Recent News – Page 111

Posted on March 10, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Microsoft named Fast Company’s most innovative workplace company of 2020

Whether helping employees to communicate more seamlessly or helping underemployed mid-career women boost their incomes, these 10 companies are creating new ways to make working life fairer and more rewarding.

For taking the slack out of messaging communications for first-line employees

It’s hard to argue with Microsoft’s dominance: Teams has more than 20 million daily users, with 91 of the Fortune 100 utilizing the platform. Last year’s improvements included greater AI integration, as well as additional tools for first-line workers (those working in people-facing positions, like doctors, or service industry employees).

Read more about why Microsoft is one of the World’s Most Innovative Companies of 2020.

2. Mursion

For teaching EQ via VR for the likes of Coca-Cola, Nationwide, and T-Mobile

Mursion is a virtual reality training tool that combines AI and interactions with trained actors to help develop stronger soft skills among employees, such as the ability to recognize bias. Clients include companies like T-Mobile, Coca-Cola, Best Western, and Nationwide.

3. Pipeline Equity

For giving companies the tools to improve gender equality when they hire and promote

Founded in 2017, Pipeline demonstrates the connection between gender parity and economic opportunity. The subscription-based platform analyzes company-specific data to make recommendations about moves that will both increase business outcomes and improve gender balance.

4. Dropbox

For thinking outside the file folder

The company introduced numerous enhancements in 2019, including integrations with various other platforms (like Google Docs/Sheets/Slides) and a cold-storage option. Dropbox also acquired e-signature company HelloSign, and adopted SHR storage, which reduces energy use and costs for storage at data centers.

5. Docusign

For closing mortgages in the cloud

Document signing isn’t the sexiest topic, but it is a critical one. The company has expanded into a number of related areas, including DocuSign rooms for Mortgages and DocuSign Identity, for verification of IDs.

6. Coda

For applying app-like functionality to document creation

A flexible doc and management tool, Coda emphasizes the idea of democratization of software, enabling users to build app-like solutions without a coding background. Officially launched in February 2019, Coda is already used by a number of companies, including Spotify, Cheddar, and Uber.

7. The Second Shift

For creating flexible gigs for mid-career women

The Second Shift is a small company, but it’s tackling a critical workforce problem: lack of flexible opportunities for women, especially mid-career, when many are assuming primary caregiving responsibilities for children and/or parents. The company connects employers with experienced women to fill in for positions or tackle special projects.

8. Bluecrew

For matching workers with hourly jobs with health insurance, overtime, sick pay, and workers comp

At a time when many gig-economy employers don’t offer workers comprehensive protections, Bluecrew is helping secure benefits for hourly workers at companies like Blue Bottle and Levi’s Stadium.

9. Lattice

For making performance reviews a continual process via apps

The HR software company is working with more than 1,400 companies to integrate management processes into tools employees are already using, such as Slack.

10. Samepage

For putting chat, email, files, and tasks on the same . . . you know

Samepage is emerging as a leading collaborative tool in the booming intranet market, offering such features as integrated videoconferencing and threaded chats.

Read more about Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies:

Posted on March 10, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

New action to disrupt world’s largest online criminal network

Today, Microsoft and partners across 35 countries took coordinated legal and technical steps to disrupt one of the world’s most prolific botnets, called Necurs, which has infected more than nine million computers globally. This disruption is the result of eight years of tracking and planning and will help ensure the criminals behind this network are no longer able to use key elements of its infrastructure to execute cyberattacks.

A botnet is a network of computers that a cybercriminal has infected with malicious software, or malware. Once infected, criminals can control those computers remotely and use them to commit crimes. Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit, BitSight and others in the security community first observed the Necurs botnet in 2012 and have seen it distribute several forms of malware, including the GameOver Zeus banking trojan.

The Necurs botnet is one of the largest networks in the spam email threat ecosystem, with victims in nearly every country in the world. During a 58-day period in our investigation, for example, we observed that one Necurs-infected computer sent a total of 3.8 million spam emails to over 40.6 million potential victims.

Necurs is believed to be operated by criminals based in Russia and has also been used for a wide range of crimes including pump-and-dump stock scams, fake pharmaceutical spam email and “Russian dating” scams. It has also been used to attack other computers on the internet, steal credentials for online accounts, and steal people’s personal information and confidential data. Interestingly, it seems the criminals behind Necurs sell or rent access to the infected computer devices to other cybercriminals as part of a botnet-for-hire service. Necurs is also known for distributing financially targeted malware and ransomware, cryptomining, and even has a DDoS (distributed denial of service) capability that has not yet been activated but could be at any moment.

On Thursday, March 5, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York issued an order enabling Microsoft to take control of U.S.-based infrastructure Necurs uses to distribute malware and infect victim computers. With this legal action and through a collaborative effort involving public-private partnerships around the globe, Microsoft is leading activities that will prevent the criminals behind Necurs from registering new domains to execute attacks in the future.

This was accomplished by analyzing a technique used by Necurs to systematically generate new domains through an algorithm. We were then able to accurately predict over six million unique domains that would be created in the next 25 months. Microsoft reported these domains to their respective registries in countries around the world so the websites can be blocked and thus prevented from becoming part of the Necurs infrastructure. By taking control of existing websites and inhibiting the ability to register new ones, we have significantly disrupted the botnet.

