Today’s special E3 edition of Inside Xbox was chock-full of world premiere trailers, developer interviews, exclusive gameplay and general celebration of all things gaming and E3.
We delved deep into the hectic, strategic and violent new game mode for Gears 5, Escape, with Rod Fergusson and showcased the fast and fluid 4v4 competitive gameplay of Ninja Theory’s brand new IP, Bleeding Edge. We welcomed Phil Spencer to the stage to discuss Team Xbox’s vision for gaming, plumbed the depths of Halo Infinite’s moving new trailer with Chris Lee, got details on the incredible partnership with Smilegate to bring Crossfire X to Xbox One, and gave a hearty welcome to Double Fine’s Tim Schafer, the newest member of the Xbox Game Studios Family.
Also highlighted on stage were Sea of Thieves, including their brand new Halo-themed livery – available now until June 15 at 4:00 pm PT – Watch Dogs: Legion, Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order, State of Decay 2’s new story-focused expansion Heartland (Trumbull Valley lives!), and Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, along with world premiere trailers for The Surge 2, Code Vein, Age of Wonders: Planetfall, Zombie Army 4, Journey to the Savage Planet, and Phoenix Point.
Of course, it wouldn’t be Inside Xbox if it didn’t break some news along the way.
Inside Xbox revealed the final wave of backward compatibility announcements for Xbox One, as the engineering team that brought one of the most beloved Xbox One features to life moves on to ensure your Xbox One library is backward compatible on Project Scarlett.
The team announced eight new original Xbox game entries into the backward compatibility catalogue: Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Double Agent, Unreal Championship 2: The Liandri Conflict, Armed and Dangerous, Indiana Jones and the Emperor’s Tomb, and Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy.
The newly announced Xbox 360 backward compatibility titles are Asura’s Wrath, Battlefield 2: Modern Combat, Enchanted Arms, Far Cry Classic, Far Cry Instinct Predator, Infinite Discovery, Peter Jackson’s King Kong: The Official Movie of the Game, Prince of Persia: Forgotten Sands, Skate, Star Ocean, Super Puzzle Fighter Turbo, The Syndicate, Unreal Tournament 3, and Too Human, which is available right now for free in the Microsoft Store.
Finally, eight Rare classics have received the Xbox One X Enhanced treatment: Banjo-Kazooie, Banjo-Tooie, Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, Kameo: Elements of Power, Perfect Dark and Perfect Dark Zero.
The team also announced some exciting new updates coming to Gamertags! First, you’ll now be able to use character scripts to represent over 200 languages, with even more support coming in the future. This means you can use characters native to your own language in your Gamertag.
You’ll also be able to now select any name you like for your Gamertag. If someone else has selected the same Gamertag, you’ll be assigned a 3-4 digit ID suffix separate you from those that have chosen the same Gamertag.
Finally, if you like your current Gamertag, nothing changes. Yours will always be the original version of that Gamertag and will not include a numerical suffix. For all the details on the coming updates to Gamertags, check out the blog post here.
X019
Phil Spencer announced the return of our global celebration of all things Xbox, with X019 slated for November 2019 in London. The event will be filled with news, first looks and plenty of surprises, all kicking off with the biggest Inside Xbox episode of the year. Thousands of fans will join in person, and we’ll have more details on how to participate in X019 at gamescom in August.
Inside Xbox may be done, but the there’s plenty more left in store during E3 week. Keep your eyes peeled on Mixer.com/Mixer for wall-to-wall E3 coverage throughout the week, and don’t forget to check out the full episode of Inside Xbox.
2019 release wave 2 plan, AI Builder, updated AI capabilities, and a new look for Power BI, PowerApps Portals, and enhancements for Microsoft Flow all coming this year.
Today, I had the opportunity to join more than 4,500 members of our community at the Microsoft Business Applications Summit (MBAS) in Atlanta. MBAS is a special event for us because it’s our chance to connect in person with the makers, thinkers, and developers that make up our community.
This is also a moment when we get to showcase some of the amazing work our customers are doing. We’re thrilled to have so many customers join us in Atlanta this year, including G&J Pepsi and Grant Thornton, who joined me onstage during the opening keynote.
