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How TrialWatch app and other technology can help you navigate the legal system

The principle of equality before law has underpinned the definition of justice all over the world, including in the United States and in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But the expertise necessary to navigate legal systems can, at times, be hard to access. AI and other technology is now being used to help predict, analyse and respond to human rights issues the world over.

In April 2019, the Clooney Foundation for Justice announced TrialWatch, in partnership with Microsoft, the American Bar Association, Columbia Law School and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. This app aims to bring more transparency to courtrooms around the world. Microsoft’s involvement with TrialWatch is part of its AI for Humanitarian Action that was announced at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2018.

Beyond Microsoft’s efforts, there are several organizations using technology to help ensure everyone has more equal access to justice. Here are a few:

Seeking advice

Interpreting the law and applying it to individual circumstances is complex. Expense, time and distance can be significant barriers when it comes to getting help from a lawyer. But sometimes even the simplest technology can make a difference.

Lawyers are using video-calling services like Skype to eliminate the need for clients to travel. In the United States, Utah Legal Services has been operating Skype clinics at community centers and public libraries so in remote parts of the state can get legal aid.

Making expertise available locally can make a difference. One example is a project in Tanzania, where volunteers with smartphones have been able to help farmers establish land rights using mobile technology. Many of the people who have been helped are vulnerable women who have been able to secure official titles to their property for the first time.

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Simpler and quicker

In some cases, more advanced applications are being used to help people navigate the justice system without a lawyer.

The A2J project uses cloud-based software to help people without legal representation put together documents that can be filed in court cases and tribunals. It has been used around 4.7 million times across 42 U.S. states. In the United Kingdom, a similar system called CourtNav guides people through putting together divorce petitions.

Chatbots are going even further. Do Not Pay helps drivers appeal parking tickets in the U.K. and a range of American cities. Its founder is planning to expand into small claims and civil cases.

The winner of the 2019 Global Legal Hackathon was a German startup, called Uthority, whose app makes legal letters easier to understand. Users can take a picture of a lawyer’s letter or court document, and get the key points in everyday language without legal jargon.

Digital courts

British Columbia has set up the Civil Resolution Tribunal, which can adjudicate in small claims, motor vehicle injury cases and condominium disputes. Plaintiffs file an application online, and the parties are taken through a mediation process. If no agreement can be reached, an independent adjudicator will make a legally enforceable judgement.

A different approach has been taken in Mohave County in Arizona. A video kiosk links to a court, allowing people to talk to clerks, print and file papers, and pay fines. People are even able to appear in front of a judge remotely.

Shining a light

Technology is also being used to shine a light into court systems, and help expose injustice around the world. TrialWatch, the Clooney Foundation for Justice’s partnership with Microsoft and other organisations, “equips and trains monitors to determine and document if trials are conducted in a fair way.”

Its AI-powered text-to-speech and language-translation capabilities help experts around the world assess a trial’s fairness, even if they don’t speak a local language. The foundation can then document and address miscarriages of justice or abuses of legal authority.

The data will also be used to create a global justice index assessing how national courts adhere to human rights and fair trial standards.

For more on AI, visit AI Empowering Innovation. And follow @MSFTIssues on Twitter.  

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Microsoft’s Threat & Vulnerability Management solution now generally available

I’m excited to announce that Microsoft’s Threat & Vulnerability Management solution is generally available as of June 30! We have been working closely with customers for more than a year to incorporate their real needs and feedback to better address vulnerability management. Our goal is to empower defenders with the tools they need to better protect against evolving threats, and we believe this solution will help provide that additional visibility and agility they need.