Microsoft is also taking the additional step of partnering with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and others around the world to rid their customers’ computers of malware associated with the Necurs botnet. This remediation effort is global in scale and involves collaboration with partners in industry, government and law enforcement via the Microsoft Cyber Threat Intelligence Program (CTIP). Through CTIP, Microsoft provides law enforcement, government Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERTs), ISPs and government agencies responsible for the enforcement of cyber laws and the protection of critical infrastructure with better insights into criminal cyber infrastructure located within their jurisdiction, as well as a view of compromised computers and victims impacted by such criminal infrastructure.

For this disruption, we are working with ISPs, domain registries, government CERTs and law enforcement in Mexico, Colombia, Taiwan, India, Japan, France, Spain, Poland and Romania, among others. Each of us has a critical role to play in protecting customers and keeping the internet safe.

To make sure your computer is free of malware, visit support.microsoft.com/botnets.

Posted on March 10, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Meet some of the amazing women on the Microsoft Quantum team

In honor of International Women’s Day, Microsoft is proud to recognize some of the amazing women of Microsoft Quantum. These engineers, scientists, program managers and business leaders are working toward realizing Microsoft’s mission of building a scalable quantum computer and global quantum community to help solve some of the world’s most challenging problems.

Last year, we introduced you to some of the women working on quantum software; this year we’re profiling more women delivering impact in the Microsoft Quantum program, across quantum hardware, software, partnerships, and business development.

This is the second of a two-part series. In case you missed it, meet The Women of Microsoft Quantum in Part 1.

Sydney Schreppler – Quantum Hardware Engineer

Q: Tell us more about your role in the Microsoft Quantum group. What exciting things are you working on right now?

I am a Quantum Engineer working as part of a global hardware team that characterizes quantum materials for the development of our topological qubit technology. Our team measures electrical transport properties in cryogenic environments, probing the quantum nature of the materials. Right now I’m excited to be working in Redmond, where, together with the Quantum Systems team, we span Microsoft’s full quantum stack, from our topological qubit layer at the very bottom all the way up to the algorithms offered in Azure Quantum.

Q: What was it that attracted you to the technology field? How and why did you decide to join the domain of quantum computing?

Long before I knew I wanted to study physics, people around me seemed to know it. I think it was because I was always asking for simple explanations for how the world worked and because I liked to understand those answers through a mathematical lens. Once I started studying physics, the more I learned, the simpler and more elegant the explanations got.

What attracted me to quantum measurements first, and later to quantum computing, was the idea that something that seemed so non-intuitive and mysterious was nonetheless observable, and even useful! I wanted to see quantum effects for myself, so as a college student, I sought out opportunities in labs measuring quantum things. And once I had “seen” quantum, I was hooked. I measured the quantum mechanical motion of tiny membranes, the interaction of ultracold atoms with laser light (obtaining my Ph.D. in physics along the way), and the quantum entanglement of superconducting circuits. Now at Microsoft, I get to harness these same kinds of measurements to develop our quantum hardware.

Amrita Singh – Quantum Hardware Engineer

Q: Tell us more about your role in the Microsoft Quantum group. What exciting things are you working on right now?

I am a hardware engineer and coordinate the substrate fabrication activities with a small team of nanofabrication engineers at Microsoft Quantum Labs – Delft. We engineer the substrates and create a platform for selective area growth of a high-quality III-V semiconductor/ superconductor hybrid network, which is a building block of the topological quantum qubit.

Q: What was it that attracted you to the technology field? How and why did you decide to join the domain of quantum computing?

I was born and raised in a remote rural village in northern India where a girl’s education wasn’t important and the only expectation from a girl was to get married at an early age, raise children, and at the most, become a primary school teacher in the village. Mathematics and Science were considered to be boys’ subjects and weren’t even available as an option until the senior year at my all-girls school when I started. I was fortunate though, in that they were introduced a year before I reached my final year.

I studied science in my school to prove my worthiness as much as the boys in the neighborhood, but didn’t fully believe in it because it conflicted with my belief in God and other superstitions. But I always loved mathematics because of its precision, as no belief could justify 2+2≠4.

My exposure to technology was very limited and I had my first encounter with computers during my Masters (Physics) degree at IIT Delhi. During my Ph.D. in Experimental Condensed Matter Physics, I started appreciating the power of scientific attitude when I would verify a hypothesis with experimental data. Being an experimental physicist, I would feel restless for my blind faith and that is when I started to question my deep-rooted superstitions and religious beliefs, getting rid of them over the course of about four to five years. This was only possible due to my career choice in Science and Technology and it has shaped me into who I am today.

I did my Ph.D. on quantum devices for spintronic application and I extended my knowledge to superconducting spintronics during my postdoc work at Leiden University, where I gained expertise in interface engineering for hybrid quantum devices. I believed that, with my diverse background in quantum physics and device engineering, I would be able to contribute toward the realization of an ambitious topological quantum computer at Microsoft, as well as be able to learn and grow without limit by working with great minds.

Science for me is not just a profession but a way of living. I strongly believe that we could change the lives of millions of unprivileged deserving children in the world by giving quality education and bring them into the mainstream by using technologies.

Aarthi Meenakshi Sundaram – Researcher

Q: Tell us more about your role in the Microsoft Quantum group. What exciting things are you working on right now?

I am a postdoctoral researcher in the Research and Applications team at Microsoft Quantum, where my overarching goal is to understand both the power and limitations of using quantum computers to solve some of our most challenging problems. Sometimes, this means defining efficient quantum algorithms for various problems. Other times, this means defining a mathematically rigorous computational model and analyzing which problems are “easy” or “difficult” in this model à la complexity theory.

