Recent News – Page 144

Posted on September 23, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Sibos 2019: Empowering financial services to achieve more

It’s a transformative time for the financial services industry. In the fast-changing, tech-driven world banks now live in, they recognize that technology can play a role in helping them meet both their customers’ expectations and challenging regulatory requirements. Coming to Microsoft from that world myself just two weeks ago, I’m now leading the team responsible for helping our customers do just that – regardless of where they are in their transformation journey.

After 20 years in financial services, I’ve seen the impact technology can have, and recognize we have been approaching an inflection point for some time – and are at the tipping point.

We’re approaching the close of a decade, and the industry has a tremendous opportunity to accelerate use of cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) as a catalyst to improve competitiveness, drive growth, elevate customer experiences and keep ahead of changing regulations and cybersecurity threats.

To take full advantage of what Sibos 2019 describes as a hyper-connected world, more banks are making broader cloud platform choices – moving beyond infrastructure services – and extending their cloud investment to productivity, data and AI, and agile customer relationship management services.

They’re making this platform decision to seize the opportunity at hand and evolve to meet the rapidly changing needs and expectations of customers. They recognize technology can help them create the new business models required – even integrate past, present and future.

As we look ahead, key to this will be the ability for financial organizations to:

Deliver differentiated customer experience by accelerating growth and loyalty through deeper customer insights and relationships
Modernize payments and core banking with agility to roll out new products and services
Manage risk across the organization with deep insights and compliance with regulatory requirements
Empower employees through teamwork and improved employee productivity and accelerate workplace modernization
Combat financial crime by protecting your bank and customers while lowering compliance costs

Because of the hyper-connectivity, we know that regulatory compliance is and must be a top priority, which is why Microsoft continues to work with financial services regulators and customers to ensure our cloud services help customers meet their strict regulatory requirements. Our team has been a part of the consultation period in sharing perspectives on updated outsourcing guidance by the European Banking Authority (“EBA)” and the final issued guidance, which takes effect on Sept. 30, 2019.  This longstanding engagement with regulators around cloud computing is one of the reasons more than 90 percent of Global Systemically Important Financial Institutions (“GSIFIs”) depend on Microsoft cloud services. As a company we’ve made the investments and commitments to ensure they can meet their regulatory obligations.

To accelerate digital transformation, Microsoft has focused on removing barriers to adopting cloud technology – such as regulatory and compliance, and beyond. At Sibos, we’re unveiling several announcements to further underscore this effort:

Microsoft becomes first public cloud provider to enable connectivity with SWIFT Cloud Connect on Azure. Today, we’re announcing progress in our work with SWIFT since last year’s Sibos where we announced the POC to provide SWIFT via cloud on Microsoft Azure. Working with Bank of New York Mellon, Microsoft Treasury has successfully completed payment transaction tests via SWIFT on Azure by integrating with the Bank of New York-Mellon for payment confirmations. In addition, at Sibos we’ll preview two new planned tools to make compliance and cloud adoption easier for financial organizations processing payment messaging in the cloud; Azure SWIFT CSP Blueprint and Logic App connectors for financial services. The Azure SWIFT CSP Blueprint is now available in public preview and will enable fast and repeatable creation of governed SWIFT environments providing continuous monitoring and audit of CSP controls. Azure Logic App Connectors for financial services will enable organizations that adopt SWIFT services on Azure to easily connect their apps, data, and devices on-premise or in the cloud. These offerings will enable more secure and agile operations that will drive cloud adoption for financial institutions that deploy SWIFT on Azure.
Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection general availability and new feature addressing wrongful declines: This cloud-based solution will be generally available on Oct. 1, 2019 and is designed to decrease fraud costs and help increase acceptance rates for customer payment transactions with e-commerce merchants. Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection is designed to benefit merchants and banks while also improving customer shopping experiences by providing a seamless purchasing experience. The solution combats payment and account-creation fraud with AI technology that continuously learns and adapts to evolving fraudulent patterns. When generally available, the service will include a new feature (Transaction Acceptance Booster) that addresses wrongful declines – a common issue negatively impacting both merchants and banks. Among the first to deploy the new solution is Wipro Consumer Care & Lighting Group in India to reduce the fraud rate for their ecommerce platform Yardley.com. FMCG players like Wipro Consumer Care & Lighting Group can opt into this feature to increase acceptance rates for authorization requests they make to their issuing banks participating in Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection.
Microsoft Banking Accelerator adds BIAN API implementation: Following the general availability of the Microsoft Banking Accelerator in July, today we are releasing an API sample implementation on GitHub for interoperability with the Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN) API service domains. BIAN is a not-for-profit association to establish and promote a common architectural framework for enabling banking interoperability. Microsoft and BIAN have been working together to help unlock new open banking opportunities by allowing organizations to more seamlessly and consistently share banking-specific data across disparate systems. In addition to the BIAN API samples, Microsoft released an update to  Banking Accelerator on AppSource bringing additional use cases for retail banking.
Microsoft is the first cloud provider to receive a comprehensive cloud assessment from TruSight, an industry-backed, best-practices third-party assessment utility. Today, TruSight delivered a comprehensive on-site assessment of Microsoft’s Cloud Computing environment, including Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, and Microsoft Dynamics 365. The assessment was conducted using TruSight’s stringent best-practices assessment methodology. The new TruSight report gives financial services organizations a high-quality assessment of Microsoft’s cloud services based on standardized, industry-designed control assessment methodology. TruSight and its third-party assessment utility was created by leading banking institutions for the collective benefit of all financial services participants. The utility gives financial institutions the ability to access assessments on the most widely used third parties across financial services, rather than having to individually conduct assessments. Microsoft is the first of the major cloud providers to complete the assessment, which covered 27 control domains such as information technology, cybersecurity, business resiliency, privacy, physical security and risk management. Visit the Microsoft Trust Center to learn more.