We’re also sharing some important news this week.
First—a first look at the 2019 release wave 2 plans! For those who want to see what’s coming, you can dive into the Dynamics 365 2019 release wave 2 plan and Power Platform 2019 release wave 2 plan. We look forward to telling you more about the 2019 release wave 2 in the coming months before these features go live starting October 1st.
Second—we’re announcing important Power Platform advancements.
Earlier this year I outlined our vision for the Power Platform. Along with Satya and the rest of the leadership team, I am bullish and enthusiastic for all things Power Platform. But what I appreciate most is the work of our community and what they DO with the Power Platform.
Today, we are giving our community more tools so they can take full advantage of what the Power Platform has to offer. On behalf of the entire team, I am incredibly proud to announce the following:
AI Builder and PowerApps Portals—two brand new capabilities
Accelerating intelligent automation in Microsoft Flow with built-in AI
Updated AI capabilities and an exciting new look for Power BI
This is a great time to be innovating with Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform, and I love being on this journey with you all. Please find more information below about today’s news along with details for how customers and partners like G&J Pepsi are already taking advantage of this work.
Introducing AI Builder
Today, we’re excited to announce AI Builder, the no-code AI capability on the Power Platform supporting PowerApps and Flow.
AI Builder enables everyone to leverage AI and machine learning to make their apps and automations more intelligent. It takes common AI scenarios and provides point-and-click solutions for app makers to solve everyday tasks like forms processing, object detection, and text and binary classification.
PowerApps already enables employees to easily create applications for your business. AI Builder now provides a way for app makers—professional and citizen developers alike—to add AI capabilities to those apps.
The potential uses for AI Builder span industries and scenarios for banking, hospitality, manufacturing, and more. For example, an organization may want to improve customer service so they can use AI to analyze customer feedback responses, map them into categories, and generate an AI model to classify and respond to customer feedback as it’s received.
The new AI Builder enables users to easily add AI capabilities to PowerApps and Microsoft Flow.
G&J Pepsi, headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, has more than 1,600 employees focused on manufacturing, distributing, and marketing the full line of Pepsi-Cola products. The G&J Pepsi IT team used AI Builder and PowerApps to create the next generation of their Store Audit App, enabling better mobility and efficiency for field personnel whose job is to assess product needs on the shelves in stores.
“With AI Builder, we were able to easily build an AI model to help automatically identify and track our products using the object detection model. For our field worker, it’s now as simple as taking a photo and letting AI builder do the rest.” – Eric McKinney, Enterprise Business Systems Manager at G&J Pepsi.
Delivering intelligence in Microsoft Flow
The no-code AI Builder capability is also coming to Microsoft Flow. Flow provides a powerful visual experience for a range of users to build everything from personal automation to business-critical enterprise-wide processes. With AI Builder, we are now making it easier for users and organizations to optimize these processes with intelligence without having advanced knowledge of how AI works.
For example, Flow makers can now extract meaningful data from images and text that can drive logic in their processes. Today, many processes involve paper forms such as a rental or job application. Historically, the first step in processing these forms would be to have someone look at the paper and manually type in each of the fields on their PC.
Now with AI Builder and Microsoft Flow, flows can automatically pick up scanned documents from an incoming email or a file server and recognize all the content. Based on the values in the form, different steps can run—from sending out simple notifications to performing a credit check.
Microsoft Flow enables users to automatically process and route analog forms.
Beyond parsing content in documents, AI Builder can also learn based on historical performance. For example, it can predict the risk of an application and, depending on how high that risk is, add additional approval actions to a business process. All of this is possible for Flow makers without having any expertise or experience with AI by leveraging guided, point-and-click experiences.
Leveraging blockchain in PowerApps and Microsoft Flow
Blockchain can bring trust and transparency to business processes that span multiple business partners. Using blockchain is easier than ever with the ability to write low-code applications using the Power Platform and Azure Blockchain Service.