Currently, I am looking forward to tackling both aspects in the context of quantum machine learning. It’s a nascent but rapidly evolving area with new algorithms being discovered and comes with its own set of challenges for us to understand precisely what kinds of learning problems can be sped up with quantum resources and to what extent. In classical computational learning theory, there are many well-established models of learning. Inevitably, we find that there may be various ways to “quantize” these models (i.e., add some “quantum magic” to these models, and each way could be useful in vastly different scenarios – some abstract/mathematical, some very real and even implementable in the near-term on quantum computers! Investigating these in all their variations is what excites me right now.

On a slightly different track, I also care about building tools that could help to efficiently verify quantum programs – through type checking or other methods. One of the main challenges is that any quantum program debugger that observes or measures how a quantum state is manipulated in the program could destroy the quantum nature of the state itself. Another challenge is that certain techniques that work well on small quantum programs will scale badly with the size of our program and could take too long to verify realistically. So, along with my collaborators here, we are investigating ways to build efficient type checkers that could provide us with the ability to verify some, if not all of the properties of interest in a quantum program.

Q: What was it that attracted you to the technology field? How and why did you decide to join the domain of quantum computing?

I have been reliably informed by my mother that, as a 4- or 5-year old, I took great joy in sitting on her lap and helping her with her programming work by entering the programs into our computer at home and marveling at this new object that knew how to follow my orders (or throw error messages!) So, while I don’t remember ever having to make a conscious choice to work in the world of computing, it has always seemed like a foregone conclusion in my mind, leading to my Math and Computer Science majors during undergrad.

For the first time at my university, one of my professors offered a course in quantum information and computing. I had just started getting interested in cryptography then and being introduced to this new computing model that could break state-of-the-art cryptosystems was a revelation! I was intrigued by this field that almost sounded like something out of science fiction and seemed so counterintuitive, at first.

Encouraged by my professor to pursue it beyond that one course, it was a natural progression for me to eventually pursue a Ph.D. in quantum complexity theory. It allowed me to blend the skills I had learned from both of my undergrad majors seamlessly. Being interested in the more abstract and theoretical aspects of computer science, I spent my Ph.D. analyzing the power of quantum analogs of various computational models. A continuous inspiration since I’ve delved more into quantum computing is that by living at the intersection and cutting edge of many different fields, one gets to work and learn from people whose expertise is vastly different than your own. With Microsoft Quantum’s aim of delivering a full stack of quantum services, that means, I am thrilled for the opportunity to interact with everyone from material scientists to mathematicians within the team.

Judith Suter – Senior Researcher

Q: Tell us more about your role in the Microsoft Quantum group. What exciting things are you working on right now?

In my work as a Senior Researcher in the Microsoft Quantum Hardware Program, I focus mainly on electrical characterization of different device types, materials, and fabrication processes. My days revolve around planning and designing experiments, running and optimizing low-temperature measurements, and exploring the resulting aggregated data. As part of a global team, another element of my job is cross-site collaboration where we leverage the diverse expertise of the whole team to collectively tackle challenging projects.

Recently I also became part of the Azure Hardware Systems and Infrastructure Diversity and Inclusion Council, where I represent the Quantum Hardware Program. I am excited to help drive the efforts towards the ambitious goals of Microsoft to fuel systemic change, widen our pipelines to reach and engage a diverse group of people, and transform our culture to ensure that everyone feels welcome and valued.

Q: What was it that attracted you to the technology field? How and why did you decide to join the domain of quantum computing?

My path to working on quantum computing was not without detours. As a high school student, I was fascinated by surrealist painters and the strange but self-consistent worlds they portrayed, so I commenced my studies at an arts and graphic design academy. Eventually, I left, longing to do something completely different, something I knew nothing about. I signed up for an undergraduate degree in Nanoscience, where I felt I could get a taste of different scientific fields. There, quantum physics intrigued me from the start: counterintuitive concepts born out of creative boldness – surprisingly, some lectures ended up reminding me of my art classes studying surrealism. I was hooked. I bought a one-way ticket to the epicenter of quantum physics, the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, joined Prof. Charles Marcus’ lab there at the Center for Quantum Devices and started my training to become a quantum physicist.

Vicky Svidenko – Partner Quantum Data Sciences

Q: Tell us more about your role in the Microsoft Quantum group. What exciting things are you working on right now?

I am leading the Quantum Systems Integration team – helping to accelerate quantum research and development. The Microsoft Quantum group is exploring ways to build a full-stack quantum computer and has become the world’s center of expertise on topological quantum computing. I am incredibly humbled by the opportunity to support this development effort and contribute to the new breakthroughs, together with an amazing team of talented researchers and engineers.

Q: What was it that attracted you to the technology field? How and why did you decide to join the domain of quantum computing?

I came to Quantum because I enjoy the loosely orchestrated chaos of early product development and the frenzy of excitement for every new learning and every new benchmark. I like that incredible sensation of being part of something futuristically amazing, now evolving and materializing.

Another reason: This was my first opportunity to work for an amazing female manager – Krysta Svore – and I wasn’t going to miss it.

Meet more of The Women of Microsoft Quantum in Part 1 of this series.

This is just a small sample of the amazing people on the Microsoft Quantum team. If you want to join us as we build the quantum future, we’re hiring!

Posted on March 10, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Teams from Kenya and Tunisia win Imagine Cup EMEA Regional Finals with AI-based weeding solution and Alzheimer’s support app

Ten student teams from across nine European, Middle Eastern, and African countries pitched their tech solutions at the 2020 Imagine Cup EMEA Regional Final this week. Each team brought a project ignited from their passion and developed with purpose, impact, and Microsoft Azure. The event concluded with the selection of the top two EMEA teams moving forward to this year’s World Championship at Microsoft Build – congratulations Team The Knights from Kenya and RedWalls from Tunisia for taking home the winning spots!