Microsoft customers share their success stories

Microsoft is focused on empowering financial services organizations to achieve more. That requires being focused on trust, and always enabling our customers – through innovation, and security and compliance investments, as well as industry leading cloud scale. We continue to put our customers at the center of everything we do by sharing their inspired stories from our customers’ success since last year’s Sibos. We see momentum increasing worldwide as our customers tell their transformation stories – answering the questions about how they overcame obstacles, pitfalls to avoid, keys to success, why cloud or AI, and why Microsoft. Here are just a few of their stories:

Microsoft partner news

At Sibos 2019, we’re excited to showcase our partners’ progress in helping our mutual customers with their technology needs. Microsoft is the only cloud provider with a mature partner program and has the largest partner ecosystem in the market with more than 68,000 partners worldwide. Our partners are equipped and prepared to work with financial services organizations of all sizes across all their needs.

We’re featuring the following partner successes and collaboration efforts:

Posted on September 23, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Ambition is good; action is better: making progress on our climate commitments

The dialogue at this year’s United Nation’s Climate Summit has a refreshing air of sober reality. The urgency of the climate crisis has by now fully been absorbed, and the conversation has turned to the practical matter of what needs to be done to mitigate the worst impacts of a rapidly changing climate and adapt to that which we cannot avoid.

This means that the time of raised ambitions and grand announcements without clear action plans is also past. That is why we are focusing this week on new and specific contributions both inside and outside our four walls that have the potential to meaningfully impact environmental outcomes. We have been doing this work for more than a decade and, in April of this year, we doubled down on our ambitions with a clear focus on doing more where it makes the most difference — beyond operational changes and increasingly on how we put technology to work for the planet. With that in mind, I’m sharing several concrete developments and markers of progress, including:

Aligning our operations with a 1.5C climate scenario: It’s clear, given the science, that targets should be even more ambitious than the Paris Accord targets, which mapped to a 2 degree rise. Today, we’re pleased to say that our renewable energy target has been certified by the Science Based Target Initiative (SBTi) as aligned to a 1.5-degree Celsius future. The certification is meaningful for two reasons — first, we believe that actions should be driven by the best available science, and SBTi uses that as a core criteria for approval and second, because what is most important is not just setting targets — it’s meeting them. Science-based targets offer important measurement and accountability that is critical to assess if we’re making the progress the world needs, in the time frame we have available.
Extending carbon reduction work into our supply chain: Today, we’re setting a target reduction for our value and supply chain via our new SBTi-certified target, which will see us cut these emissions by at least 30 percent by 2030. Our supply chain, referred to in carbon accounting as Scope 3 emissions as indirect carbon emissions associated with anything from manufacturing to customer use of devices to employee airline travel, are far larger than our operational footprint. This is true for many companies and nearly all technology companies. We have already worked to drive transparency in this space, with more than 105 of our top suppliers reporting through the CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project), and will look to continue to do more in this space in the coming year.
Going from carbon neutral operations to carbon neutral products: Microsoft’s business operations have operated carbon neutral since 2012. Today we are beginning the journey of extending that to our products and devices with a pilot to make 825,000 Xbox consoles carbon neutral. These are the first gaming consoles to be carbon neutral. While just a pilot, we’re already looking at what we can do to further reduce and neutralize carbon across devices in the future.
Putting technology in the hands of others for the good of the planet: The investments we’ve made to make our devices and datacenters and supply chain greener are good for the planet but have exponential impact when the world is using these greener computing resources to power new AI breakthroughs for the planet. That’s why we’re continuing to expand our AI for Earth program with new grant partners like Conservation X Labs, National Geographic Society and World Resources Institute. We now have more than 430 grantees in 71 countries and just released our first APIs and code on our website and GitHub. The newest members of AI for Earth include the young leaders who participated in the Youth Summit’s Summer of Solutions.

It’s important to note that while we’ve made progress on several fronts, there is still much work to do within Microsoft to embed sustainability more deeply across the company and into all that we do. We are committed to doing this work and being transparent about our journey. And we’ll continue to work with external organizations like the Science Based Target Initiative and CDP, which have done so much to drive concrete, measurable change to hold us accountable and aligned to the best science.

This summit comes at a pivotal moment in time. I’m encouraged by the passion and participation I’ve seen already at the Youth Summit and new corporate announcements as well. It’s a welcome antidote to the fatalistic worldview that is all too easy to adopt when it comes to the future of the planet.

We must also not give in too easily to optimism unless it’s paired with real action. The road ahead will be challenging, and progress will certainly require everyone to do more. We’re committed to doing our part. Microsoft sees a responsibility and opportunity as a leading cloud and AI provider to play a major role in deploying solutions, applying capital and market power and reducing our sizable environmental footprint.

But progress is indeed possible. That’s not a naïve hope but one based on evidence: technology breakthroughs over the past few years, new work underway across our business, and a growing appetite from customers to digitally transform their businesses with sustainability in mind. We’re celebrating today in New York, and tomorrow we get back to work. I hope you’ll join us.

