Recent News – Page 134

Posted on November 8, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Less stress, less time: How a Brazilian startup is using Azure AI to make car repairs easier

SÃO PAOLO, Brazil – For most people, the worst part of getting into a minor car accident is figuring out how to get your car repaired.

There’s the trouble of figuring out who to call, the hassle of driving around to get estimates and the constant worry that whoever you work with will end up taking advantage of you.

That’s where Car10 comes in. The Brazilian startup has created an app that allows customers to take a picture of the damage, submit the photo and get three to five estimates from nearby car repair shops that Car10 has pre-screened for quality and reliability. The startup even guarantees it will make the repair for free if you aren’t satisfied.

“We take the fear out of the process, the worry that you’ll be taken advantage of,” said Jose Tafner, Car10’s chief financial officer.

Now, the São Paolo-based company is using artificial intelligence to make the process faster. The startup announced that it is using Microsoft’s Azure Cognitive Services Custom Vision Service to almost immediately give the user a rough sense of what they expect the repair to cost.

With the current system, users who submit a photo will get a quote within 30 minutes to an hour. With the new AI tools, Tafner said they can get a general sense of how much the repair will cost within about 30 seconds.

“It goes back to the customer need. When you have a small accident or crash, the thing you want to know is how much it’s going to cost,” Tafner said. “The first need is speed and some level of accuracy.”

The AI system uses a machine learning model to compare the damage to the customer’s car with other examples of similar damage to come up with a reasonably close estimate. Then, the company works with car repair shops to get firmer bids.

The AI system may speed up the quote process, but it doesn’t replace the hands-on involvement that Car10 has in ensuring customers feel comfortable throughout the process of getting their car repaired.

Tafner said Car10 works with customers on everything from providing the estimate to scheduling the visit and even paying through Car10’s digital platform. The customer then has the opportunity to rate the experience and the shop where the repair was made.

“The digital part of the journey is small. The largest part is analog,” Tafner said.

Focus on quality

Car10 has about 100,000 customers and works with about 4,000 auto body shops throughout Brazil, ranging from big businesses to small mom-and-pop shops. Tafner said the company initially focused only on larger shops, thinking that was what the customer would prefer. But they found that customers didn’t care whether the shop was being run out of someone’s garage or a fancy office.

“They care about the quality of the service,” he said.

Car10 was started in 2014 by three brothers who had previously worked for their father’s insurance adjustment business. When that business was sold, they decided to use their experience in the car repair industry to plunge into the startup world. Tafner joined a couple of years later, after decades of global experience in the corporate world. The service is designed for people who are paying for repairs themselves, instead of relying on insurance.

From the beginning, the four-person leadership team has been highly reliant on technology and data. They run on Microsoft’s Azure cloud service, use Power BI dashboards and built the app on the .NET framework.

“The four of us are data freaks. We’re constantly using it to improve the business,” Tafner said.

Still, Tafner said that like many businesses swimming in data, it can be challenging to figure out which pieces of data are useful.

One clear winner: The photos of car repairs. Car10 was able to use that data to train the machine learning model to automatically detect what kind of repair a person needs and what it would generally cost. Car10 doesn’t sell customer data, and it protects people’s personal information using Azure security protections.

Car10, which has received startup investment funds from Microsoft, first started building the AI solution when the company participated in an industry hackfest. Although it has an IT staff, none of the people who work for Car10 have a particular expertise in AI. Azure Cognitive Services are designed so that even people without any formal AI training can use them.

Future plans

Car10 is about five years old now, and it expects to break even within a quarter. Now, Tafner said the company is seeking more funding so that it can expand into other areas of business, and potentially other markets outside of Brazil.

“What we can do for car crashes we can do for a number of things,” he said.

For Tafner, the small team and fast pace is both invigorating and enlightening. Like any startup, he notes, the company is constantly trying new things, making mistakes and adjusting – all while trying to run the core business. He likens it to race car driving.