The Imagine Cup aims to inspire students to use their imagination and passion for technology to create innovative and inclusive projects that tackle some of the world’s biggest social, environmental, and health challenges. Taking on this challenge, The Knights created an automated weeding bot to help farmers eliminate the need for herbicides in their crops, and Team RedWalls created a mobile application designed for Alzheimer’s patients and their caregivers to help evaluate and train the user’s memory.

Out of hundreds of EMEA submissions, the ten regional finalist teams virtually showcased their innovations to a panel of judges to compete for prizes totaling USD20,000, Azure credits, and two spots in the 2020 World Championship. With ideas encompassing solutions in education, wildlife conservation, cancer detection, emotional wellbeing, accessibility, and more, judges had a difficult task selecting which teams to advance. 

Congratulations to all our winners and thank you to everyone who participated in bringing your passion to life! We’d also like to give a special thank you to our competition judges for their expertise and time.

Meet the winning teams: 

World Finalist – Team The Knights, Kenya 

The Knights created an automated robot using artificial intelligence to identify and remove weeds from rows of crops. Their solution uses cameras as sensors to gather input from the environment and eliminate farmers’ need to use environmentally harmful pesticides in their weeding.

Prizes: USD8,000, Azure credits, a spot in the 2020 Imagine Cup World Championship  

World Finalist – Team RedWalls, Tunisia

Team RedWalls created I-Remember, a two-part mobile application designed for the wellbeing of both Alzheimer’s patients and their caregivers. The patient interface includes task reminders, live facial recognition, labelled photos, emergency location and call assistance, as well as memory games to help evaluate and train the user’s memory. The caregiver interface provides the same, but with supervisor features.

Prizes: USD8,000, Azure credits, a spot in the 2020 Imagine Cup World Championship  

Runner-up – Team Wild Eye, Kenya

The team’s project, Wild Eye_KE, brings technology to the wild by monitoring and tracking animal activities. Wild Eye_KE will notify authorities if animals move away from the wildlife protected areas in an effort to reduce poaching and human interaction.

Prizes: USD2,500 and Azure credits  

Runner-up – Team Allez, Ukraine

Allez supports personal development through sports experience. The team created a mobile app which collects athlete analytics and improves communication with the coach. The aim is to maximize the performance of an athlete and help coaches grow individuals mentally ready to fight obstacles.

Prizes: USD2,500 and Azure credits  

Runner-up – Team Vhysio, United Kingdom

Vhysio is a web application utilizing tensorflow.js, a cutting-edge browser-based Machine Learning library, to enable accessible physiotherapy for the visually impaired. Vhysio provides real-time feedback by speaking through exercises and responding to the user’s posture.

Prizes: USD2,500 and Azure credits  

Follow the journeys of our winning teams on Instagram and Twitter as they prepare for the 2020 World Championship! They’ll be competing against Asia Regional winners, team Syrinx and team Hollo, and the winners of the upcoming Americas Regional Final.   

Posted on March 9, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Microsoft donates $1M to Puget Sound’s COVID-19 Response Fund

As the world grapples with COVID-19, local officials and businesses here in the Puget Sound are taking necessary and unprecedented steps to protect public health, ease anxiety and prevent the spread of the virus. Conferences and events have been postponed or canceled, large meetings limited, and employers are asking their employees to work from home. While these moves to stem COVID-19 are critical, we realize they come with an economic and societal price. A price that is especially high for those closest to the crisis and members of our community already facing health and economic disparities.

Last week, we announced in the Puget Sound region that we’ve asked our employees who can work from home to do so. While reducing the number of people on our campuses has also reduced the need for onsite support from hourly workers supporting our operations, we will continue to pay them their regular wages, whether their services are needed or not. It’s encouraging to see Amazon, Expedia, Facebook, Google, and Salesforce announce that they’ll do the same. As large corporations we can take this step and should. But not all businesses will be able to do so.

As our community focuses on public health needs during the COVID-19 outbreak, it’s important that we also rally together to address the unmet economic needs developing around us. That’s why we’re partnering today with the two largest broad-based regional foundations to strengthen the community’s safety net through this crisis. The Seattle Foundation, United Way of King County, Microsoft, Amazon and Starbucks, in coordination with King County and the City of Seattle, will launch a regional COVID-19 Response Fund (CRF) to address the emerging community needs of COVID-19. . Microsoft is making an initial $1 million anchor donation to help launch this effort immediately.

Given that the outbreak will impact many communities that are already facing health and economic disparities, the fund will provide financial support to nonprofits and community-based organizations on the frontlines of the response. This support will include rental assistance to keep people housed; help ensure children, seniors and families have access to food; and support healthcare workers on the front line.

In addition to contributing to the COVID-19 Response Fund, our employees want to and can play a vital role. We will encourage and facilitate employee donations to support these efforts, which will be matched by the company on a dollar-per-dollar basis.

Criteria for the initial emergency response stage are being developed to ensure the dollars are allocated in a targeted, agile and responsive manner where the dollars are needed most. Initial grants will support organizations doing work with priority populations, such as: people without sick leave or health insurance; medically fragile populations; hourly and gig economy workers; healthcare workers and people with limited English-language proficiency. The group will raise funds throughout the epidemic and recovery phases, to allocate resources as needs emerge and evolve.

Microsoft’s products and services can also play a vital role in supporting people and organizations through this crisis, especially for public health officials working tirelessly to reduce the impact of COVID-19 and businesses and universities that are moving to remote meetings and classes. Across the global economy, we’re working to enable people to work remotely without sacrificing collaboration, productivity and security.