Threat & Vulnerability Management (TVM) is a built-in capability in Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) that uses a risk-based approach to discover, prioritize, and remediate endpoint vulnerabilities and misconfigurations. With Microsoft Defender ATP’s Threat & Vulnerability Management, customers benefit from:

  • Continuous discovery of vulnerabilities and misconfigurations
  • Prioritization based on business context and dynamic threat landscape
  • Correlation of vulnerabilities with endpoint detection and response (EDR) alerts to expose breach insights
  • Machine-level vulnerability context during incident investigations
  • Built-in remediation processes through unique integration with Microsoft Intune and Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager

Traditional vulnerability scanning only happens periodically, leaving organizations with security blind spots between scans. The one-size-fits-all approach that these traditional solutions use ignores critical business-specific context, as well as the dynamic threat landscape. This is coupled with the fact that mitigation of vulnerabilities is a manual process, often across teams, that can take days, weeks, or months to complete. This leaves a window of opportunity for attackers and puts our defenders in a tough spot.

To address these challenges Microsoft partnered with a dozen enterprise customers on the design and creation of this new Threat & Vulnerability Management solution. One of them is Telit, a global leader in IoT enablement offering end-to-end IoT solutions, including enterprise-grade hardware, connectivity, platform, and consulting services. Telit already had a well-defined vulnerability management program in place, but said they were missing several critical capabilities, including visibility, prioritization, and remediation.

Our design partners play a key role throughout the entire process, from planning and building to operationalizing and maturing the product so we can deliver the best experience. Many of our customers have existing vulnerability management programs, so we knew that to have them switch to Microsoft we would need a disruptive approach to vulnerability management. From private preview to general availability and beyond, our key goals were to bridge the gap between Security and IT roles in threat protection, to reduce time to threat resolution while enabling real-time prioritization and risk reduction based on the evolving threat landscape and business context. The team continues to incorporate feedback from customers and partners, adding these new capabilities on a monthly basis.

“Telit’s previous threat and vulnerability solutions were limited to on-premises connected endpoints. Moving to Microsoft’s TVM cloud-based solution provides us much better visibility into roaming endpoints with a continuous assessment, especially when our endpoints are connected to untrusted networks.”
— Itzik Menashe, VP of IT & Information Security, Telit

Working together with Telit, we quickly understood that the current prioritization norm is not enough to properly reduce risk in an organization. We consulted with our partners on a new risk-based approach, which is focused on continuous discovery of vulnerabilities and misconfigurations and correlated those insights with context specific to their business and the dynamic threat landscape.

Microsoft’s built-in, end-to-end remediation process helps Telit bridge the gap between their security and operations teams. The unique integration with Microsoft Intune allows their security team to create remediation requests with a click of a button, and the operations team receives the requests automatically with all relevant information and can start the remediation process right away. The security team can then watch their exposure score drop in real time as remediation progresses.

“Microsoft’s TVM provides Telit with an easy-to-use solution that incorporates strong discovery capabilities, a risk-based approach to prioritization, and an effective remediation process. With this solution we are able to cover a large number of endpoints using a very small team of security engineers.”
— Mor Asher, Global IT and Information Security Manager, Telit

The product experience and ease of implementation was a big driver for Telit and thousands of other active customers to start using Microsoft Defender ATP Threat & Vulnerability Management. Telit had Microsoft Defender ATP’s TVM up and running within seconds.

To learn more about threat and vulnerability management watch our video that walks you through the experience.

If you already have Microsoft Defender ATP, the TVM solution is now available within your ATP portal. If you would like to sign up for a trial of Microsoft Defender ATP including TVM, sign up here.

We’re excited for our customers to evaluate this new solution and are looking forward to continued feedback.

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Travel app and Microsoft Garage project Outings graduates, bringing new destination search experiences to Bing

The Garage empowers Microsoft employees to explore demand for new products and features through tangible experiments. Outings, a Microsoft Garage project, an app for iOS and Android released in December 2017 and has since generated the feedback, usage, and buzz required to confirm the sponsoring Bing team hypotheses that travel and destination search is an area for continued investment. The team has integrated insights from user’s interest and feedback into Bing.com and Bing Search apps, and the project is officially graduating from The Garage.

An experiment designed to explore new search

Bing has always had a strong culture of experimentation and the product was built from the ground up to enable efficient experimentation. “Our culture has always been: experiment, fail fast, learn fast—our Bing.com infrastructure is built to equip engineers to flight and A/B test new features,” shares Jyot Patel, the Engineering Manager of Outings and a Principal Software Engineer on the Bing team.