Posted on September 19, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

How AI for Earth is inspiring new generations to help the planet

Woodland Park Zoo, Seattle: streamlining camera traps

Manoj Sarathy, a high school student, is working with Dr. Robert Long of Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo to develop an AI tool that processes data from wildlife camera traps to monitor species in the Pacific Northwest and in the Rocky Mountains. Using machine learning, this resource will be able to identify and index a wide variety of animals in a much shorter timeframe than if processed manually. Camera traps can generate large amounts of data, some of which are false positives – for example, when something triggers the camera, but nothing meaningful is photographed. This AI tool examines the images and eliminates images that don’t require more detailed inspection.

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Cornell University, Ithaca, New York: listening to the sound of the rainforest

Dr. Laurel Symes and Dr. Holger Klinck are leading a project that uses insect sounds to monitor rainforests. Working out of the Cornell Bioacoustics Research Program in Ithaca, New York, their team of researchers uses AI to monitor insect sounds to develop a better understanding of the dynamics of these habitats. Tropical rainforests are home to great swathes of biodiversity, in part, because they are inaccessible to humans. The combination of plant density and high canopies makes these rainforests a challenging environment for traditional study techniques. This team’s first focus is on neotropical rainforest katydids, or bush crickets. The research will then move beyond insects to birds, monkeys and other vocal animals.

ETH Zurich: making the rainforest everyone’s joint concern

David Dao is a doctoral candidate at ETH Zurich, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. He is building AI and data systems to help fight deforestation. Historically, figuring out which body is responsible for looking after a section of forest has been a challenge. Dao and his team came up with an innovative idea: Make everyone a caretaker of the forest. This system allows people to make a financial investment in the forest’s wellbeing, with the hope of gaining a return. This gives – giving everyone an incentive to help fight deforestation.

University of Alberta in Canada: grizzly bears and the right to roam

Clayton Lamb is a researcher at the University of Alberta in Canada, specializing in grizzly bears. Lamb is particularly interested in the scope of the bears’ territory – or lack of it – as grizzlies only occupy a fraction of the land they formerly roamed. Much of the remaining population also faces competition for land use from humans. Lamb’s work uses AI and machine-learning tools to create a comprehensive analysis of the human and environmental factors that could contribute to the limiting of grizzly bear density.

iNaturalist: Using AI for species identification

iNaturalist is a social media platform that helps people identify the plants, animals and insects they see anywhere in the world. With badges and features that offer a gaming element, users capture biodiversity data and share their findings. The iNat’s Seek app was created with families in mind with features to mask location data and other potentially sensitive information about children using the app. There are an estimated 10 million species in the world, but only 1.8 million have been discovered and just 90,000 analyzed. So there’s plenty of scope for getting involved.

Colorado State University: Inspiration from above

The Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network, CoCoRaHS for short, works with thousands of trained volunteer observers, including children, to gather data on rain, snow and hail. Using tools like plastic rain gauges, citizen scientists measure rain or snowfall each morning and submit their readings to the CoCoRaHS database. Making this data available to weather forecasting services is helping improve severe weather models, making it easier to issue accurate and timely alerts when needed.

City University of New York: Looking to the future

Just off the Pacific coast of North America lies the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) Regional Cabled Array. It sits atop the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate, collecting oceanographic data. Dr. Dax Soule at City University of New York uses that data to engage students from a variety of backgrounds. One such study concerns the Axial Seamount, which combines a volcanic hotspot with a mid-ocean ridge. Using cloud-based tools to access this data and then conduct important research, Soule is helping to inspire the next generation of oceanographic scientists.

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

Posted on September 19, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

18 million new building footprints in Africa will help rescuers respond to natural disasters

In the last ten years, 2 billion people were affected by disasters according to the World Disasters report 2018. In 2017, 201 million people needed humanitarian assistance and 18 million were displaced due to weather related disasters. Many of these disaster-prone areas are literally “missing” from the map, making it harder for first responders to prepare and deliver relief efforts.

Since the inception of Tasking Manager, the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) community has mapped at an incredible rate with 11 million square kilometers mapped in Africa alone. However, large parts of Africa with populations prone to disasters still remain unmapped — 60% of the 30 million square kilometers.

Under Microsoft’s AI for Humanitarian Action program, Bing Maps together with Microsoft Philanthropies is partnering with HOT on an initiative to bring AI Assistance as a resource in open map building. The initiative focuses on incorporating design updates, integrating machine learning, and bringing new open building datasets into Tasking Manager.

The Bing Maps team has been harnessing the power of Computer Vision to identify map features at scale. Building upon their work in the United States and Canada, Bing Maps is now releasing country-wide open building footprints datasets in Uganda and Tanzania. This will be one of the first open building datasets in Africa and will be available for use within OpenStreetMap (OSM).

In Tasking Manager specifically, the dataset will be used to help in task creation with the goal of improving task completion rates. Tasking Manager relies on ‘ML enabler’ to connect with building datasets through an API. This API-based integration makes it convenient to access not just Africa building footprints, but all open building footprints datasets from Bing Maps through ML Enabler, and thus the OpenStreetMap ecosystem.

“Machine learning datasets for OSM need to be open. We need to go beyond identifying roads and buildings and open datasets allow us to experiment and uncover new opportunities. Open Building Dataset gives us the ability to not only explore quality and validation aspects, but also advance how ML data assists mapping.”
– Tyler Radford (Executive Director, Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team)

Africa presented several challenges: stark difference in landscape from the United States or Canada, unique settlements such as Tukuls, dense urban areas with connected structures, imagery quality and vintage, and lack of training data in rural areas. The team identified areas with poor recall by leveraging population estimates from CIESIN. Subsequent targeted labeling efforts across Bing Maps and HOT improved model recall especially in rural areas. A two-step process with semantic segmentation followed by polygonization resulted in 18M building footprints — 7M in Uganda and 11M in Tanzania.