“We’re changing the tires while the car is running,” Tafner said. “There are no pit stops for us.”

Allison Linn writes about AI and innovation. Follow her on Twitter.

Posted on November 8, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

How tech inspired one man to transform businesses in Dubai

When Faisal Ali was a child, his schoolteacher would always encourage him to solve small problems while keeping an eye on the bigger picture. Fast-forward to the present, the now group CIO of the Garash Group in Dubai still follows that same philosophy.

Beginning from when he first played on an Atari 2600 console when he was just 11-years-old, Faisal knew that when he grew up, he had to do something which involved problem solving and technology.

Faisal now leads the Automotive, Financial Services and Real Estate sectors of the business enterprise, all with the main goal of enabling business growth through technology.

It is his passion for technology combined with this love of problem-solving which has and continued to inspire Faisal to be successful in his role today.

How has technology transformed how you work?

Faisal believes that technology has completely changed his approach to work. New innovations in the digital era allow him to connect and collaborate with co-workers at any time or from any place possible, which is hugely important for his job.

Summarizing how technology has developed over the course of his career, he said:

“Over the last 25 years of my professional life technology has changed my working lifestyle many times over. “

“I remember back in the 90s when dialing into work was almost impossible. The most I could do was send a few emails and upload a few excel files. “

“In the Noughties, broadband was in its early stages and mobility was becoming a reality, I could use a blackberry to stay connected to my mail and VPN to the office to do my work. “

“In the last 10 years’ workplace and systems are transforming from being on-premise to cloud and becoming more social. It’s a connected digital world and everyone is a citizen.”

Microsoft technologies have particularly benefited Faisal during his working life. He reflected on this, saying that Microsoft’s technology has inspired him to be as innovative as possible at work.

“You can’t make me switch back from my Microsoft Surface Pro”, he said. “It was truly love at first sight. The integration between desktop and mobile, wired and wireless, mouse and touch is seamless and natural.”

How do you use technology outside of work?

Outside of work, he recognizes that technology is just as useful and enjoyable in his everyday life.

“I am lucky in that way, as both my passion and my profession are technology”, he said.

“I love smart devices. I measure my physical activity, track my trips and can even message my 10-year-old son whenever I like. I guess you could say a good mobile phone is a man’s new best friend.”

He does admit that technology cannot be allowed to dictate our lives, however.

He believes connections between humans can never be replaced, and added:

“Technology is great but it simply does not replace the relationships and bonds you share with friends and family. Let technology augment those experience and not dictate them.”

What does the technology of the future look like to you?

Although believing that technology can never replace humans, he sees it as crucial for future developments in improving many aspects of our lives.

“This is a really interesting discussion point. I completed my Masters in IT Systems and am keen to learn how technology will continue to advance and benefit our lives.”

“I think that we’ll see a more natural integration of human technologies into our daily lives, meaning humans and AI will collaborate to improve society.”

“We’ll see devices that can help manage and monitor our health better, and systems which seamless keep us all connected online.”

“Technology isn’t just the present. It’s the future, and it’s going to help us act faster, think better and ultimately enhance the way we live.”

Posted on November 7, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

En garde! Wearable IoT and AI keep fencers on point

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

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

Beyond fencing

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

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

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

A handphone with an app displayed. — When a problem is identified, coaches can develop a training regimen to address it. They can also monitor an athlete’s progress remotely.

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

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

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

Two female fencers — The company has been able to change its business model by being nimble as it embraces new technologies.

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

A long way from the garment industry

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on November 7, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

How Minecraft: Education Edition helps hospitalized kids continue to learn

This post comes to us from Evelina Hospital School in London. Their team is using Minecraft: Education Edition to teach students in treatment at Evelina London Children’s hospital. Read their inspiring story about using Minecraft to facilitate learning under challenging circumstances.

Evelina Hospital School is a hospital community school with the UK’s Department for Education that educates young people who are patients of the Evelina London Children’s Hospital. The school was established in 1949, and they’re celebrating their 70th Birthday this year! Located on the South Bank of the Thames river, the hospital is directly opposite the British Parliament.