Applications built on blockchain using PowerApps and Microsoft Flow can easily create attestable workflows that bring together data from every point in the business process across the value chain. For mobile clients, PowerApps enables developers to effortlessly capture all of the information from the phone’s sensors (barcodes, photos, GPS coordinates, etc.) and send it to a smart contract on a blockchain. Using connectors for popular enterprise blockchains in Microsoft Flow, you can easily integrate blockchain with popular SaaS, legacy enterprise systems, web and messaging services, and different types of data technologies.
Some industry examples that leverage the power of blockchain and the Power Platform include:
Multi-party supply chain: Building applications and workflows that provide irrefutable proof of delivery of shipments to manage shrinkage risk between point-of-manufacturing and point-of-sales.
Food safety: Users can get real time insights when goods that can be impacted by temperature and humidity are in transit. Blockchain can provide real time insight with trustworthy data that can help avoid costly public health issues, streamline return processes, and dispute resolution.
Attest genuine media: Many industries have a need to ensure that documents have not been tampered with. Build applications that can attest and/or validate that media is genuine with PowerApps and Flow.
Announcing PowerApps Portals
PowerApps can now reach users external to an organization with PowerApps Portals, coming soon to public preview.
PowerApps customers can now create websites that can be accessed by external users with a wide variety of identities including personal accounts, LinkedIn, and other Azure Active Directory organizations, and enable anonymous access to content. Portals works exclusively over data in the Common Data Service and customers benefit from its robust security and advanced capabilities for modelling business processes, which now includes low-code AI with the release of AI Builder.
PowerApps Portals also comes with a reimagined maker experience, embracing the core PowerApps principle of low-code productivity for everyone. With these new capabilities, app makers can create a website from scratch using pre-built templates, and then customize the layout and content using components like forms, views, and dashboards.
Portals capability was previously only available as an add-on to Dynamics 365 and is used extensively by customers including the University of Canterbury, Internet Initiative Japan, and Wineshipping to serve millions of users for scenarios like partner management, customer support, community feedback, employee benefits, and more. With this release, we’re enabling the creation of a custom portal directly from PowerApps.com using the Common Data Service, which will open new categories of use cases.
With PowerApps Portals, users can now create websites that can be accessed by external users.
New AI capabilities in Power BI
Power BI is a popular tool that millions of users trust for exploring data. More than 25 million models are hosted in the Power BI service, more than 12 million queries are processed each hour, and more than 20 petabytes of data are ingested into the Power BI service each month.
Today, we’re excited to announce new Power BI AI capabilities, and more.
Power BI has been a pioneer in applying AI to business intelligence and making AI accessible to everyone. We recently previewed several new AI capabilities that enable users to detect objects in images, analyze free-form text, build new machine learning models, and automatically understand what drives outcomes, all with point-and-click simplicity.
We have important updates to Power BI AI capabilities:
Text and image analytics in Power BI powered by Azure Cognitive Services, and the ability to invoke Azure ML models are both now generally available.
We’re announcing two new AI visuals: Distribution Changes analyzes what makes a distribution look different, and the Decomposition Tree enables users to drill into any dimension to understand what is driving a key metric.
We are expanding Power BI’s vision and text analytics capabilities and adding entity detection and text and handwriting recognition, enabling one-click transformations for insights on unstructured data.
For enterprises that need custom lifecycle management or further tuning, models created in Power BI can be exported to Azure ML.
And finally, we are extending Power BI’s natural language capabilities. The new updates include the ability to train Q&A so it understands and adapts to company-specific language like synonyms, phrasings, or specific domains, and the ability for report authors to see every natural-language question asked so they can make adjustments to how Power BI responds.
Kinepolis is a cinema group operating 53 complexes throughout Belgium, The Netherlands, France, Spain, Luxembourg, Switzerland, and Poland, as well as 44 cinemas in Canada. The company uses Power BI AI capabilities to understand how they can improve their visitor experience by analyzing the sentiment of customer reviews and tweets.
“Kinepolis serves visitors in and from many countries, who vocalize their opinion through various channels. With text analytics in Power BI, we are able to structure and analyze all this feedback. It allows us to score the sentiment of our visitor reviews without investing in the data science behind it.” – Carlo Wambeke, technical lead BI at Kinepolis.