Extractions in Musoma, Tanzania

Bing Maps is making this data open for download free of charge and usable for research, analysis and of course, OSM. In OpenStreetMap there are currently 14M building footprints in Uganda and Tanzania (the last time our team counted). We are working to determine overlaps.

We will be making the data available on Github to download. The CNTK toolkit developed by Microsoft is open source and available on GitHub as well. The ResNet3 model is also open source and available on GitHub. The Bing Maps computer vision team will be presenting the work in Uganda and Tanzania at the annual International State of the Map conference in Heidelberg, Germany and at the HOT Summit.

– Bing Maps Team

Posted on September 19, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Virtual reality project Microgravity Lab takes students to space

Virtual reality can transport us to new lands that are near, far, or imagined. As a team of Garage interns found partnering with the Microsoft Hacking STEM and NASA Stem on Station teams, it can also demonstrate physics concepts and spark an interest in STEM careers. For the back-to-school season, we’re excited to announce the opportunity to try Microgravity Lab, a Microsoft Garage project. The VR experience for Windows Mixed Reality and corresponding lesson plan equip teachers with an engaging tool for teaching physics concepts by simulating microgravity. Interested educators can request an invite to try the VR application and corresponding lesson plans. Be sure to include your school name and plan for using the application into the form.

Bringing space into the classroom via Windows Mixed Reality

The Garage Internship is a unique, startup-style program in which teams of interns build projects in response to pitched challenges by Microsoft engineering teams. When this Vancouver intern team heard that the Microsoft Education team was looking for a creative new method way to illustrate the concept of microgravity through VR, they jumped at the opportunity to work on the project.

An often-misunderstood concept, microgravity is difficult to simulate and understand in Earth’s gravity-laden environment. It is best explained through experiential learning. The Microgravity Lab VR lab experience for Windows Mixed Reality and its accompanying lessons gives teachers the tools to bring this experiential learning to their students.

As NASA Education Specialist Matthew E. Wallace shared, “The concept of microgravity is often misunderstood by students who learn about astronauts on the International Space Station. Providing a virtual reality world for them to explore the phenomena of life on orbit is an excellent way to engage students and solidify their comprehension of concepts related to force, mass and gravitational acceleration.”

Sabrina Ng, Design Intern for the project noted, “When I think of microgravity, I think of it as something you feel, not what you see per se. Thinking about how to visualize and communicate such an abstract concept without stimulating the physical senses was a really cool challenge.”

Microgravity Lab joins a collection of eight middle school lesson plans developed in partnership with NASA to celebrate 20 years of humans living in and working on the International Space Station.

Experiencing microgravity to understand Newton’s 2nd & 3rd Law

Microgravity Lab is designed for grades 6-8. Students can explore three VR modules to understand these physics principles in the context of microgravity on the moon:

Conservation of momentum
Newton’s 2nd Law
Newton’s 3rd Law

The team worked closely with teachers to develop the project, testing early versions of Microgravity Lab with 7th and 8th grade classes. They refined and updated the experienced based on the classroom feedback.

Implementing feedback from teachers and students, the interns added a feature to enable live Microgravity data analysis via Excel. “This project gives students the experience and the fun aspects of VR, but with Excel, we found a way to expose them to Data Analysis. Data is a very important part of our world and this is a great way to introduce it to them,” shared Rébecca Vézina-Côté, the Program Manager Intern for Microgravity Lab.

Introducing space into the classroom via Windows Mixed Reality

Hacking STEM to engage students

Microgravity Lab joins the Hacking STEM portfolio. The portfolio is created by teachers for teachers to offer hands-on, inquiry-driven, real-world lesson plans. The standards-aligned, interdisciplinary lessons lesson plans teach 21st century technical skills in the context of existing curricula. The Hacking STEM portfolio now includes 22 middle and high school lesson plans built by teachers for teachers on topics ranging from circuits and robotic hands to learning how sharks swim, and now, microgravity.

“There are companies moving towards commercializing space travel and package delivery, a project like this might give students an idea of what life might be like on a space station, and hopefully inspire them to want to go further with it and see it as a future path for them as an area of interest or a future career,” shared Adrian Pang, a Software Engineer Intern with the project.

The Microgravity Lab experience makes science more engaging and introduces these concepts to students in a way that inspires lifelong learning and passionate curiosity about the world around them.

The impact of VR in the classroom

The Microsoft Education team has provided materials to enable a seamless introduction of VR to the classroom. When immersive technologies are deployed correctly and in a pedagogically consistent manner, they have the potential to support and expand curriculum, enhancing learning outcomes in ways that haven’t been previously affordable or scalable. Read more in this white paper detailing the impact of VR in the classroom.

Based on their own experience learning VR and Windows Mixed Reality, Garage interns have suggestions on how teachers can get started with VR. “Windows Mixed Reality does a great job of walking users through setting up the headset, then it’s just finding the app on the Microsoft Store, downloading it and installing it,” shared Rébecca. Crystal Song, another Software Engineering Intern continues, “I’d encourage teachers and school administrators to not see the tech as just a toy, but something that can teach. VR has a unique ability to teach through discovery, so allowing space and time for students to explore is key.”