While the team had access to this state-of-the art testing infrastructure, they built dedicated mobile apps to more acutely test an experience that presents users with possible destinations of interest. Outings identifies rich content from online travel blogs and curates it into bite-sized attractions, or outings, that users can browse through. It’s powered by a data pipeline that mines meta-data in popular travel blogs, which debuted in the Outings experience. The focused apps allowed the team to hone the relevance of the new data type and get clear feedback and ratings on the experience to zero in on users’ interest in curated travel content.

Once they observed the positive feedback for Outings, the team knew they had to scale the experience to more users on both desktop and mobile.

Outings insights scaled to Bing.com and Bing mobile experiences

Oswaldo Ribas is a Principal Program Manager working on The Bing Attractions and Outdoors team which helps users discover attractions and destinations that they might want to visit, see, and experience, and in the process, help them map their experience. “Our goal is to continuously improve these scenarios.” He worked closely with the Outings team to explore what they’d learned about user experience and their technical approach through their experiment. “The work will surface in a number of places including the search results page and the Maps vertical.”

Bing has long had dedicated search result experiences for maps, travel, and destinations, and the insights and technology from Outings will fold into Bing in three chief ways.

  • Enhanced Search Result UX Now users will see attractions arranged in a carousel with better images, brief descriptions, and different topics synthesizing what the attractions are popular for.
  • Relevance The data pipeline fine-tuned in Outings powers more relevant search for destinations and attractions. Since the pipeline gathers meta-data from millions of travel blogs, the experience can surface the most popular attractions in particular areas
  • Improved Query Triggering Additional key terms in the search query that will cue these search result experiences. For example, you don’t just have to search the Space Needle; you can search things to do in Seattle or things to do near me

Jyot continues, “All the feedback and reviews we got, the first impression of the app was really positive. They really enjoy the content. But even if this content is already available, you’ll have to scour the internet for that information. There’s a need to have all this rich content about destinations in one place.” Now, the opportunity to access that content from a simple, single place will be available on a far broader scale.

“The positive feedback told us that there is quite a bit of demand for rich, attraction and destination content to be presented in a put-together fashion. Obviously, there’s a lot of opportunity for us to invest in travel and destinations moving forward. It confirmed suspicions that we have, basically,” adds Oswaldo.

The team is excited to bring these enhanced search results to a broader user base and continue to improve the experience. “Moving forward, we’re acquiring more and more content around attractions in France, Italy, Spain and the next countries that we’re after. I’m looking forward to seeing all that rich data surface on Bing,” he continues.

Congratulations to the entire Outings team and thanks to the users who can now see their feedback integrated into a larger search platform.

Outings fans, find your next outing on Bing

With this experiment complete, the Outings mobile app on iOS and Android will sunset on July 31, 2019. The enhanced search relevance will be available on Bing desktop and mobile experiences for English in the United States.

The Outings mixed reality experience highlighting Maps SDK will remain available for users who want to continue to use the sandboxed, sample app. The Outings Garage project will remain active but will mainly serve to illustrate the power of Maps SDK to MR developers.

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Harnessing the power of AI to transform healthcare

One of the many remarkable things about artificial intelligence is that while we tend to think of it as something that will have a big effect in the not-too-distant future, it is already transforming people’s lives in profound and powerful ways today. In factories and warehouses, AI is improving workplace safety by scanning thousands of videos to detect potential risks. In the U.S., researchers are exploring how AI can help public health organizations around the world prevent the spread of deadly diseases like Ebola, Chikungunya, and Zika by detecting the presence of pathogens in the environment and stopping transmission to humans before outbreaks can begin.

I believe this is the true promise and challenge of AI – using these new technologies to create a healthier and safer world for everyone. Now that AI has given computers the ability to recognize words and images, discover patterns in complex systems and reason and learn much like people do, it is enabling our devices to behave more naturally and more responsively. This is transforming how we understand the world and augmenting our uniquely human talents and abilities in ways that will enable us to begin to find answers to some of humanity’s most pressing challenges.