Welcoming a new look for Power BI
In addition to the updates above, we’re also releasing a new look for Power BI, so it’s more closely aligned to the experiences in Office 365 already familiar to users around the world. The new user interface makes it easier than ever to create reports, explore data, get answers, and make decisions without having to learn specialized skills.
We’re also making users more productive through new features like report commenting which allows people to collaborate on their data, and Siri shortcuts for our iOS mobile app, simplifying how users find data.
The new Power BI UI makes it easier than ever for users to explore data in a style that is familiar from Office 365.
New capabilities for a unified enterprise business intelligence platform
Organizations can now move to one modern, compliant platform as the single destination for business analytics with key enterprise-facing updates on enterprise-grade semantic models and reporting at worldwide scale. Paginated reports, available for over a decade in SQL Server and a staple of corporate reporting solutions, are generally available in Power BI this month, enabling pixel-perfect formatting and advanced export options. Additionally, organizations can encourage reuse and create a single source of truth with certified datasets, now available in preview. With future capabilities for data lineage, administrators can understand usage and plan changes.
For more information on today’s news, please refer to the following blogs:
A report commissioned by Microsoft and conducted by EY says the UAE has seen the second highest AI investment over the past decade, more than USD $2.15 billion
One in five companies in the country consider AI as their top digital priority
94% of C-suite leadership consider ‘AI strategy’ as an important topic and 35% of non-managerial staff are actively having AI discussions
June 10, 2019 – Dubai, UAE: New research shows the state of AI within businesses across the UAE is expected to improve dramatically over the next three years, particularly as a growing number of executives look to AI to drive their digital agendas.
Already, 18% of businesses in the country consider AI their most important digital priority. This is according to the AI Maturity Report in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) Click here – a new study commissioned by Microsoft and conducted by EY.
Much of the UAE’s progress in elevating the AI agenda is a direct result of leaders across the country recognising that the technology is quickly becoming a key differentiator across all sectors and actively pursuing their AI agendas accordingly.
In fact, 94% of companies in the UAE report involvement in AI at executive management level – the highest percentage of any surveyed country in MEA.
“When we examine companies with high AI maturity, it’s clear that the technology is driven directly by the CEOs themselves. This high level of involvement typically results in greater investment in AI, broader adopti on and a greater number of successful implementations,” says Sayed Hashish, regional general manager at Microsoft Gulf.
Leadership capability in the UAE is also rated high when compared with other countries in MEA. While 64% of respondents believe they have moderate, little or no AI leadership competency, 24% of executives in the UAE rated themselves as highly competent, with another 46 percent indicating they are either competent or very competent.
Most companies still consider themselves to be in the planned phase of AI maturity, meaning AI has not yet been put to active use. On the opposite end of the spectrum, just 8% of businesses perceive themselves as advanced in their application of AI.
A top regional investor
It’s not surprising that the UAE is the second highest regional investor in AI over the past ten years, investing $2.15 billion in total. The bulk of this investment went towards social media and Internet of Things (IoT) transactions. This was followed by notable spend across a further eight technologies, including smart mobile, gamification, and machine learning.
In fact, respondents ranked machine learning as the most useful AI technology, with primary emphasis placed on decision support solutions. This was followed by smart robotics and text analysis, where customer interactions were the key focus.
A healthy attitude towards new technology
The UAE’s open culture around AI is another highly positive indicator of the health of the technology within the country. 94% of UAE companies have ‘AI Strategy’ as an important topic at C-suite level and a significant 35% of companies say AI discussions are filtering down from top management right the way through to non-managerial levels.
As a result, employees in the UAE are less afraid of losing their jobs to AI than employees in other countries. In fact, they embrace opportunities to participate in skills training and pilot programmes.
Building a solid foundation for AI
Though UAE executives are providing clear direction for the development of AI within the country, converting this vision to actionable output remains a challenge. This is largely because many UAE companies are still building the foundations needed to develop AI maturity, including suitable infrastructure and good quality data.