James Burke, a longtime Hacking STEM developer partner who worked with the interns to test the project, encourages fellow educators to think outside the box to engage and challenge students. “Kids can do a lot more than people give them credit for.” In Burke’s engineering lab at Tyee Middle School, students work on project-based learning modules that can resemble college-level multidisciplinary assignments. With future-ready equipment and real-world projects to tackle, his award-winning classroom engages with students at every level. VR is just another way to spark that passion in students.

Request an invitation to try the project

To get started with Microgravity Lab for your classroom, request an invite to try the VR application. Include your school name and plan for using the application into the form.

More lesson plans and classroom materials are available at the Hacking STEM website.

Posted on September 19, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Meet the Surface design team that built our first smart headphones

Meet the Surface design team who built our first smart headphones

It’s 2 PM, and you need to finish a project by end of day. Coworkers in your open office space are chatting about the newest ramen spot. While you’d like to expound on the difference between Hokkaido- versus Tokyo-style noodles, you need to focus. You put on your Surface Headphones, and Cortana greets you with a quick update:

“Hi, you’ve got about 8 hours of battery left. You’re connected to [your device name].”

As your favorite Odesza song plays, you start work immediately.

YOUR WORKPLACE ACCOMPANIMENT

Composed with the design trinity of audio quality, comfort, and seamless integration, the Surface Headphones help you create a personal space in the modern workplace and in your modern life. The idea that, when you wear them, you escape into another world that lets you focus on you and what you need to get done. The Surface design team wanted to give you — the actual user — control over how plugged in (or not!) you want to be to your immediate environment. Check out the tech specs here.

And you can see that thoughtful approach in the hardware. Designing comfortable earmuffs was paramount because it’s the one part that touches you all the time. They initially considered a traditional donut shape, but with inclusive design at the heart of everything we do, we wanted to accommodate a diverse set of ear shapes. The earmuffs now fit ears of all shapes and sizes comfortably with even pressure points for a secure fit.

Tactile design wasn’t the only consideration. They set out to craft a device that’s both functional and beautiful. Creating a smooth seam on the earmuff, for example, was surprisingly difficult. See how the team wouldn’t take no for an answer in the video below:

See how the Surface design team wove together elegant hardware design, rich audio, and an intelligent assistant. Click here for the audio description version.

Every decision about the Surface Headphones keeps real people in mind — including the writing they don’t see or touch.

To create a holistic and seamless voice experience, Senior Writer Matt Lichtenberg, who focuses on hardware, and Senior Personality Lead for AI Chris O’Connor, who shapes the voice for intelligent experiences, fused their complementary skills. Because Cortana delivers the instructions, Matt and Chris needed to collaborate and bring together the what (instructions) and the how (Cortana).

“Words contribute to the whole experience,” said Matt, “and we wanted the headphones to be almost invisible to people while they’re wearing them. They shouldn’t have to think about them much.”

“I like to think of it as, we’re helping people achieve more with less energy,” said Chris. “How do they get the most out of this device with the least amount of effort? It’s the idea that design stays out of your way — it’s minimal and there to help you get stuff done.”

THINKING OUT OF THE BOX

From the onset, the design team wanted to understand how people naturally use headphones in a variety of vignettes. They developed a series of scenarios to answer key questions about how people interacted with the headphones.

For instance, when customers initially turn on the headphones, would they want to pair and go? Or would they download the Cortana app first?

As it turns out, most want to pair and go.

When you turn on other Bluetooth devices for the first time, you’ll need to put the device in pairing mode. With the Surface Headphones, they’re immediately in pairing mode and Cortana greets you with, “Hello, you’re ready to pair.”

You connect your device, and Cortana confirms with, “You’re paired to [device name].”

“It’s a challenge to create a rich and enjoyable out-of-the-box experience,” said Chris. “If it’s boring and tedious, people blow right through it. But if it’s enjoyable and people understand the value, they’ll reach an optimal state before carrying on.”

Design is an iterative process, and we’re constantly listening to feedback. We’ve heard customers ask for more device control to turn settings on or off, including the “Hey, Cortana” voice activation, touch controls, and voice prompts. So, we delivered.

The latest firmware update on the Cortana app can help you personalize your headphone settings, like reducing the number or duration of voice prompts. That means you can change your settings so a simple “Hello” plays when you initially turn on your headphones. The app gives you more control of your device, ensuring you get the best experience possible.

“It’s amazing how long it feels to say a few words, so you need to make them count,” said Matt.

Unlike computers, which require constant interaction, the Surface Headphones almost disappear into the background while you work, helping you focus while eliminating outside distractions. To help people achieve this, the voice writing team designed the voice prompts to avoid interruptions unless they’re critical, like letting you know when your battery is low.

“How do you thread the needle between being a voice prompt, a robot, and a conversational entity, but still get out of the way?” asked Chris. “This was one of the first areas where we had to practice design differently and pull back on personality to allow things to be shorter and faster.”

COMMUNICATING WITHOUT WORDS

Some interactions don’t even need words.

When the headphones are charging, for example, the LED light flashes. In this context, a visual cue is more intuitive. You don’t need to pick them up or put them on to know what’s happening.

In times when words feel unnatural, sound itself can communicate information. When you turn the left dial on the Surface Headphones forward, you hear a low-pitched beep to indicate maximum noise cancellation. Conversely, a high-pitched beep plays when you turn the dial in the opposite direction. This confirms the headphones are now amplifying ambient sound.

Inspired by the volume knobs of hi-fi stereos, which turn with a certain slowness, the hardware design team added headset dials to adjust volume, noise cancellation, or sound amplification. Rotating the dial is an intuitive motion that lets people choose the precise level of sound they want (or don’t want).