Over the academic year, Evelina typically teaches 1,500–1,800 different pupils who are unable to attend their home schools because of their medical needs. Their students are taught in classrooms based in the hospital’s atrium, or even at their bedsides in the ward. The school aims to minimize the disruption to young people’s education caused by hospital treatment so that academic progress and an interest in learning will continue as far as medical circumstances permit.

The pupils at Evelina attend for a wide variety of reasons. As a school, they need to offer an enriching educational experience, facilitating learning and continuity in education while meeting the challenges present during a hospital stay. They offer bespoke lessons for each pupil and often seek to find a highly motivated activity to help the students with that initial engagement. The teachers at Evelina discovered that Minecraft: Education Edition was a common theme when discussing student interests. It was a great leveler across wide-ranging needs and age groups, affording accessibility while nurturing opportunities for peer learning. What they see with Minecraft: Education Edition is energy, enthusiasm, and excitement for learning.

Minecraft naturally evolved out of a desire for pupil-led learning and educational experiences. When the opportunity arose for Evelina Hospital School to apply to be Minecraft Champions, it was a golden opportunity to promote educational Minecraft within the hospital school. They were lucky to have Marquel, a staff member who has a background in multimedia and a great deal of experience with Minecraft itself, in addition to Benjamin Neasom, the lead teacher. Both became Minecraft Champions.

Marquel was able to take the lead on the project, and the results have been phenomenal, with a full replica of the hospital produced through pupil input. This replica has been further adapted into a virtual learning environment. As a result, students readily connect and identify with the context where the teachers set their challenges.

Evelina Hospital School provided laptops to pupils across the hospital, allowing multiple participants within a Minecraft session. Now, pupils in the primary classroom can interact directly within Minecraft with those in the dialysis ward. This connectivity is particularly useful in a hospital setting, where learners are often not able to be present in the same room but benefit from peer interaction within a safe virtual space.

For the staff who are new to Minecraft: Education Edition, Marquel is offering one-to-one drop-in and group training sessions to help them get started and deliver Minecraft across their settings.

Any achievement is on a strictly individual basis since pupils are often dealing with a complex set of medical circumstances. Achievement could be as simple as engaging with the session. Evelina Hospital School encourages participation and peer work wherever possible. Achievement is recorded through Evelina’s own organization-specific Management Information System, based on teacher observation and demonstrated through finished challenges or the creation of Minecraft content.

Many of the incredible students at the hospital school have been inspired to think about the jobs of the future—jobs that might not even exist yet! Minecraft has expanded the horizons of students who are overcoming complex problems and has encouraged the building of self-esteem, inspiring creative thinking to prepare them for the challenges of the future.

To learn more about how Minecraft: Education Edition can inspire students in any setting, head to education.minecraft.net.

The post Minecraft: Education Edition at Evelina Hospital School appeared first on Minecraft: Education Edition.

This post was originally published on this site.

Posted on November 7, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

The making of the HoloLens 2: How advanced AI built Microsoft’s vision for ubiquitous computing

Cloud collaboration

A key advantage of intelligent cloud-powered holographic computing is the ability to share information with others who have a HoloLens or another device with similar capabilities, said Marc Pollefeys, the director of Microsoft’s Mixed Reality and AI Zurich Lab in Switzerland.

Pollefeys is leading a team that develops core computer vision algorithms for a mixed reality cloud service called Azure Spatial Anchors that allows holograms to persist, locked in the real world, for anyone with the appropriate level of access to view.

For example, spatial anchor technology allows a manager in a factory to place holograms next to equipment on an assembly line that contain vital, real-time operating and maintenance information that any credentialed worker with a mixed reality capable device can access.

“If I can only place information that I will see back on my device, it’s probably never worth placing holograms in the world, but if I can annotate the world and afterward anyone else in the company that has the right access can see all of the information, it is suddenly much more valuable,” Pollefeys said.