“The biggest problem to date with AI is that it isn’t always right – AI has given us the ability to make data-driven predictions, decisions and actions faster than ever before, but it is only as effective as the data and algorithms it relies on,” says Steve Plimsoll, MENA Data & Intelligence advisory leader, EY. “So, while it’s great to see local companies investing in adoption of AI, the focus must be on building trust – that the underlying data and algorithms are reliable, the models ethical and the predictions are measurable and as accurate as they can be. Without trust, AI will be never fully move from fiction into reality.”
“Executives across the UAE are already investing significantly in the training and education of their employees. At the same time, businesses are engaging with external parties to promote skills transfer and making a concerted effort to identify relevant use cases for AI,” continues Microsoft’s Hashish. “In the past, organisations have undervalued the importance of their data assets, meaning their competencies around structured data governance and data stewardship are still developing. And it will take time for businesses to start producing large volumes of high quality, well-managed data.
“The country has made significant progress in elevating its AI agenda over the past three years, and all indicators point to the near future bringing significant improvement in the application of the technology as well.”
Customers a key focus
UAE companies are, in general, heavily focused on customer engagement when it comes to AI. The use of chatbots in the marketing space has become common, largely because they enhance the customer experience, ultimately demonstrating obvious value to management.
As with most other businesses across the region, UAE respondents expect AI to deliver greater operational efficiencies, drive down costs and, most importantly, enable them to be more competitive. Specifically, companies within the Emirates view prediction (76%) and automation (76%) as the most relevant applications of AI for their businesses.
Despite such challenges, 65% of UAE companies rate themselves as highly to very competent when it comes to drawing on external alliances to strengthen their AI capabilities. Ultimately, this enables executives to kick-start AI programmes, leveraging external competencies while growing their internal capacity.
To download the full report on the UAE’s AI outlook, click here
Oceans are the heart of our planet, and Skype in the Classrooms celebrates them throughout the month of June in honor of World Ocean Day (June 8th). We are inviting educators around the world to explore all the available ocean-related activitiesand register for one or more to raise students’ awareness about marine conservation.
This June, your class can take virtual field trips to a sea turtle rehab center to learn about turtle conservation, pick the brain of a World Wildlife Fund expert about corals, take a deep dive into the issues facing our oceans with Pulitzer Center journalists and many more. There’s no doubt our guest speakers will inspire your students to love and protect our oceans. On top of that, there is a great variety of collaborative projects so you can connect with other classrooms to work together on finding solutions and taking action to protect our oceans.
Finally, why not add some fun by connecting with another class for a marine-themed Mystery Animal Skype? If you haven’t yet, explore our Oceans OneNote—it has all the resources you need to help you get started with Mystery Animal Skype.
To celebrate the importance of oceans, Skype has just released a collection of ocean-themed emoticons. Open your Skype and start sharing them before, during and after your calls to spread the fun and get your students excited.
And we have more ocean emoticons coming next week!
We hope you’ll join us in celebrating oceans by getting involved with one or more of our activities that will make learning relevant and fun for your students.
As always, keep sharing your favorite moments with us and our global community on Twitter (@SkypeClassroom) with #Skype2Learn #MicrosoftEDU to celebrate your students’ global learning experiences.
Don’t miss out exploring the rest of our FREE ocean-related resources
Download ourOcean Month activity plan—full of ideas and suggestions on how to organize your Skype sessions—to guide your classroom’s celebration all month long.
Earlier this year, I shared Microsoft’s 2019 Washington state legislative priorities as part of our practice to engage constructively on important regional issues. Since then, a lot has happened, and I thought it was a good time to provide an update on where we landed on the issues we feel are important for the future of the state.
Washington made some great strides this session on issues like higher education funding, affordable housing and rural broadband — but some important initiatives, including the adoption of consumer data privacy protections, did not get completed and will need to be addressed in the next session.
Recession-proofing higher education funding In March, I joined University of Washington president Ana Mari Cauce and Wayne Martin, vice chair of the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges in a Seattle Times opinion column that laid out why this was the right time to establish a dedicated funding source for public higher education.