This is particularly true when it comes to human health. Today, it is possible to imagine a world where we have discovered new approaches that enable us to address some of our most pressing challenges in healthcare, including heart disease, chronic illnesses, and cancer. The good news is that innovators around the globe are already working on these issues. From detection to preventive care and personalized medicine, the opportunities to us AI to improve outcomes and reduce costs appear to be nearly limitless.

Ethan Jackson, a Microsoft researcher who is leading Project Premonition. (Photo credit: Brian Smale)
Ethan Jackson, a Microsoft researcher who is leading Project Premonition. (Photo credit: Brian Smale)

In India, for example, Microsoft is proud to work with Apollo Hospitals, one of nation’s largest private healthcare companies, to use AI to improve detection of cardiac illnesses that cause more than 3 million heart attacks in that country every year. Until now, it’s been difficult for doctors to identify patients who are at risk for coronary disease because most prediction models are based on studies conducted in Europe and North America and don’t apply well to Indian populations. For example, high LDL cholesterol, which is a significant cause of heart attacks in western countries, is less common in India.

Our approach is to combine the rich data and deep expertise that Apollo offers with Microsoft’s powerful cloud and AI capabilities to develop a scoring system to identify patients in India who are at high risk for suffering a heart attack.

To do this, a team of Apollo clinicians and data scientist started by reviewing more than 400,000 patient records from its hospitals around the country and found that nearly 60,000 patients had suffered a cardiac event after a health checkup. The challenge was to uncover the risk factors in the data that existing models had overlooked. To do this, they uploaded all the data they had collected to the cloud using Microsoft Azure and then worked with Microsoft Azure Machine Learning services to search for hidden correlations.

The team started with 100 potential risk factors and 200 lab data points. Using the massive computing power of the cloud, they trained machine learning algorithms to find the statistical significance of each factor in the occurrence of future heart attacks. This enabled them to create a model that identified 21 risk factors in Indian populations. Dr. K. Shiv Kumar, Apollo Hospitals’ chief of Chief of Cardiology, said the resulting model is twice as accurate at predicting the probability of future coronary disease as previous models. Not only is this transforming how physician’s conduct preventive health checkups, but they are now developing an AI-powered app that would allow anyone to find their heart risk score without visiting a doctor for a detailed health checkup.

In China, Ray Zhang, CEO of  a startup company called Airdoc, recruited a team of engineers to develop an AI-based diagnostic tool that can instantly detect signs of chronic illnesses including diabetes, hypertension, arteriosclerosis, age-related macular degeneration, and more – simply by taking a high-resolution image of the back of the eye.

The device takes advantage of the fact that examining the human retina is an effective way to assess the health not just of the eye, but to look for evidence of other diseases. To create it, the Airdoc team used thousands of retinal scans to create an algorithm using Microsoft Azure’s machine learning capabilities that is trained to look for tiny abnormalities such as specks, spots, and deformed blood vessels that can be warning signs for a wide range of health issues.

The Airdoc device is similar to the scanner optometrists use for routine eye exams. To use it, a patient sit on a stool, place their chin on a padded brace, and look into an eyepiece. The algorithm then automatically adjusts the angle until a green cross comes into focus and captures a high-resolution, medical-grade image that is instantly uploaded to the cloud, where it takes less than a second to conduct a detailed analysis that rates susceptibility to a long list diseases as either low, medium, or high. The results are then sent to the patient’s smartphone, with a recommendation to seek professional medical help if there are signs of potential problems.

Currently, the Airdoc device can recognize signs of more than 30 diseases. Eventually, it will be able to detect 200. The plan is to make it available in more than 1,000 hundreds optical retail stores across China over the next few years. The Airdoc device significantly reduces the amount of time physicians will need to spend reviewing and assessing scans, so they can focus more on identifying and treating patients with serious health issues. The potential to provide a simple and inexpensive way to detect not just eye problems but a wide range of diseases has the potential to transform when and how people begin treatment for chronic illnesses in China and around the world.