To create this capability, Pollefeys and his team developed AI computer vision algorithms that process data from sensors to extract 3D geometric information about the environment and piece it together in the cloud to create a digital twin, or map, of the area of interest.

HoloLens has always built up a 3D or spatial understanding of its environment to function. Azure Spatial Anchors creates, refines and shares these maps across devices, Pollefeys noted. That’s why the maps from individual devices are pieced together and stored in the cloud.

“It doesn’t make sense to have that data only on an individual device,” he said. “It is one of those things where I have a little piece of the puzzle, and somebody else has a little piece of the puzzle, and all of the devices together have covered the whole space of interest.”

These maps get denser, more precise and robust over time as different mixed reality capable devices – HoloLenses as well as properly equipped phones, tablets and laptops – map their environment and share the data with the cloud.

For example, the map of the factory floor where the manager left holograms floating over pieces of equipment on the assembly line is steadily refined as more and more credentialed workers view the holograms with their devices.

This capability also enables scenarios such as a meeting between architects and clients to view and interact with a holographic 3D blueprint of a building, each of them with mixed reality capable devices looking at the blueprint from their own point of view as they sit around a table.

Azure contains pre-built services to write applications for these types of experiences on HoloLens and any other mixed reality device, including smartphones and tablets running the iOS and Android operating systems, noted White.

“That collaboration experience isn’t just locked to HoloLens,” she said. “And, the cost and complexity and skillset required to make an application that does something amazing is far down.”

The cross-device and platform capability, for example, enables experiences such as Minecraft Earth, which merges the popular video game with mixed reality in a way that players can build and place virtual structures in the real world that persist so that other players can interact with them on their devices.

“We all get to participate because it is based on using cloud technology that can be understood and interpreted by all different devices,” said White.

Technology that is designed for people

For HoloLens to work as envisioned, the technology that underpins the experience needs to understand the world in ways that are similar to the way people do, Kipman noted.

That’s why he and his collaborators across Microsoft have developed, deployed and leveraged AI solutions throughout the ubiquitous computing fabric, from the silicon in the headset of HoloLens 2 to Azure AI and mixed reality services.

Back at his digital whiteboard, Kipman has now sketched out a vision for ubiquitous computing that is rife with words, boxes, arrows – and a stick-figure picture of two people locked in conversation next to an intelligent device.

That, he says, is the ultimate goal of ubiquitous computing – to get people to interact with other people in natural ways.

To drive home the point, he establishes a moment of intense, deliberate eye contact and says, “Hopefully, you are getting more out of this conversation because you are physically present with me.”

“We could have done this over the phone,” he continues. “We could have done it over Skype. I could have recorded it and sent you a tape. You didn’t choose to do that. You chose to be physically present with me. Why? Because that’s how we do human things.”

“The con is you have to be here at the same time I am here, and we have to be in the same location. The power of this technology is it gives us the ability to displace space and time.”

Top image: Microsoft Technical Fellow Alex Kipman models the HoloLens 2, a sensor-packed holographic computing headset. Photo by Microsoft.

John Roach writes about Microsoft research and innovation. Follow him on Twitter.

Posted on November 6, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Bringing autonomous systems to engineers: Taking a leap from the digital world of games to the real world

Imagine an autonomous vehicle navigating a smoke-filled mine looking for survivors, personal belongings or any other clues to find anyone who might be alive. It identifies objects it sees and decides which paths to take first. As it reaches the limit of where it can explore, a drone sitting on the vehicle flies off to explore the hard-to-reach corners of the mine. All of this is done without any communication with the outside world. Believe it or not, this isn’t science fiction! Team Explorer from Carnegie Mellon University and Oregon State University did exactly this to win the first event of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Subterranean Challenge.