Fortunately, lawmakers, led by Rep. Drew Hansen, agreed and made a $1.2 billion commitment to prepare Washington students and workers for Washington jobs over the next six years. These are new and dedicated funds for higher education institutions and state-funded student financial aid programs to supplement, not supplant, other federal, state and local higher education funding.
Why is this important? Because, historically, higher education has sustained significantly larger cuts than K-12 schools, criminal justice, and other general fund spending categories during economic downturns. By establishing a dedicated fund, the bill reduces the potential impact of general fund budget cuts.
Another important element of the legislation is that funds will go where they are needed most, with the costs borne by those who benefit the most from higher education. Over the next two years, more than $160 million will be directly invested into the futures of Washington students to create the Washington College Grant (WCG) program, a need-based financial aid program for students from low- and moderate-income families. The WCG will close the waiting list for the existing State Need Grant, which it replaces, within those two years. Students enrolled in qualifying post-secondary education and training programs qualify for grants based on income, with full tuition and fees provided for those at 55 percent or less of the median family income level (approximately $50,000 or less for a family of four), and smaller grants pro-rated for income levels up to the state median (approximately $90,000 for a family of four).
In addition to this important new resource, critical additional funding will flow to high-demand degree programs, from engineering and math programs at UW, to teacher education at Central Washington University, to nursing education at our state’s community and technical colleges.
What’s next: Microsoft remains committed to doing our part. The highest surcharges will be paid by advanced computing businesses with worldwide gross revenues in excess of $100 million such as Amazon and Microsoft. We consider it an investment in the future of our state.
Expanding affordable housing options An equally important investment, announced about the time the Legislature was getting underway, is Microsoft’s $500 million commitment to expanding affordable housing options in the Puget Sound region.
When we made that announcement, we shared our belief that substantial public, private and non-profit resources will be needed to make our communities more welcoming to a diverse range of local residents. Investments must be made not only to combat chronic homelessness, but also to create affordable middle-income housing opportunities for teachers, emergency responders, nurses and many others who contribute to the health and social fabric of the entire community.
With that in mind, we advocated for the state to almost double its direct public investment in affordable housing in the 2019-21 capital budget. Ultimately, lawmakers settled on an appropriation of $175 million to the Housing Trust Fund, a substantial increase over the $110 million included in recent budget cycles, more proportionate to the scale of the problem. We applaud everyone in Olympia who worked to make this outstanding commitment to affordable housing.
We also were encouraged by passage of legislation to modernize Washington statutes on condominium liability, which Gov. Jay Inslee signed into law on April 30. The reforms in that legislation will eliminate barriers and stimulate new private development of affordable housing options for the middle-income market.
What’s next: We will continue to work in partnership with policymakers, business organizations, nonprofits and community groups on this pressing issue. It’s up to all of us to promote inclusive and vibrant communities in our region through affordable housing. We look forward to continued dialogue and collective action.
Protection of data and personal privacy At Microsoft, we believe privacy is a fundamental human right. Technology plays an increasingly important role in our lives. But while technology is a tool that creates exciting new opportunities, people need to have assurance their data is protected and they can control it. At a time when other states and even other countries are strengthening their laws, we believe Washingtonians deserve world-class protections.
That’s why we strongly supported legislation introduced by Sen. Reuven Carlyle to protect the data and privacy of Washington consumers. Carlyle’s bill would have given Washingtonians a new level of control over their personal data while also allowing innovation to continue.
The movement to strengthen consumer privacy was advanced when this bill passed the Senate on a strong, bipartisan vote of 46-1; the privacy updates it would have ushered in were an important and meaningful step in the right direction. Unfortunately, as is sometimes the case in state and federal legislative bodies, political considerations ultimately got in the way of action and the bill did not pass the Legislature.
What’s next: Despite the Legislature’s failure to successfully address the issue, privacy concerns aren’t going away. Data privacy remains critically important for the people of Washington. We are committed to working with legislative leaders and other stakeholders to address the barriers to passage that emerged this session so that we can improve prospects for passage next year.
