian detection algorithms haven’t been shown examples of people who use wheelchairs or whose posture or gait is different due to advanced age, for example, they may not correctly identify those people as objects to avoid or estimate how much longer they need to safely cross a street, researchers noted.
AI models used in hiring processes that try to read personalities or interpret sentiment from potential job candidates can misread cues and screen out qualified candidates with autism or who emote differently. Algorithms that read handwriting may not be able to cope with examples from people who have Parkinson’s disease or tremors. Gesture recognition systems may be confused by people with amputated limbs or different body shapes.
It’s fairly common for some people with disabilities to be early adopters of intelligent technologies, yet they’ve often not been adequately represented in the data that informs how those systems work, researchers say.
“When technologies are so desired by a community, they’re often willing to tolerate a higher rate of errors,” said Meredith Ringel Morris, senior principal researcher who manages the Microsoft Research Ability Team. “So imperfect AI systems still have value, but they could provide so much more and work so much better if they were trained on more inclusive data.”
‘Pushing the state of the art’
Danna Gurari, an AI for Accessibility grantee and assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin, had that goal in mind when she began developing the VizWiz datasets. They include tens of thousands of photographs and questions submitted by people who are blind or have low vision to an app originally developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University.
The questions run the gamut: What is the expiration date on this milk? What does this shirt say? Do my fingertips look blue? Do these clouds look stormy? Do the charcoal briquettes in this grill look ready? What does the picture on this birthday card look like?
The app originally crowdsourced answers from people across the internet, but Gurari wondered if she could use the data to improve how computer vision algorithms interpret photos taken by people who are blind.
AI for Accessibility grantee Danna Gurari, assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin who developed the VizWiz dataset and directs the School of Information’s Image and Video Computing Group.
Many of those questions require reading text, such as determining how much of an over-the-counter medicine is safe to take. Computer vision research has often treated that as a separate problem, for example, from recognizing objects or trying to interpret low-quality photos. But successfully describing real-world photos requires an integrated approach, Gurari said.
Moreover, computer vision algorithms typically learn from large image datasets of pictures downloaded from the internet. Most are taken by sighted people and reflect the photographer’s interest, with items that are centered and in focus.
But an algorithm that’s only been trained on perfect images is likely to perform poorly in describing what’s in a photo taken by a person who is blind; it may be blurry, off center or backlit. And sometimes the thing that person wants to know hinges on a detail that a person who is sighted might not think to label, such as whether a shirt is clean or dirty.
“Often it’s not obvious what is meaningful to people, and that’s why it’s so important not just to design for — but design these technologies with — people who are in the blind and low vision community,” said Gurari, who also directs the School of Information’s Image and Video Computing Group at the University of Texas at Austin.
Her team undertook the massive task of cleaning up the original VizWiz dataset to make it usable for training machine learning algorithms — removing inappropriate images, sourcing new labels, scrubbing personal information and even translating audio questions into text to remove the possibility that someone’s voice could be recognized.
Earlier this year, Microsoft sponsored an open challenge to other industry and academic researchers to test their image captioning algorithms on the VizWiz dataset. In one common evaluation metric, the top performing algorithm posted a 33% improvement over the prior state of the art.
“This is really pushing the state of the art in captioning for the blind community forward,” said Seeing AI lead engineer Shaikh, who is working with AI for Accessibility grantees and their datasets to develop potential improvements for the app.
In a worldwide first that could jumpstart a long-forecast clean energy economy built around the most abundant element in the universe, hydrogen fuel cells have powered a row of datacenter servers for 48 consecutive hours, Microsoft announced Monday.
Diesel fuel accounts for less than 1% of Microsoft’s overall emissions. Its use is primarily confined to Azure datacenters, where, like at most cloud providers around the world, diesel-powered generators support continuous operations in the event of power outages and other service disruptions.
“They are expensive. And they sit around and don’t do anything for more than 99% of their life,” said Mark Monroe, a principle infrastructure engineer on Microsoft’s team for datacenter advanced development.
Lucas Joppa, Microsoft’s chief environmental officer, is Microsoft’s representative on the Hydrogen Council, a global initiative of leading energy, transport and industry companies to spur the hydrogen economy. Credit: Roderigo De Medeiros
In recent years, hydrogen fuel cell costs have plummeted to the point that they are now an economically viable alternative to diesel-powered backup generators.
“And the idea of running them on green hydrogen fits right in with our overall carbon commitments,” Monroe said.
What’s more, he added, an Azure datacenter outfitted with fuel cells, a hydrogen storage tank and an electrolyzer that converts water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen could be integrated with the electric power grid to provide load balancing services.
For example, the electrolyzer could be turned on during periods of excess wind or solar energy production to store the renewable energy as hydrogen. Then, during periods of high demand, Microsoft could start up the hydrogen fuel cells to generate electricity for the grid.
Hydrogen-powered long-haul vehicles could pullup at datacenters to fill their tanks.
“All of that infrastructure represents an opportunity for Microsoft to play a role in what will surely be a more dynamic kind of overall energy optimization framework that the world will be deploying over the coming years,” said Lucas Joppa, Microsoft’s chief environmental officer.
To further explore how Microsoft can leverage its investment in hydrogen fuel cells and related infrastructure, the company today named Joppa as its representative on the Hydrogen Council, a global initiative of leading energy, transport and industry companies to spur the hydrogen economy.
Scientists have already proved that hydrogen fuel cells can be used to generate greenhouse gas-free energy from the most abundant element in the universe, Joppa noted.