Today we live in the age of data-driven artificial intelligence (AI), where machine intelligence systems solve difficult problems by considering hundreds of millions of trials or training episodes. Hard problems in perception and decision making that were considered too tough by the community even in the recent past are today being successfully solved using techniques such as reinforcement learning (RL).

I’ve often thought about how advances like these in machine perception and automated decision-making could help us do things like build intelligent robots, and in particular tackle the challenges of optimal control of dynamical systems. And since my early days as a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon, I’ve been fascinated by the tight loop between perception — using computer intelligence to sense surroundings — and action — using this feedback and data to make decisions. Today, our work teaching computers to play games (e.g., mastering Ms. Pac-Man) has the ability to fundamentally change the way we will build control systems in the future. The potential applications could impact a wide range of industries with profound impact on safety and productivity — going well beyond just the self-driving cars that dominate today’s news cycles.

Today’s engineered devices and systems use rules-based logic to bring together the scientific principles, technology and mathematics which have been painstakingly discovered over time by subject matter experts and engineers. But what if our engineers of the future could build control systems infused with machine intelligence that go beyond rules-based logic, and respond in real-time to changing environments to accomplish their goal? Technologies such as RL that are seeing tremendous success in solving video games will be key to building real-world sequential decision-making mechanisms and will power our next generation of autonomous systems.

Helping engineers build action-perception loops for the real world
Translating the success of RL in video games to real-world autonomous systems carries big challenges — for example, no one loses a life making the wrong move in a video game! AI can’t learn from its failures as easily in the real world, where the potential cost of mistakes can be huge. Additionally, newer AI techniques are data hungry. For example, it takes hundreds of millions of tries before a seemingly respectable policy can be trained for many of these gaming tasks. So, operating physical systems like machines or chemical processes for millions of cycles to generate data to train AI can be a very expensive proposition.

Today, I’m excited to talk about how new breakthroughs in the world of machine teaching and creating high-fidelity simulations will enable you to tackle these challenges.

Machine teaching – a new paradigm to infuse domain knowledge to help improve learning
Our researchers have been hard at work on developing machine teaching, which infuses expert domain knowledge and harnesses human expertise to break a big problem into easier, smaller tasks. It also can give AI models important clues about how to find a solution faster, dramatically accelerating model training time. There’s still AI underneath the hood, but you as the expert provide examples, or lesson plans, to help the learning algorithms solve the task at hand. Since you are the one giving the lessons, describing the goals, desired behavior, and safety boundary conditions, the resulting AI models are also far more explainable and auditable once they are deployed. I know I wouldn’t want a “black-box” AI model running the control loop for my systems!

Borrowing a quote from Alfred Aho and Jeffrey Ullman, “Computer Science is the science of abstraction, creating the right model for thinking about a problem and devising the appropriate mechanizable techniques to solve it.” I think of machine teaching as the abstraction we are creating, the right model for thinking about applying domain expertise to AI systems. It can help you to bridge between the model-first mindset of engineers and the code-first mindset practiced by software developers.

High-fidelity simulations – A critical path to gather experiences at scale
Similar to machine teaching, simulations offer a way to generate synthetic data that can train machine intelligence systems at scale and without taking unnecessary risks. Simulations are a safe and cost-efficient way to train AI models, if you can model the key elements like the devices, the sensors and the environment interacting with your system. That allows you to simulate all possible scenarios, including edge situations — such as when a certain sensor or actuator fails — to teach the AI how to adapt to those situations.

For example, we built an open source simulator for aerial and other robotic vehicles called Aerial Informatics and Robotics Simulation, or AirSim for short. AirSim allows the simulation of a wide variety of environments, lighting conditions, sensors and fusion of sensor data. AirSim’s ability to create near-realistic autonomy pipelines is how Team Explorer secured its win.

Most of our customers use highly specialized simulation software for their specific use cases. We’re working with leading simulation makers in the industry like MathWorks to bring these simulators to Azure. MathWorks is the leading developer of mathematical computing software, including MATLAB and Simulink, used by millions of engineers and scientists to design complex embedded and multidomain systems. These partnerships will enable you to easily produce the large volumes of synthetic data needed to quickly train AI models for your specific use case.