Our design anticipates different modes of communication contingent on how someone wants to use or interact with the headphones. But whether it’s audio or visual, each interaction remains succinct.

THE NEXT MOVEMENT IN VOICE DESIGN

The Surface Headphones are the first ambient device from Microsoft with an assistant. The Surface design team had a groundbreaking opportunity to radically reimagine headphones as more than just headphones.

In the past, people often confused or conflated digital assistants with voice control. But with increased investments in personality design and the future of interaction, Microsoft is experimenting with giving Cortana added dimension and awareness to help customers get the most out of a digital assistant.

“We decided to use the human metaphor for a digital assistant, because a real-life assistant isn’t just voice control. They don’t just take dictation. They understand what’s important to you, your family, your priorities, your goals,” explained Chris.

As we continue to infuse intelligence across our products and services, teams throughout the company are beginning to explore the potential for what a digital assistant could be.

“The headphones sparked a whole new area of thinking — one that we’re using to think through the same problem from other endpoints as we move on to work for the Office 365 apps,” said Chris.

And who knows? Maybe one day, when you slip on your Surface Headphones, Cortana can chime in with her favorite kind of ramen, too.

Posted on September 19, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

First reviews for new book ‘Tools and Weapons’ by Microsoft Pres. Brad Smith and Carol Ann Browne

“When your technology changes the world,” he writes, “you bear a responsibility to help address the world that you have helped create.” And governments, he writes, “need to move faster and start to catch up with the pace of technology.”

In a lengthy interview, Mr. Smith talked about the lessons he had learned from Microsoft’s past battles and what he saw as the future of tech policymaking – arguing for closer cooperation between the tech sector and the government. It’s a theme echoed in the book, “Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age,” which he wrote with Carol Ann Browne, a member of Microsoft’s communications staff.

–The New York Times, Sept. 8, 2019

In 2019, a book about tech’s present and future impact on humankind that was relentlessly upbeat would feel out of whack with reality. But Smith’s Microsoft experience allowed him to take a measured look at major issues and possible solutions, a task he says he relished.

“There are some people that are steeped in technology, but they may not be steeped in the world of politics or policy,” Smith told me in a recent conversation. “There are some people who are steeped in the world of politics and policy, but they may not be steeped in technology. And most people are not actually steeped in either. But these issues impact them. And increasingly they matter to them.”

–Fast Company, Sept. 8, 2019

In ‘Tools & Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age,’ the longtime Microsoft executive and his co-author Carol Ann Browne tell the inside story of some of the biggest developments in tech and the world over the past decade – including Microsoft’s reaction to the Snowden revelations, its battle with Russian hackers in the lead up to the 2016 elections and its role in the ongoing debate over privacy and facial recognition technology.

The book goes behind-the-scenes at the Obama and Trump White Houses; explores the implications of the coming wave of artificial intelligence; and calls on tech giants and governments to step up and prepare for the ethical, legal and societal challenges of powerful new forms of technology yet to come.

-GeekWire, September 7, 2019

Tensions between the U.S. and China feature prominently in Smith’s new book, ‘Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age.’ While Huawei is its own case, Smith worries that broader and tighter strictures could soon follow. The Commerce Department is considering new restrictions on the export of emerging technologies on which Microsoft has placed big bets, including artificial intelligence and quantum computing. “You can’t be a global technology leader if you can’t bring your technology to the globe,” he says.

-Bloomberg Businessweek, Sept. 7, 2019

Tell us what you think about the book @MSFTIssues. You can buy the book here or at bookstores around the world.

Posted on September 19, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Bollywood, blockbusters and a $5B industry: How Eros Now is redefining online video

Being on the cutting edge of technology was baked into the DNA of Indian video company Eros Now from the start.

Its parent company, Eros International Plc., was founded in 1977, the same year the VHS videocassette format was released in North America. While some in the entertainment industry were leery about the newfangled technology, Eros was all in.

“Back then, it was a scary thing,” says Eros Digital CEO Rishika Lulla Singh. “But we embraced VHS and we continued to embrace new technology.”

That approach has served the company well. Eros International Plc., a movie distribution and production company, was India’s first VHS distributor and the first Indian media company listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

Eros Now, its on-demand video arm, was launched in 2012 and has now attracted over 18.8 million paid subscribers and 155 million users worldwide with its more than 12,000 Bollywood films, music videos and original content including series and short episodes.

Eros Now amassed its big audience largely by premiering blockbuster films and related content such as trailers and music videos on its site even before they were on YouTube, Lulla Singh says. The company aims to differentiate itself not just as a one-stop destination for online entertainment but also as a tech innovator — and a new collaboration with Microsoft is underpinning those efforts.

Portrait of Rishika Lulla Singh, CEO of Indian company Eros Digital — Eros Digital CEO Rishika Lulla Singh.

Eros Now is working with Microsoft to migrate the company’s operations to the Azure cloud platform to improve video and viewing experiences for consumers worldwide. Lulla Singh says Microsoft’s ability to innovate in cloud computing and artificial intelligence, its research in voice services and discovery, and the company’s capacity for handling big data were the primary reasons Eros Now wanted to collaborate with Microsoft to develop next-generation video technology.

“We feel that Azure can help us to drive a lot of our ambitions to create the correct architecture for the video platform,” she says. “It was the sheer sophistication of the product over everything else on the market.”

The collaboration, Microsoft’s first effort in India in streaming video, signifies a move into a thriving entertainment market. Streaming video is growing rapidly in India, where the market is projected to reach $5 billion by 2023, according to a study by The Boston Consulting Group.