We’re also working with the Princess Margaret Cancer Center at University Health Centre in Toronto to redefine cancer treatment through a remarkable new approach called “single cell sequencing” that enables doctors to analyze the genetic makeup of every single cell in a cancerous tumor and then select a combination of drugs that is optimized to kill the greatest number of cancer cells. Typically today, doctors try one drug at a time to find the most effective combination for each individual patient. By utilizing the power of Microsoft Azure Machine Learning and the cloud, single cell sequencing is enabling doctors to predict how every cell will respond to each of the thousands of compounds that are available for cancer treatment and then create a truly personalized therapy based on the specific genetic characteristics of each cancerous tumor.

Azure also provides a common platform for sharing medical data and analytic tools with researchers and physicians across the country. Scientists at Princess Margaret Cancer Center now envision a time in the not-to-distant future when this kind of detailed genomic analysis will be available for every patient in Canada.

These examples are just the beginning when it comes to the outpouring of AI research and innovation Microsoft and its partners are involved in right now – and not just in healthcare. In future posts, I look forward to sharing how Microsoft is also helping innovators and entrepreneurs use the power of AI to transform the industries of agriculture and education.

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Improving the Office app experience in virtual environments

Microsoft 365 is designed to help organizations digitally transform workplace collaboration. Many customers that I work with use virtualization, and they’re always looking for ways to cut costs and improve the user experience. To help, we acquired FSLogix last November, and today I’m pleased to announce four new capabilities to further improve the user experience in virtualized environments:

  • FSLogix technology, which improves the performance of Office 365 ProPlus in multi-user virtual environments, is now available at no additional cost for Microsoft 365 customers.
  • Windows Server 2019 will add support for OneDrive Files On-Demand in the coming months.
  • Office 365 ProPlus, our flagship Office experience, will be supported on Windows Server 2019.
  • And we’ve added new capabilities to Outlook, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams in Office 365 ProPlus to improve the user experience in a virtualized environment.

Get the same reliable experience with Office apps in any environment with FSLogix

The FSLogix container technology is now fully integrated with Office apps in virtual environments. This technology improves the speed and reliability of virtualized Office apps to feel like the experience of using Office apps on a dedicated machine. The FSLogix containers work in virtualized environments, including those provided by Microsoft, Citrix, and VMWare. This technology is now included at no extra charge if you are licensed for any of the following Microsoft solutions:

  • Microsoft 365 E3/E5/A3/A5/Student Use Benefits/F1/Business
  • Windows 10 Enterprise E3/E5
  • Windows 10 Education A3/A5
  • Windows 10 VDA per user
  • Remote Desktop Services (RDS) Client Access License (CAL) and Subscriber Access License (SAL)

Learn more about FSLogix.

Easily access OneDrive Files On-Demand with Windows Server 2019

Using OneDrive Files On-Demand, people can access all their files in OneDrive while only downloading the ones they’re using to save hard drive space on their devices. In the coming months, Windows Server 2019 will support OneDrive Files On-Demand for virtualized Office apps users. This support will couple the fast access to files that users love, with reduced User Profile Disk storage requirements and cost savings that businesses need. Learn more about how to take advantage of this new capability with Windows Server 2019.

Run Office 365 ProPlus on Windows Server 2019

While Office 365 ProPlus provides the best experience when running on Windows 10, we know some of you rely on Windows Server to provide virtual desktop services for your users. For those still needing to migrate from Windows Server 2008/R2 before it reaches end of support in January 2020, or from Windows Server 2012/R2 before the October 2020 end of support for connectivity to Office 365 data, I’m happy to share that we’ll support Office 365 ProPlus running on Windows Server 2019. This enables you to take advantage of the Files On-Demand capabilities coming to Windows Server 2019 I mentioned above, and to leverage the latest Windows Server platform.

Get a better experience with Office apps in virtual environments

There are also significant enhancements to the virtualization experience for several apps in Office 365, including Outlook, OneDrive, and Teams.