The possibilities are endless, and the time is now
We’re continuing to bring AI to engineers and designers that will harness their expertise and trustworthy autonomy as the foundation for accelerated innovation. Customers like Delta, Shell and Toyota are already starting to use and benefit from this approach. From industrial applications to search and rescue operations like in the DARPA challenge, the applications of this technology will be endless. We hope you will join us on this journey to start inventing the future!

Related:
Visit: Autonomous systems with Microsoft AI

Read: How autonomous systems use AI that learns from the world around it

Read: Helping first responders achieve more with autonomous systems and AirSim

Read: Machine teaching: How people’s expertise makes AI even more powerful

Learn more: Game of Drones Competition at NeurIPS 2019

Posted on November 5, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

CVP Ann Johnson: How to balance compliance and security with limited resources

Today, many organizations still struggle to adhere to General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) mandates even though this landmark regulation took effect nearly two years ago. A key learning for some: being compliant does not always mean you are secure. Shifting privacy regulations, combined with limited resources like budgets and talent shortages, add to today’s business complexities. I hear this concern time and again as I travel around the world meeting with our customers to share how Microsoft can empower organizations successfully through these challenges.

Most recently, I sat down with Emma Smith, Global Security Director at Vodafone Group to talk about their own best practices when navigating the regulatory environment. Vodafone Group is a global company with mobile operations in 24 countries and partnerships that extend to 42 more. The company also operates fixed broadband operations in 19 markets, with about 700 million customers. This global reach means they must protect a significant amount of data while adhering to multiple requirements.

Emma and her team have put a lot of time and effort into the strategies and tactics that keep Vodafone and its customers compliant no matter where they are in the world. They’ve learned a lot in this process, and she shared these learnings with me as we discussed the need for organizations to be both secure and compliant, in order to best serve our customers and maintain their trust. You can watch our conversation and hear more in our CISO Spotlight episode.

Cybersecurity enables privacy compliance

As you work to balance compliance with security keep in mind that, as Emma said, “There is no privacy without security.” If you have separate teams for privacy and security, it’s important that they’re strategically aligned. People only use technology and services they trust, which is why privacy and security go hand in hand.

Vodafone did a security and privacy assessment across all their big data stores to understand where the high-risk data lives and how to protect it. They were then able to implement the same controls for privacy and security. It’s also important to recognize that you will never be immune from an attack, but you can reduce the damage.

Emma offered three recommendations for balancing security with privacy compliance:

Develop a risk framework so you can prioritize your efforts.
Communicate regularly with the board and executive team to align on risk appetite.
Establish the right security capabilities internally and/or through a mix of partners and third parties.

I couldn’t agree more, as these are also important building blocks for any organization as they work to become operationally resilient.

I also asked Emma for her top five steps for becoming compliant with privacy regulations:

Comply with international standards first, then address local rules.
Develop a clear, board-approved strategy.
Measure progress against your strategy.
Develop a prioritized program of work with clear outcomes.
Stay abreast of new technologies and new threats.

The simplest way to manage your risk is to minimize the amount of data that you store. Privacy assessments will help you know where the data is and how to protect it. Regional and local laws can provide tools to guide your standards. Protecting online privacy and personal data is a big responsibility, but with a risk management approach, you can go beyond the “letter of the law” to better safeguard data and support online privacy as a human right.

Learn more

Watch my conversation with Emma about balancing security with privacy compliance. To learn more about compliance and GDPR, read Microsoft Cloud safeguards individual privacy.

Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us at @MSFTSecurity for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

CISO Spotlight Series

Address cybersecurity challenges head-on with 10-minute video episodes that discuss cybersecurity problems and solutions from AI to Zero Trust.

Watch today

Posted on November 5, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Introducing Azure Quantum: our next step in delivering quantum impact

At Microsoft Quantum, our ambition is to help solve some of the world’s most complex challenges through the world’s most scalable quantum system.