While local philanthropy has an important role to play, the COVID-19 crisis requires more funding than the corporate and philanthropic sector can contribute. There is clearly a need for additional state and government assistance. We look forward to working with state, county and local leaders who have been playing such an important and vital role in recent days.

In times of trouble, the greater Seattle community has a strong track record of pulling together. This is a time that calls for the community to come together once again.

Posted on March 9, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

How technology is transforming home health care

senior woman and digital tablet — young caregiver showing something to senior woman, 90 years old, on a digital tablet

Public health organizations are chartered with ensuring the health and well-being of individuals, families, and communities. Their scope of responsibility is wide-ranging and varies from country to country, and they are required to provide direct healthcare services to their citizens, including epidemiology and disease prevention.

In the area of providing care, public health organizations, along with their commercial health counterparts, face a variety of challenges: a virtual explosion in the amount of collected information; fragmentation of data and formats across providers and care teams; spiraling cost escalation; and a shortage of staff and resources to keep up with the workload caused in large part by an aging population.

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that by 2050, 22% of the population will be over the age of 60. The WHO further states that health systems need to be realigned to meet the needs of the aging population and that all countries need an integrated system of long-term care.¹

Public health officials and practitioners continue to assess new technologies to help them transform healthcare services to keep up with these growing demands. Technology, when combined with new and novel approaches, enables public health organizations to drive down costs and improve health outcomes. In-home care is a way to address these challenges, contain costs, and improve the patient’s overall well-being and care experience. This is an area undergoing rapid digital transformation as public health organizations adopt modern technologies.

Aspects of home care employing modern technologies include:

Remote Patient Monitoring helps create and maintain a full picture of a patient’s health and well-being by connecting devices in the field and harnessing the power of the Internet of Things (IoT) to track wellness and detect, troubleshoot, and resolve patient issues in real-time.
Example: Care-givers are equipping elderly patient’s homes with sensors embedded in the floor and furniture for issues ranging from “slip and fall” detection to signal an alert to the caregiver if the patient has remained in bed for an extended period of time. These sensors, combined with wearable technologies that monitor the patient’s vital signs (e.g. heart rate, respiration, blood pressure, etc.), can provide vital information to the patient’s care team.
Mobile Care Worker helps health organizations carry out their extended mission by building a customized mobile care solution based on a health customer’s specific needs and priorities to serve residents in their homes. Additionally, IoT and other technologies, along with the care-giver’s mobile device can provide oversight to ensure these visits are carried out when and where they are scheduled (in an electronic visit verification scenario—an important compliance aspect of home care for many public health agencies).
Example: Certain countries have begun empowering postal workers with capabilities to check on remote elderly patients with mobile care solutions to collect information to update health records while out on regularly recurring routes. This helps to maximize existing efficiencies and empower staff to be impactful in new ways.
Virtual Consult utilizes enablement and configuration within Microsoft Teams to facilitate a telehealth solution that can reduce onboarding time, consolidate communication and collaboration agility, and ease user adoption for an organization.
Example: Traveling to a patient’s home is time-consuming and can be costly—especially in rural communities where the travel distances can be significant from one patient’s home to another. Virtual consultations are becoming a more popular complement to—and sometimes replacement of—in-home visits made possible by the video-teleconference capabilities within Microsoft Teams.
Common scenarios include:
• Checking in on the patient when receiving a non-emergency alert (e.g. elevated blood pressure). Video allows the caregiver to check in on the patient and observe their state in a way that a phone call cannot;
• Behavioral Counseling: video enables the counselor to pick up on non-verbal cues in a way audio-only (e.g. phone call) interactions cannot.
Healthcare Bot employs an AI-powered service for healthcare that integrates medical content from trusted sources, including details on conditions, symptoms, medications, types of doctors, procedures, and more.
Example: AI-driven technology can be leveraged to provide automated triage functionality to respond to and interact with patients during a time of crisis. Questions that assess the levels of pain and types of injuries, while recording the information in healthcare standard terminology are invaluable to care teams who will need to follow up with patients based on need and severity.
Operational Analytics embrace predictive models and innovative technologies to create actionable insights and outputs to better manage individual and population health outcomes.
Example: Streamlined operations and reduced costs are benefits of analytics models enabling healthcare care executives and clinicians to share information and analyze structured & unstructured data. This empowers them to make more informed choices at the point of decision by utilizing improved KPI’s such as medical quality and patient safety.

Public health solutions create experiences that give residents control over their health data and provide insights that facilitate self-care and family support. Technology-driven solutions deepen patient insights to gain a 360-degree view of care metrics and enable a personalized care continuum.

Care teams at different levels within the municipality are able to connect with patients, increase communication and collaborate more efficiently in real-time to address issues from benign single-patient monitoring through pandemic-level crises that necessitate a broader reach and level of interaction. Delivering a connected and personalized customer service experience to empower care teams is an evolving requirement, and Microsoft provides solutions to enable secure, compliant collaboration and faster decisions, as well as help care teams to form, communicate, and do more for their residents.

Visit Microsoft in Health and Microsoft in Public Health and Social Services to learn more. Also, download the IDC white paper on Public Health and Social Services.

References:

¹World Health Organization

Posted on March 8, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

CVP Erin Chapple’s reflections on International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month

Reflections on International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month

In recent weeks, I have had several individuals share with me their admiration for the amount of time I spend listening to, advocating for and simply being there for women. Of course I was humbled by what felt like a compliment, but hearing this gave me pause. Why did these individuals see my actions as deserving of admiration as opposed to a core way of how we show up for each other in the workplace, the industry and our lives in general? What path led me to this way of being, how might I expand my impact and how might I encourage others to take a more active role?