  • Outlook Cached Mode improvements help people running Outlook on virtual desktops access email and calendars faster:
    • Sync Inbox before Calendar means people get faster access to email so they can start working right away.
    • Reduce the number of folders that are synced by default, and an Admin option to reduce the Calendar sync window; both of which help syncs complete faster.
  • OneDrive now features a per-machine installation option, allowing people to share a single installation of the OneDrive app while still maintaining their own individual folders and files as if they are on their own device.
  • Teams also has a per-machine installation for Chat and Collaboration. In the coming months, we’ll offer Calling and Meetings in Teams through Audio/Video Media optimization in collaboration with Citrix. We’re also planning additional Teams enhancements, including improved app deployment, support for Windows Virtual Desktop, performance enhancements, and optimized caching for non-persistent setups.
  • Windows Search per-user index allows each user profile to persist its own search index, so that search is fast and individualized.

If virtualization is an important part of your IT strategy, we think you’re going to love these new capabilities. If you’re interested in evaluating the Office 365 apps enhancements we announced today in your own virtual environment, please visit the Microsoft Download Center.

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How consumer goods companies are unlocking the power of data

Did you know that an incredible 90% of all data in existence today was created in just the last two years? We’re talking about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data per day.

I recently shared this mind-blowing fact along with awesome customer success stories and our strategic approach at the Consumer Goods Forum 2019. In case you haven’t been, it’s a veritable ‘who’s who’ in consumer goods attends this flagship event, including more than 1,000 C-level executives from over 70 countries.

It was incredible for me to see so many household-name brands thinking about how to unlock the power of their data, how to use AI and other technologies to create more innovative products, and how to get so much closer to their consumers. Another very consistent themes I heard was around how to leverage data for sustainability and our environment.

Of course, the world we live in now is increasingly digital and data is on overdrive. We’re seeing disruption and change everywhere, driven by the explosion of that data. It’s being generated at a break-neck pace, flooding out of the dozens of connected devices we use every day at work and at home, and it shows no signs of slowing down.

With all this data at our disposal, why does Nielsen data show that 80% of new product launches by fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) companies fail? It’s all about what they’re doing with their data, how they’re storing it, analyzing it, continuing to reevaluate it and creating digital feedback loops with it.

So how can consumer goods companies unlock their data to deliver more authentic brand experiences, be good for the planet or increase their speed to market? At the Consumer Goods Forum, I talked about the importance of data to the future of consumer goods companies and how our work with Starbucks and Carlsberg demonstrates a number of strategic consumer goods scenarios that show we are partnering with them to unlock the power of that data.

Starbucks

Microsoft is partnering with Starbucks on several initiatives, including one called bean-to-cup. It’s a real-time, data-fueled approach to transparency and traceability using Blockchain. It gives:

  1. Customers details on where their coffee was sourced and roasted, as well as tasting notes
  2. Farmers access to data, such as where their beans end up in consumers’ cups; and
  3. Starbucks digital, “real-time traceability” to its supply chains all the way from bean/farm to cup

Carlsberg

Founded in 1847, Carlsberg is now using technology to create beer.

Faced with increasing global competition from large, established brands as well as smaller more niche microbreweries, the company wanted to get closer to its customers in innovative new ways. So Carlsberg launched its Beer Fingerprinting Project, which uses AI solutions, including machine learning algorithms, to measure the flavors and aromas created by yeast and other ingredients.

For instance, sensors can tell the difference between various pilsners and lagers, and researchers are now fine-tuning the system to help them produce better tasting beer. And they’re working to map a flavor fingerprint for each sample to reduce the time it takes to research taste combinations and processes by up to a third, which will help the company get more distinct beers to market faster.

We are all creating more data every single day, adding to a phenomenal – a growing – trove of information across the globe. For consumer goods companies, turning this data into useful and actionable insights that help them deliver personal experiences and develop new products we didn’t even know we needed is the key to the future.