To deliver on that promise, we’ve been working together with a global quantum community to innovate across every layer of the quantum stack – from applications and software down to control and devices.

Leading cryptographers at Microsoft Research are developing quantum-resistant public-key cryptographic algorithms and protocols to prepare customers and data centers around the world for a quantum future.
Developers are already contributing to the growing quantum community through Q# and our open source Quantum Development Kit, which today has more than 200,000 downloads.
Recently, Microsoft’s Quantum Lab located at the University of Sydney made breakthroughs in qubit control technology that allow us to scale beyond the physical limitations of current conventional systems. We now have the ability to control up to 50,000 qubits through simply three wires, a cryogenic CMOS design, and a 1cm² chip computing at near absolute zero temperatures.

3 photos of Cryo Control — Cryo-CMOS Technology. Image on left courtesy of The University of Sydney, Louise M. Cooper.

These are simply a few examples of advancements across the stack that are bringing the promise of quantum to our world, right now. Today, we’re introducing our next step in delivering quantum impact: Azure Quantum.

Learn, build, and solve with Azure Quantum

Azure Quantum is a full-stack, open cloud ecosystem that will bring the benefits of quantum computing to people and organizations around the world. Together with our partners 1QBit, Honeywell, IonQ, and QCI, we’re assembling the most diverse set of quantum solutions, software, and hardware across the industry, in Azure.

Learn. Anyone can come to Azure Quantum to learn about quantum computing through a series of tools and learning tutorials, like the quantum katas.
Build. Developers can write programs with Q# and the QDK and experiment running the code against simulators and a variety of quantum hardware.
Solve. Customers can solve complex business challenges with our pre-built solutions and algorithms running in Azure.

With one program, you’ll be able to target a variety of hardware through Azure Quantum – Azure classical compute, quantum simulators and resource estimators, and quantum hardware from our partners, as well as our future quantum system being built on revolutionary topological qubit. As quantum systems evolve, your code endures.

Delivering quantum impact today

Customers across a wide range of industries are already seeing the impact of our quantum solutions built on the tools and services available in Azure.

In collaboration with Microsoft, Case Western Reserve University created an MRI scan that takes a third of the time of a conventional MRI based on quantum solutions running on classical hardware. These advances in speed could help doctors detect diseases earlier, develop new drugs for conditions where progress is hard to measure today, or use imaging to diagnose cancers rather than relying on invasive procedures like biopsies.

OTI Lumionics develops advanced materials for OLED displays for use in next generation consumer electronics. This includes fully transparent displays that can integrate under-display cameras. Using their quantum chemistry applications with Microsoft’s quantum-inspired algorithms running in Azure, the team was able to successfully simulate Alq3, an OLED fluorescent material, with greater accuracy than typical methods available today. These quantum solutions enabled the team to achieve simulation without the need for expensive high-performance computations or a scalable quantum system. This marks a milestone in chemistry simulation that could inspire more efficient and scalable methods of materials, chemical and drug discovery across the industry.

Recently, Microsoft partnered with 1QBit and IonQ to demonstrate end-to-end quantum computing in Azure Quantum. The team collaborated with Dow and identified a problem in which the molecular energy of a ring of hydrogen atoms had to be evaluated. Using 1QBit’s problem decomposition solution expressed in Q#, the team was able to run computation in Azure against IonQ’s quantum computer based on trapped ions. This demonstrates how Azure Quantum can start to fuel innovations across the quantum stack – from applications and algorithms down to simulators and hardware. By bringing these end-to-end capabilities into one platform, the quantum community will be able to unlock new solutions that scale to even greater impact in the future.

Join the global quantum community

We’re excited to continue collaborating with developers and organizations through Azure Quantum, which will launch in private preview in the coming months. We hope you’ll sign up to become an early adopter!