This way of being has been part of who I am for my entire working life. When I joined Microsoft full time in 1998, my first manager was a role model for me. Laurie Litwack spent time getting to know me personally as well as to understand my passion and hopes and what unique perspective I brought. She thoughtfully created my first assignment to both leverage my skills and challenge me. Laurie showed me not only what it meant to bring your authentic self to work but also how it felt to be supported. Under her leadership I not only grew in the technical aspects of my role, she also nurtured my appreciation for people. Looking back, this experience was unique, especially for that era in engineering where there were fewer women and even fewer women managers. It shaped my values as a leader and my view on how you best engage people and support their development. It showed me the importance of being present.

Early into my career the VP of our engineering organization, Bill Vegthe, brought a group of women employees together to better understand our experiences in the organization. He genuinely wanted to learn from us what the organization could be doing better to support our growth and satisfaction. At the time, the number of women in the organization was low and this forum was the first opportunity many of us had to meet and spend time with each other. The most valuable thing we learned from the experience was the personal support and enjoyment that came from simply making time for each other. The isolation we each felt melted away when we got to spend time with others like us: creating connections, sharing experiences, learning from each other. We grew more collectively than we ever would have individually, and I personally benefited from both the friendship and wisdom of many of the women in this community: Terrell Cox, Jimin Li, Anna Hester, Farzana Rahman, Deb MacFadden, Molly Brown, Linda Apsley, Betsy Speare. This was true many years ago when this community was created and holds true today even as this community has scaled from a handful of women to thousands of women across our Cloud + AI Division who make up this Women’s Leadership Community (WLC) under sponsorship from leaders such as Bob Muglia, Bill Laing, Brad Anderson and currently Scott Guthrie.

As I grew in my career, the importance of intentionally building connections with other women only became more clear. In the early 2010s as I joined the technical executive community, I looked around and felt a similar experience to my early career days. There were very few technical executives who were women, and we were spread across the organization, meaning we rarely had the opportunity to interact and in some cases had never met! It was out of desire to bring the WLC experience to this group that our Life Without Lines Community of technical women executives across Microsoft grew, based on the founding work of Michele Freed, Lili Cheng, Roz Ho, Rebecca Norlander. This group represents cross-company leadership and as the connections deepened, so did the impact on each other in terms of peer mentoring, career sponsorship and engineering and product collaboration.

Together we are more powerful than we are individually, amplifying each other’s voices.

Although the concept of community might seem simple and obvious in the ongoing conversations about inclusion, the key in my experience is how the connections in these communities were built. This isn’t just about networking for the sake of networking; we come together with a focus on being generous with our time and our experiences, challenging each other and our organization to address issues in a new way, and with the space to be authentic within our own community by not feeling like we needed to be a monolith in our perspectives or priorities. We advocate for one another, we leverage our networks, we create space and we amplify voices of others. This community names the challenges these women face, names the hopes they have for themselves and future women in our industry, and names what is most important to our enjoyment of our work. My job, and the job of others leaders, is to then listen to these voices leveraging the insights to advocate for what is needed in the organization, and drive systemic changes that will create the best-lived experience for all women at Microsoft and in the industry.

I have found that members of the community want to be heard, if you are willing to be present, willing to bring your authentic self and willing to take action on what you learn. I’m reflecting on this, in particular, as I think about International Women’s Day (IWD). From its beginnings in the early 1900s through to present day, IWD strives to recognize the need for active participation, equality and development of women and acknowledge the contribution of women globally.

This year I am reflecting on the need to ensure that our communities of women accurately represent the diverse range of perspectives and experiences of employees and customers. Making sure that even in a community about including others, we are not unintentionally excluding certain groups of women who may not have the same experiences or priorities, or privileges as others. It is a chance to reflect on how I can expand my impact. I challenge all of us to take this time to recognize those who are role models for us and those voices who may not be heard and determine what role each of us can play in achieving this goal for everyone.

Posted on March 8, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Women as allies for women: understanding intersectionality

One of my earliest learnings was that my experiences as a woman were not identical to other women’s experiences, although they were similar. As with any dimension of identity, the way women experience the world depends on much larger context. As a white girl growing up in Victoria, British Columbia, there were multiple layers to my experiences. Although my brothers and I had what was necessary, we did not have much socioeconomic privilege. What I learned as I watched the world around me is that as a benefit of my race, it was easier for me to cover my socioeconomic status than it was for my friends who were not white.

The United Nations marked March 8 as International Women’s Day by declaring that “fundamental freedoms require the active participation, equality and development of women everywhere.” This declaration is inclusive of all women with intersectionality in mind.

Understanding intersectionality in the workplace

It starts with something as simple as the way we think about all the dimensions of our identity, including things like race, ethnicity, disability, religion, age and sexual orientation. Even class, education, geography and personal history can alter how we experience womanhood. When Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality 30 years ago, she explained it as how these overlapping identities and conditions impact the way we experience life’s challenges and opportunities, the privileges we have, the biases we face.

So simply focusing on a single dimension of identity, without that context, is not always helpful. When we consider women as a single category, as a monolith, it can be misleading at best, dangerous at worst. Doing so overlooks the variations of circumstances and perspectives within the group and obscures real lived experiences as outliers or exceptions. “Women’s workplace issues” is a vague term without enough specificity to drive action. Women of color, women with disabilities, transgender women, women who are the first of their family to work corporate or professional jobs, women who are caregivers — all women deal with additional social, cultural, regional or community demands that may not exist for others. Although all women navigate varying degrees of conscious and unconscious gender biases, intersections of identity can place compounded pressure on a woman to downplay other aspects of her life to conform — a behavior called covering, as explored by Kenji Yoshino — leading to even greater workplace stress.