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Meet Azure Resource Graph, latest Microsoft Garage Wall of Fame inductee

For the 2017 company-wide Hackathon, Chirag Gupta and Gaurav Kapila saw an opportunity to bring visibility to and alignment behind an improved and more in-depth analysis of resource allocation for large enterprise customers on Azure. At the time, the two were working on log analytics and Azure Governance for their day jobs. They were gathering evidence on what were the gaps for enterprise adoption of Azure, and what could help the experience for customers with Azure subscriptions at scale. With their 2017 Hackathon project, Cloud Map, Chirag and Gaurav recruited a team to create a solution that provided Azure Resource exploration through a graphical interface as well as advanced query language for searching across Azure resource properties. When showing their hack project to various groups in the company, they found that everyone was dealing with one problem – helping large-scale, enterprise customers better understand their own Azure environments by bringing better visibility to existing issues or potential problems.

“Hackathon helped us really get these internal teams together. Our project has a lot of dependencies and partners inside Microsoft.” Gaurav explained. “We needed to get these teams in the same room and ask, ‘would something like Cloud Map be helpful to you? Does this solve your problems?’” Chirag added.

Their project resonated with teams and especially Group Manager of Azure portal, Leon Welicki, who not only joined their project but became the sponsor, key in guiding the project towards public preview and general availability as Azure Resource Graph. Alex Zakonov, who was the Director of Application Insights in 2017, also sponsored the project with engineers from his team contributing to the project early on. The amount of validation the project received was so powerful that the portal team adopted Azure Resource Graph completely, with the top search bar in Azure portal pulling data solely from Azure Resource Graph.

“We coded like crazy in 3-4 days during Hackathon, we were elbow to elbow, sitting together, so we developed a really close relationship. Fantastic full stack collaboration between everybody involved, which set a very solid foundation of two teams that worked like one.” Leon recalled his team working side by side with the Graph team during the Hackathon and how each member of the hack project worked across disciplines to achieve a compelling demo that showed their vision for the project. “We continue to have a fantastic partnership going on driving two parts of the product – front-end and back-end.”

Azure Resource Graph - dashboard displaying bar charts for VMs, SQL database, and disks counts

In 2018, Chirag again participated in the Hackathon to experiment with what their team had built. Their 2018 Hackathon project, Microsoft Graph for Azure, investigated ways Azure Resource Graph’s reach could be extended by integrating Microsoft Graph to allow exploration using Microsoft Graph API’s.

In September of 2018 at Microsoft Ignite, Azure Resource Graph was officially released as part of Azure Governance, a set of services for customers that help build and scale applications quickly while making sure their environments are secure, compliant, and cost effective. Customers are able to access Azure Resource Graph by directly searching in the Azure portal search bar, querying and filtering on multiple resource properties, and seeing an in-depth and even visual representation of their resources across Azure subscriptions. All to ensure customers have a clearer picture of their activity and environments across Azure for smarter and more efficient management to save time and money.

At Build 2019, the team released the Azure Resource Graph explorer view in Azure portal. In addition to allowing customers to create custom queries, they could now also create dashboards based on the Graph. The experience was also made available on the Azure mobile application, expanding Azure Resource Graph’s footprint.

Even after public preview and general availability release, expect the team to continue improving and extending Azure Resource Graph. The team is collaborating closely with Azure portal to provide robust data visualizations and build improved Azure management experiences that are critical for IT admins, cloud admins, DevOps, and enterprise businesses everywhere.

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‘Crackdown 3’ Free Flying High Campaign update available now

Welcome back, Agents!

Last month, we gave you Crackdown 3’s Keys to the City, providing a deep menu of Campaign tools and cheats to unleash unprecedented havoc, alongside a new vanity progression system for Wrecking Zone. Today, we’re excited to announce the free Flying High Campaign update, available with Xbox Game Pass and on Xbox One and Windows 10 PC.

With Flying High you have new gadgets to collect, new Achievements to earn—and a whole new way to explore the expansive, vertical world of New Providence.

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s you soaring above the city with the Agency Wingsuit! Reach new heights, attack enemies from above, and test your flying skills in one of seven Wingsuit races.

Eager to bring even more boom? Try the Clusterduck grenade and its chain-reaction explosions. If that doesn’t fit the duckbill, make it rain with the Hellstorm Flare to call in air-strikes from the Island Defense Turrets or deploy the Agency Peacekeeper Beacon to summon Civilian Militia backup.