With Azure Quantum, our ambition is to empower every developer and every organization to experience quantum impact at every stage of this quantum revolution – today and tomorrow.

Request to be an early adopter on Azure Quantum and get started with our Quantum Development Kit today.

Interested in joining the Microsoft Quantum Network of partners, customers, and labs? Let us know by submitting a request.

Posted on November 5, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

New tool gives people a powerful way to build expertise

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

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

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

portrait of Simon Denton, smiling — Simon Denton, productivity applications architect at Mott MacDonald.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The knowledge vision

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

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

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

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

Two people smile as they work together on a laptop in an office — Personal assistant Laura Smith talks with civil apprentice Shey Sewell at Mott MacDonald offices in London.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Screenshot of an online user experience — An example of a topic card in Outlook.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on November 5, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Surface Pro X available today

Today, we’re excited to launch what’s next for the 2-1 category – the all new Surface Pro X. When we started on this journey with Surface seven years ago, we created a new category that changed the industry forever. Now, as the world becomes more mobile and more cloud based, we’ve pushed the boundaries again with Surface Pro X to create a product that is at the intersection of mobility, productivity and speed.

What we’ve learned from our customers over the years is, as much as they love the portability, power and versatility of a 2-1, many of them also want that device that’s at the cutting edge of what’s next. This set of customers has new expectations for a modern device – the ability to be connected, productive and creative, with enough pixels and graphics performance for them to do more on the go. A device that lets them be mobile as they go from meeting to meeting to airport to hotel and back home again.

So, we pushed ourselves to evolve what it means to be mobile, powerful, and always connected with no interruption to your flow. The result is an incredibly thin, light, powerful and connected Surface. Hardware and platform innovation coming together to create an amazing experience for our customers.

Something new – custom silicon

Our vision for Surface Pro X was to take a mobile architecture and push the technology to make it a fully functioning powerful PC. To do this we created a piece of custom silicon, designed in partnership with Qualcomm. Surface Pro X is powered by the Microsoft SQ1 processor, creating a device that enables an incredible combination of pixels, performance, thinness, battery life and constant LTE connectivity.

This chip brings Snapdragon mobile DNA and an integrated AI accelerator together with incredible power. While ARM chips normally run in the 2-watt range, we know how important performance is to our customers and wanted to give them the power they need to achieve their goals.

With Microsoft SQ1 we’ve started with a phenomenal 7 watts of power by changing the chip itself, reengineering the tools and architecture for an incredibly fast, powerful experience found nowhere else. We redesigned the GPU and other silicon IP to create a product that’s 3x more performant per watt than Surface Pro 6. This means better battery life, a lighter and thinner product, and unprecedented performance, all while running full Windows, all the Office apps you love, Edge and Chrome.

Get into your flow anytime, anywhere

With the combination of the custom silicon and the amazing engineering and design work that went into the hardware, Surface Pro X is unbelievably light and thin. At 5.3mm thin at its thinnest point and 1.68lbs, it’s portable, versatile and always connected with LTE advanced. So you can work anywhere, anytime, whether you’re in the office, at home, traveling or at a coffee shop.

The display is stunning. With the thinnest bezels of any 2-1 on the market, this display provides a 13” screen in a 12” form factor, the most working space possible on a 13” screen, along with beautiful high contrast and high readability, colors that are vibrant and bright, and 2880×1920 resolution at 267 dpi.

Create intuitively

With the new Surface Pro X Signature Keyboard and Surface Slim Pen, you can create intuitively with typing, pen or touch. One of the things we’ve heard consistently from our customers is that they love using Surface Pen but want to have a way to make sure they can keep it with them, so it doesn’t get lost. With the Surface Pro X Signature Keyboard, the Pen stores securely and automatically recharges so it’s always with you and always charged.

You bring our products to life

Nothing inspires the team more than seeing the amazing things our customers do with our products. Surface Pro X is available in the US and Canada today, and additional markets where Surface is sold in the coming weeks. I can’t wait to see what you create.