To increase hiring, retention, representation and the development of women in the workplace, companies must be intentional and accountable for being aware of the diversity within the diversity. Conventional strategies to increase the representation of women in a workplace have mostly benefited those who do not also experience intersectional challenges. By getting curious and exploring the lived experiences of women through the lens of intersectionality, we become more precise about the root cause and about finding ways to generate systemic solutions for all.

Setting the stage for allyship

Understanding all this can be a powerful catalyst for change, not just for organizations as a whole but also for individuals. At Microsoft we are refining how we think about allyship. Part of that exploration is the recognition that as Microsoft employees each of us has some dimension of privilege. This isn’t meant to minimize or negate the very real ways that communities experience significant, systematic historical bias or oppression. But rather it is meant to shine a light on our opportunity to show up for each other. For example, as a community of women we have an opportunity to be more thoughtful about the experiences of our peers who face greater challenges due to their intersectional identity. So although traditionally we might look to men in the workplace to carry the full weight of allyship, women in the workplace also have an opportunity to be thoughtful allies for others in their community.

Such an awareness opens the door for true allyship — an intentional commitment to use your voice, credibility, knowledge, place or power to support others in the way they want to be supported. I am very aware of my opportunity, due to my personal privilege, to show up for other women in a meaningful way. I embrace my obligation to create space for other voices to be heard, not just on International Women’s Day, but all year round.

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

International Women’s Day 2020: creating opportunity for all

Sunday, March 8th will mark a day that’s close to my heart, International Women’s Day.

The day shines a light on the progress we’ve made in recognizing the potential of a diverse and inclusive economy and the power that comes from developing strong, female role models. Yet while we can reflect on that progress, we must also acknowledge the work that still must be done. It is critical for me that we address the challenges that still exist for women in today’s business landscape—there are many women around the world who are locked out of opportunities many take for granted, for a variety of reasons.

I’m proud of the work we’ve done at Microsoft so far to increase access and opportunities for women through our workplace culture, policies and technologies. I believe we have a responsibility to highlight other organizations that have also prioritized diversity and inclusion and encourage others to do the same.

Building opportunity and access for all through technology

Technology helps organizations empower their employees, optimize their operations, connect with their customers and transform their products. It’s also a key factor in building an inclusive economy; an economy that harnesses the power of diversity to create opportunities and positive business outcomes for all. At Microsoft, we understand that a diverse work force inspires diverse solutions, which ultimately helps drive innovations that benefit everyone.

That’s why I am excited to share that Microsoft is supporting the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals through our #BuildFor2030 campaign. Through October, we will be highlighting Microsoft partners with solutions that align to the UN’s goals. And in celebration of Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day on March 8^th, we will be focusing on solutions by women-led organizations within our Microsoft partner community. I encourage you to read more about these incredible innovations here.

These solutions
showcase the entrepreneurial spirit of women in technology—a community that is
grossly underrepresented in the marketplace today. Recent studies suggest, if
women and men participated equally as entrepreneurs, global GDP could rise by approximately
3% to 6%, boosting the global economy by as much as $5 trillion. If we work together, we can start that
shift, and create more opportunities for everyone.

Did you know?

According to the McKinsey Global Institute:

Companies in the top quartile for gender diversity are 21 percent more profitable than companies in the bottom quartile

Companies in the top quartile for ethnic and cultural diversity are 33 percent more likely to outperform companies in the bottom quartile

Closing the gender gap in the workforce could add $28 trillion to the global GDP

Closing the gender gap in the workforce could add $28 trillion to the global GDP

Women in Cloud

In January, Microsoft hosted the Women in Cloud Summit in Redmond, and I had the privilege of discussing how we can all work to create more opportunities for women in technology. Women in Cloud is a community-led organization that brings together female entrepreneurs, global leaders, corporations, and policy makers to support economic development for women in tech. They have vowed to help create $1 billion in economic access and opportunity by 2030.

As an executive sponsor of this initiative, I have sat down with many
female business owners and have heard their struggles, triumphs and
breakthroughs. Everyone I’ve met has emphasized the importance of access to
technology, customers, partners, and investments. My team and I are focused on
creating access for their growth through co-marketing and co-selling opportunities
as we strive to create an inclusive marketplace for all partners to deploy
cloud solutions and services.

Building for the future

While we are
focused on creating equal access and opportunity for women business owners
today, we must also prepare the next generation of entrepreneurs and female
tech leaders. To participate in the global economy and businesses of the future,
understanding and innovating with technology will be a core skill of any job. Young
women need to embrace technology and develop skills and passions that will be key
success factors in a world where technology is part of every business in every
industry.

I’d like to invite all Microsoft partners to join other impact-oriented technology solution leaders in the #BuildFor2030 campaign to highlight their innovative solutions. And in honor of International Women’s Day, I encourage you to take action and drive momentum towards creating a gender-equal society by supporting this campaign.