But that’s not all! Unearth the Elemental Forge gadget to summon four over-the-top melee weapons, each with its own unique environmental damage effects. Light up your foes with the Flaming Sword, give them a shocking send-off with the Electric Hammer, keep it cool with the Ice Mace, or be the toxin of the town with the Chimera Axe. Swing, smash and throw each weapon to unleash chaotic fun.

We can’t thank you enough for your continued support of Crackdown 3. With a total of 14 new Achievements and 500 Gamerscore, the free Flying High update is yours for the taking, so get to it Agents!

Crackdown 3 is available now with Xbox Game Pass and on Xbox One and Windows 10 PC. For the latest on Crackdown 3 and all things Xbox stay tuned to Xbox Wire.

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Icertis narrows the gap between AI expectations and reality

Transform recently sat down with several Microsoft customers at an event highlighting emerging trends in data and artificial intelligence. We talked with Vivek Bharti, general manager of product management at Icertis, which provides contract management services to enterprise customers.

TRANSFORM: Describe how your company uses AI to serve customers.

VIVEK BHARTI: We strive to solve the hardest contract management problems, using technology, and making it easy for the customers to use it.

All a company’s commitments and obligations are in that contract document. The problem is that those are in natural languages, not very amenable to the traditional systems. We take their (contract) repository, which is usually a set of folders of PDFs, etc., convert them into intelligent documents and help them manage their publications for life.

In the process, we save them money or help them garner more revenue.

TRANSFORM: What are the biggest challenges you see with AI?

BHARTI: One challenge is that the technology seems to be ahead of the business. The pace of innovation is so fast that technologies are producing possibilities, left, right and center. But it’s not necessarily true that the business use cases have been found. It’s resulting in very hyped-up speculation from the customers. There’s a gap between expectations and reality.

Another challenge is creating pools of people who understand both the customer and the technology, to create the intersection of technology and what the business problems are. At a tactical level, that’s solved by having a pool of domain experts who sensitize the engineers about what the business problem is.

Conversely, every single person who joins the company, they go through product training. So we set a foundation where everyone is aligned on what the company vision is and what is it that we’re building for. That starts sensitizing people who are more business oriented, sales folks, business analysts or whatever, to what is the technology capability.

TRANSFORM: How does that intersection of technology and business know-how help you serve customers better?

BHARTI: If you look at the size of our company, and the kind of customers we are acquiring, some of them have 400,000 suppliers. And they’ve trusted our system to manage (their contracts). It’s not because we are a big company. They saw that everyone that they interacted with from our company was actually talking about their problems, not about their product. So that’s how we’re making a difference.

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How AI could boost GDP and help reduce greenhouse gas emissions

The application of AI technologies in four areas – agriculture, water, energy and transport – have the potential to increase global GDP by up to $5.2 trillion by 2030, according to a new report from Microsoft and Pricewaterhouse Coopers. That is an increase of 4.4% in global GDP over the next 11 years, relative to business as usual.

At the same time, these technologies could reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by up to 4%. That is equivalent to the predicted 2030 annual emissions of Australia, Canada and Japan combined.

This map shows where those changes could occur.

Summary of regional GDP and GHG impacts relative to the baseline by 2030 in the “Expansion” Scenario

Europe could see the greatest rise in GDP – an increase of 5.4%, while the United States could see the greatest fall in greenhouse gas emissions – a drop of 6.1%.

The report also predicts that, without addressing some of the blockers to technology and AI adoption and readiness, the impact of AI will be felt less in some parts of the world. If progress is made on those blockers, however, these regions could benefit greatly from low-carbon, sustainable economic growth.

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Of the four sectors detailed in the report, the impact of AI within the energy and transport sectors is predicted to contribute most to the rise in GDP and to the fall in harmful emissions. The following shows the changes forecast in each of the sectors.

Key sectoral results – impact on GDP and GHG emissions by 2030 in the “Expansion” scenario

The high potential of transformation within energy and transport sectors is due to an array of innovations, some of which are already being realized including traffic optimization systems, vehicle-sharing services, increased efficiency of renewables and the smart management of energy consumption, in two heavy-emitting industries.

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