“India is among the fastest-growing entertainment and media markets globally, with cutting-edge innovation in content creation, distribution and data insights ,” says Anant Maheshwari, president of Microsoft India. “Our partnership with Eros Now is a significant milestone. Together, we hope to redefine the video viewing experience for consumers in India and across the globe.”

Lulla Singh has been working with teams across Microsoft and says she’s been struck by the company’s collaborative culture.

“Microsoft wants to enable other companies to be cool and to essentially realize your own ambition. The collaboration that’s come from that is incredible,” she says.

The rise in video streaming has shifted consumer expectations and the role of companies like Microsoft in the industry. Consumers are watching content on multiple devices, from smartphones to tablets, and media companies are facing increased competition to attract viewers, Maheshwari says. Those companies are looking to cloud providers for secure and scalable content delivery, he says, and for capabilities such as advanced search and smart content recommendations.

“What will differentiate video streaming services is the ability to give users exciting content to experience within the limited time and attention span they have,” he says. “AI and intelligent cloud tools will be the next drivers of the media business and will impact everything in the content value chain.”

Eros Now, Lulla Singh says, saw an opportunity to distinguish itself by creating original content that was a departure from the typical Indian television fare.

“The television landscape in India is very, very different to what happens in the U.S., where we have ‘Game of Thrones’ and a lot of sexy content,” she says. “That doesn’t really exist in the Indian television ecosystem.

“Most Indian programming is catered to more older audiences, which is actually not relevant to the new millennial audiences.”

Eros Now began developing its own original content around 2015, launching “Side Hero,” a Bollywood-inspired comedy series, last year, followed by “Smoke,” a drama about drug cartels. Last December, the company introduced “Eros Now Quickie,” a series of eight- to 10-minute episodes ranging from docudramas to comedy, and segments on food, health and travel.

Eros Now plans to continue innovating by personalizing content for customers by language, subtitles and other geographic-based preferences. Bollywood movies have been growing in popularity in regions outside India including China, Russia and Eastern Europe, Lulla Singh says. Eros Now, which currently has viewers in more than 135 countries, hopes to ride that momentum to expand into new markets and reach its goal of 50 million subscribers over the next three years.

“We just want to continue to create, continue to please our customers and grow in the process as well,” she says.

Top image: A sampling of Eros Now’s original content, which began premiering in 2018. (Images courtesy of Eros Now)

Posted on September 17, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Oracle and Microsoft expand cloud partnership to boost workplace productivity

Building on Oracle and Microsoft’s cloud interoperability partnership, Oracle today announced the availability of an integration between Oracle Digital Assistant and Microsoft Teams. Enterprise customers can now access Oracle Cloud Applications through an AI-powered voice experience in Teams.

“Using Oracle Digital Assistant, business users can simply and conversationally interact with business applications directly from their Microsoft Teams interface just as they would collaborate with their fellow employees or other productivity tools,” said Suhas Uliyar, vice president, AI and Digital Assistant, Oracle. “Completing daily work tasks becomes much more efficient as the AI-trained conversational access doesn’t require additional employee training on different applications. This is yet another way we are enabling customers to run mission-critical enterprise workloads across Microsoft 365 and Oracle Cloud.”

Once Oracle Digital Assistant is enabled from the Teams App Store, users can query Oracle Cloud Applications, such as CX and HCM, through a bot conversation. Skills from Oracle Digital Assistant are auto provisioned and auto configured, tapping into the richness of the Teams experience. “Together, Oracle Digital Assistant and Teams enable our customers to transform existing workflows and save time,” said Bhrighu Sareen, general manager, Microsoft Teams Platform. “This integration reduces context change for people since it eliminates the need to switch between applications, enabling them to complete tasks like viewing a sales pipeline in Oracle CX without leaving Teams.”

Today, the integration of Oracle Digital Assistant and Teams provides customers with a frictionless work environment to boost productivity and faster decision making. In the future, out-of-the-box skills or chatbots for Oracle ERP Cloud, Oracle HCM Cloud and Oracle CX Cloud are planned to be available in Teams via the Oracle Digital Assistant. These pre-built features can enable employee self-service for scenarios spanning sales, project management, expenses, productivity, time and absence management, compensation and benefits, and recruiting.

“We’ve been working closely with our partner IntraSee to create a HR digital assistant for our global employee base and Oracle Digital Assistant was the natural choice for us because of its ability to securely operate in our hybrid cloud infrastructure,” said Mark Burgess, senior director, HR Technology Solutions, Honeywell. “Our aim is to have it be the preferred method to get questions answered 24×7, access to policies and an amazing end-to-end approach for completing transactions with more speed and accuracy. We knew we wanted our HR digital assistant to be available where employees spend their time online, and an integration with Teams was therefore essential. Our vision is to have it become to employees what J.A.R.V.I.S. is to Iron Man.”

“We are excited to hear that Oracle Digital Assistant will support Teams,” said Sayan Ray, vice president, IT, SRF Ltd. “We’ve been using Oracle Digital Assistant to deliver conversational interfaces to our backend systems with great success. We also use Teams to collaborate so this partnership will help take Oracle Digital Assistant implementation to new levels in productivity gains.”

For more information on Oracle Digital Assistant for Teams, please sign up for private preview today.

Posted on September 17, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Helping first responders achieve more with autonomous systems and AirSim

With inputs from: Elizabeth Bondi (Harvard University), Bob DeBortoli (Oregon State University), Balinder Malhi (Microsoft) and Jim Piavis (Microsoft)

Autonomous systems have the potential to improve safety for people in dangerous jobs, particularly first responders. However, deploying these systems is a difficult task that requires extensive research and testing.