“We know how to do it,” he said. “The council exists because we don’t necessarily know how to scale the generation of hydrogen, transportation of hydrogen, supply of hydrogen and then consumption of it in the various ways that we would like to. There’s still tons of work that needs to be done.”
Replacements for diesel
Mark Monroe, a principle infrastructure engineer on Microsoft’s team for datacenter advanced development, is leading a project exploring the potential of hydrogen fuel cells to power backup generators at datacenters. Credit: Mark Monroe/Microsoft.
Microsoft strives to provide Azure datacenter customers “five-nines” of service availability, which means that the datacenter is operational 99.999% of the time. Backup generators are fired up during power grid outages and other service interruptions.
“We don’t use the diesel generators very much,” Monroe said. “We start them up once a month to make sure they run and give them a load test once a year to make sure we can transfer load to them correctly, but on average they cover a power outage less than one time per year.”
Microsoft is researching replacement technologies to diesel that would maintain or improve service availability and sees promise in hydrogen fuel cells and batteries, explained Brian Janous, general manager of Microsoft’s team for datacenter energy and sustainability strategy.
“The work that the team is doing today is really looking at trying to evaluate the feasibility of different solutions,” he said.
Batteries already supply short-term backup power, filling the 30-second gap between an outage on the grid and the time it takes to power up the diesel generators. More advanced batteries have longer durations.
“If you get to a scenario where the durations that you require are of such a length that batteries cease to be effective, that’s when you would spill over into looking at something like fuel cells,” Janous said.
Proof of concept
Power Innovations built a 250-kilowatt fuel cell system to help Microsoft explore the potential of using hydrogen fuel cells for backup power generation at datacenters. In a proof of concept, the system powered a row of datacenter servers for 48 consecutive hours. Credit: Power Innovations.
The seed for using hydrogen fuel cells for backup power was planted in spring 2018, when researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, powered a rack of computers with a proton exchange membrane, or PEM, hydrogen fuel cell. Monroe and his colleagues were on hand for the demonstration.
“We got intrigued because we knew that they were using an automotive fuel cell,” Monroe said. “An automotive fuel cell has the reaction time like a diesel generator does. It can turn on quickly. It can be ready for a full load within seconds. You can floor it, let it off, let it idle.”
PEM fuel cells combine hydrogen and oxygen in a process that produces water vapor and electricity. Automotive companies are developing the technology to power cars, trucks and other vehicles. After the demonstration, Microsoft started thinking about using fuel cells for backup power at datacenters.
Monroe’s team procured a 250-kilowatt fuel cell system, which is sufficient to power a full row, on the order of 10 racks, of datacenter servers. Tests began at Power Innovations, the system developer, outside Salt Lake City in September 2019. The system passed the 24-hour endurance test that December; the 48-hour test this June.
“It is the largest computer backup power system that we know that is running on hydrogen and it has run the longest continuous test,” Monroe said.
The next step for the team is to procure and test a 3-megawatt fuel cell system, which is on par with the size of diesel-powered backup generators at Azure datacenters.
Fuel cell explorations
Brian Janous is general manager of Microsoft’s team for datacenter energy and sustainability strategy. His team is exploring replacement technologies to diesel powered backup generators. Credit: Scott Eklund/Red Box Pictures.
Even before that 2018 demonstration, Microsoft had been looking at ways to use fuel cells. The company started to explore fuel cell technology in 2013 with the National Fuel Cell Research Center at the University of California, Irvine, where they tested the idea of powering racks of servers with solid oxide fuel cells, or SOFCs, which are fueled by natural gas.
“They have the ability to make their own hydrogen out of the natural gas feed that they get,” Monroe explained. “They take natural gas, a little bit of water, they heat it up to 600 degrees C, which is the temperature of a hot charcoal fire.”
That’s hot enough for a process called steam methane reformation that generates a stream of hydrogen atoms for electricity generation.
Microsoft has continued to explore the potential of SOFC fuel cell technology to provide baseload power, which could free datacenters from the electric power grid while making them 8 to 10 times more energy efficient. For now, though, the technology remains too expensive for widespread deployment.
The SOFC process also produces carbon dioxide, which is another reason that Microsoft is exploring PEM fuel cells, Monroe noted.
In addition, estimated costs for PEM fuel cell systems for backup power generation at datacenters have fallen more than 75% since the demonstration at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. If the trend continues, in a year or two the capital costs of fuel cell generators could be price competitive with diesel generators.
The increased production of fuel cells to meet the demand from the datacenter industry could potentially further drive down costs, he added.
“We very much see ourselves as a catalyst in this whole hydrogen economy,” Monroe said.
Hydrogen economy
From Microsoft’s perspective, other parts of this economy include infrastructure to procure, store and maintain a sufficient supply of green hydrogen to power the backup generators for 12 to 48 hours, which is standard in the industry to enable those “five nines” of service availability.
For example, for 48 hours of backup power generation, each datacenter would require up to 100,000 kilograms of hydrogen to fuel the backup generators for an extended power outage, Monroe said.
Internal conversations about how to secure this infrastructure have led to discussions about the role Microsoft could play in spurring the hydrogen economy, Janous noted.
“What if you could take all of these assets the datacenter has and integrate them into the grid in a way that helps to further accelerate decarbonization of the grid more broadly rather than just a point solution for the datacenter itself,” he said. “That’s where I think all of this gets interesting.”
Top image: Microsoft used hydrogen stored in tanks on trailers parked outside a lab near Salt Lake City, Utah, to fuel hydrogen fuel cells that powered a row of datacenter servers for 48 consecutive hours. Credit: Power Innovations.
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John Roach writes about Microsoft research and innovation. Follow him on Twitter.