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

Microsoft for Healthcare: Empowering our customers and partners to provide better experiences, insights and care

At Microsoft, our goal within healthcare is to empower people and organizations to address the complex challenges facing the healthcare industry today. We help do this by co-innovating and collaborating with our customers and partners as a trusted technology provider. Today, we’re excited to share progress on the latest innovations from Microsoft aimed at helping address the most prevalent and persistent health and business challenges:

Empower care teams with Microsoft 365: Available in the coming weeks, the new Bookings app in Microsoft Teams will empower care teams to schedule, manage and conduct virtual visits with remote patients via video conference. Also coming soon, clinicians will be able to target Teams messages to recipients based on the shift they are working. Finally, healthcare customers can support their security and compliance requirements with the HIPAA/HITECH assessment in Microsoft Compliance Score.
Protect health information with Azure Sphere: Microsoft’s integrated security solution for IoT (Internet of Things) devices and equipment – is now widely available for the development and deployment of secure, connected devices. Azure Sphere helps securely personalize patient experiences with connected devices and solutions. And, to make it easier for healthcare leaders to develop their own IoT strategies, today we’re launching a new IoT Signals report focused on the healthcare industry that provides an industry pulse on the state of IoT adoption and helpful insights for IoT strategies. Learn more about Microsoft’s IoT offerings for healthcare here.
Enable personalized virtual care with Microsoft Healthcare Bot: Today, we’re pleased to announce that Microsoft Healthcare Bot, our HITRUST-certified platform for creating virtual health assistants, is enriching its healthcare intelligence with new built-in templates for healthcare-specific use cases, and expanding its integrated medical content options. With the addition of Infermedica, a cutting-edge triage engine based on advanced artificial intelligence (AI) that enables symptom checking in 17 languages Healthcare Bot is empowering providers to offer global access to care.
Reimagine healthcare using new data platform innovations: With the 2019 release of Azure API for FHIR, Microsoft became the first cloud provider with a fully managed, enterprise-grade service for health data in the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) format. We’re excited to expand those offerings with several new innovations around connecting, converting and transforming data. The first is Power BI FHIR Connector, which makes it simple and easy to bring FHIR data into Power BI for analytics and insights. The second, IoMT (Internet of Medical Things) FHIR Connector, is now available as open source software (OSS) and allows for seamless ingestion, normalization and transformation of Protected Health Information data from health devices into FHIR. Another new open source project, FHIR Converter, provides an easy way to convert healthcare data from legacy formats (i.e., HL7v2) into FHIR. And lastly, FHIR Tools for Anonymization, is now offered via OSS and enables anonymization and pseudonymization of data in the FHIR format. Including capabilities for redaction and date shifting in accordance with the HIPAA privacy rule.

Frictionless exchange of health information in FHIR makes it easier for researchers and clinicians to collaborate, innovate and improve patient care. As we move forward working with our customers and partners and others across the health ecosystem, Microsoft is committed to enabling and improving interoperability and required standards to make it easier for patients to manage their healthcare and control their information. At the same time, trust, privacy and compliance are a top priority – making sure Protected Health Information (PHI) remains under control and custodianship of healthcare providers and their patients.

We’ve seen a growing number of healthcare organizations not only deploy new technologies, but also begin to develop their own digital capabilities and solutions that use data and AI to transform and innovate healthcare and life sciences in profoundly positive ways. Over the past year, together with our customers and partners, we’ve announced new strategic partnerships aimed at empowering this transformation.

For example, to enable caregivers to focus more on patients by dramatically reducing the burden of documenting doctor-patient visits, Nuance has released Nuance Dragon Ambient eXperience (DAX). This ambient clinical intelligence technologies (ACI) is enriched by AI and cloud capabilities from Microsoft, including the ambient intelligence technology, EmpowerMD, which is coming to market as part of Nuance’s DAX solution. The solution aims to transform the exam room by deploying ACI to capture, with patient consent, interactions between clinicians and patients so that clinical documentation writes itself.

Among health systems, Providence St. Joseph Health is using Microsoft’s cloud, AI, productivity and collaboration technologies to deploy next-generation healthcare solutions while empowering their employees. NHS Calderdale is enabling patients and their providers to hold appointments virtually via Microsoft Teams for routine and follow-up visits, which helps lower costs while maintaining the quality of care. The U.S. Veterans Affairs Department is embracing mixed reality by working with technology providers Medivis, Microsoft and Verizon to roll out its first 5G-enabled hospital. And specifically for health consumers, Walgreens Boots Alliance will harness the power of our cloud, AI and productivity technologies to empower care teams and deliver new retail solutions to make healthcare delivery more personal, affordable and accessible.

Major payor, pharmaceutical and health technology platform companies are also transforming healthcare in collaboration with us. Humana will develop predictive solutions for personalized and secure patient support, and by using Azure, Azure AI and Microsoft 365, they’ll also equip home healthcare workers with real-time access to information and voice technology to better understand key factors that influence patient health. In pharmaceuticals, Novartis will bring Microsoft AI capabilities together with its deep expertise in life sciences to address specific challenges that make the process of discovering, developing and delivering new medicines so costly and time-consuming.

We’re pleased to showcase how together with our customers and partners, we’re working to bring healthcare solutions to life and positively impact the health ecosystem.

To keep up to date with the latest announcements visit the Microsoft Health News Room.

About the authors:
As Corporate Vice President of Health Technology and Alliances, Dr. Greg Moore leads the dedicated research and development collaborations with our strategic partners, to deliver next-generation technologies and experiences for healthcare.

Vice President and Chief Medical Officer Dr. David Rhew recently joined Microsoft’s Worldwide Commercial Business Healthcare leadership team and provides executive-level support, engaging in business opportunities with our customers and partners.

As Corporate Vice President of Healthcare, Peter Lee leads the Microsoft organization that works on technologies for better and more efficient healthcare, with a special focus on AI and cloud computing.