In April, we explored complexities and challenges present in the development of autonomous systems and how technologies such as AirSim provide a pragmatic way to solve these tasks. Microsoft believes that the key to building robust and safe autonomous systems is providing a system with a wide range of training experiences to properly expose it to many scenarios before it can be deployed in the real world. This ensures training is done in a meaningful way—similar to how a student might be trained to tackle complex tasks through a curriculum curated by a teacher.

With autonomous systems, first responders gain sight into the unknown

One way Microsoft trains autonomous systems is through participating in unique research opportunities focused on solving real-world challenges, like aiding first responders in hazardous scenarios. Recently, our collaborators at Carnegie Mellon University and Oregon State University, collectively named Team Explorer, demonstrated technological breakthroughs in this area during their first-place win at the first round of the DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge.

Snapshots from the AirSim simulation showing the effects of different conditions such as water vapor, dust and heavy smoke. Such variations in conditions can provide useful data when building robust autonomous systems.

The DARPA SubT Challenge aspires to further the technologies that would augment difficult operations underground. Specifically, the challenge focuses on the methods to map, navigate, and search complex underground environments. These underground environments include human-made tunnel systems, urban underground, and natural cave networks. Imagine constrained environments that are several kilometers long and structured in unique ways with regular or irregular geological topologies and patterns. Weather or other hazardous conditions, due to poor ventilation or poisonous gasses, often make first responders’ work even more dangerous.

Team Explorer engaged in autonomous search and detection of several artifacts within a man-made system of tunnels. The end-to-end solution that the team created required many different complex components to work across the challenging circuit including mobility, mapping, navigation, and detection.

Microsoft’s Autonomous Systems team worked closely with Team Explorer to provide a high-definition simulation environment to help with the challenge. The team used AirSim to create an intricate maze of man-made tunnels in a virtual world that was representative of such real-world tunnels, both in complexity as well as size. The virtual world was a hybrid synthesis, where a team of artists used reference material from real-world mines to modularly generate a network of interconnected tunnels spanning two kilometers in length spread over a large area.

Additionally, the simulation included robotic vehicles—wheeled robots as well as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)—and a suite of sensors that adorned the autonomous agents. AirSim provided a rich platform that Team Explorer could use to test their methods along with generate training experiences for creating various decision-making components for the autonomous agents.

At the center of the challenge was the ability for the robots to perceive the underground terrain and discover things (such as human survivors, backpacks, cellular phones, fire extinguishers, and power drills) while adjusting to different weather and lighting conditions. Multimodal perception is important in challenging environments, as well as AirSim’s ability to simulate a wide variety of sensors, and their fusion can provide a competitive edge. One of the most important sensors is a LIDAR, and in AirSim, the physical process of generating the point clouds are carefully reconstructed in software, so the sensor used on the robot in simulation uses the same configuration parameters (such as number-of-channels, range, points-per-second, rotations-per-second, horizontal/vertical FOVs, and more) as those found on the real vehicle.

It is challenging to train perception modules based on deep learning models to detect the target objects using LIDAR point clouds and RGB cameras. While curated datasets, such as ScanNet and MS COCO, exist for more canonical applications, none exist for underground exploration applications. Creating a real dataset for underground environments is expensive because a dedicated team is needed to first deploy the robot, gather the data, and then label the captured data. Microsoft’s ability to create near-realistic autonomy pipelines in AirSim means that we can rapidly generate labeled training data for a subterranean environment.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOORx_7JmXc]

Detecting animal poaching through drone simulations

With autonomous systems, the issues with collection data are further exacerbated for applications that involve first line responders since the collection process is itself dangerous. Such challenges were present in our collaboration with Air Shepherd and USC to help counter wildlife poaching.

The central task in this collaboration was the development of UAVs equipped with thermal infrared cameras that can ﬂy through national parks at night to search for poachers and animals. The project had several challenges, the largest of which was building such a system that requires data for both training as well as testing purposes. For example, labeling a real-world dataset, which was provided by Air Shepherd, took approximately 800 hours over the course of 6 months to complete. This produced 39,380 labeled frames and approximately 180,000 individual poacher and animal labels on those frames. This data was used to build a prototype detection system called SPOT but did not produce acceptable precision and recall values.

AirSim was then used to create a simulation, where virtual UAVs flew over virtual environments like those found in the Central African savanna at an altitude from 200 to 400 feet above ground level. The simulation took on the difficult task of detecting poachers and wildlife, both during the day and at night, and ultimately ended up increasing the precision in detection through imaging by 35.2%.

Driving innovation through simulation

Access to simulation environments means that we have a near-infinite data generation machine, where different simulation parameters can be chosen to generate experiences at will. This capability is foundational to test and debug autonomous systems that eventually would be provably robust and certified. We continue to investigate such fuzzing and falsification framework for various AI systems.

Holistic challenges such as the DARPA SubT Challenge, and partnerships with organizations like Air Shepherd allow researchers and developers to build complete solutions that cover a wide array of research topics. There are many research challenges at the intersection of robotics, simulations, and machine intelligence that we continue to invest in our journey to build toolchains, enabling researchers and developers to build safe and useful simulations and robots.

We invite readers to explore AirSim on our GitHub repository and invest in our journey to build toolchains in collaboration with the community. The AirSim network of man-made caves environment was co-created with Team Explorer for the DARPA SubT Challenge and is publicly available for researchers and developers.