Creating additional opportunities in rural areas As technology’s pervasive presence in our work and family lives increases the need for a regulatory framework to protect personal privacy, it also makes it more critical that all members of our society have access to the new opportunities created through innovation.
Unfortunately, in Washington and across the country, too many people living in rural areas lack access to the broadband communication infrastructure necessary to fully participate in our digital economy.
We believe bringing broadband to rural areas is as important today as the electrification of rural America was decades ago, which is why we launched the Microsoft AirBand Initiative to deliver high-speed internet access to more than 3 million additional rural Americans by July 4, 2022.
I’m pleased to see the state is continuing its commitment to expanding economic opportunities in every corner of our state with a $21.5 million appropriation to provide loans and grants for expanding broadband access in rural areas, as well as operating funds for a new State Broadband Office to be located within the Department of Commerce.
What’s next: Microsoft will continue to pursue strategic investments and support public policies to bring broadband access to all Washingtonians.
High-speed rail connections Washington, Oregon and British Columbia have an opportunity to stake out a stronger position as leaders in the global economy through the continued development of the Cascadia Innovation Corridor. Through coordination and collaboration we can create greater opportunities and establish ourselves as a global center of innovation and trade. Together, Seattle, Vancouver and Portland can expect to accomplish so much more than would ever be possible individually. By shrinking travel times between major Pacific Northwest anchor cities, high-speed rail will open the door for stronger relationships and new employment and entrepreneurship opportunities within and across communities.
We know establishing a massive public infrastructure project is no small feat and requires ironing out all manner of multi-jurisdictional and multi-national details. But I’m encouraged to see that the initial feasibility studies of high-speed rail in the Cascadia corridor have come back positive.
Given the long development times involved, it’s important to begin initial work as soon as possible to secure financing and governance structures needed to make this incredible service a reality.
The transportation budget adopted by the Legislature will provide another $242,000 in state funding to continue this critical development work. However, it makes the appropriation contingent on $671,000 first being raised from private and local sources. Although we appreciate their continued support of the planning and development process, we also believe that Washington state lawmakers should have made a more significant, non-conditional commitment to support this game-changing service. The fact is, Washington is the largest economy among the three regions, and we stand to gain substantially from the development of the Cascadia corridor. Our state should be stepping up to take a lead role.
What’s next: Microsoft will continue to work to secure the funding needed for state engagement and will work with private and public sector partners to host a conference focused on high-speed rail.
The conversation continues Over this last legislative session, Microsoft advocated in Olympia for expanded computer science education options in K-12 schools, for strengthening companies’ legal responsibilities in the event of a data breach, and for furthering Washington’s commitment to carbon-free electricity generation in the years ahead.
We believe that as a major employer in the state, it’s our job to keep the lines of communication open, keep engaging on the important issues, and most of all, keep creating economic opportunities that improve the quality of life for Washington state residents.
At Louisville’s Entrepreneur Center, Mayor Greg Fischer announced a three-year digital alliance with Microsoft to boost the region’s digital transformation and accelerate AI practices. The remarks were part of a kick-off event for a weekend of start-up activities at the center, which supports the growth of local tech companies. The alliance will focus on strengthening the region’s ability to navigate its major industries’ digital transformation by skilling the population in the key digital fronts of the future: artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, and data science.
Upon signing Mayor Fischer said, “Artificial intelligence is the next frontier in technology, and through this collaboration with Microsoft, we will prepare our workforce for the tech revolution and create economic opportunity, while not losing sight of the need for equity within economic growth. We are excited to collaborate with Microsoft to ensure Louisville residents and businesses are ready for the future economy.”
With a physical hub in the Entrepreneur Center in Louisville’s Innovation District, the alliance will encompass public events, technology investment, and skills training for all ages throughout the greater Louisville area, with a population of approximately 620,000 people.
Microsoft will collaborate with the city of Louisville, the Brookings Institute, and the University of Louisville as well as other local partners in this wide-reaching public-private initiative to increase digital skills along the full continuum of the educational pipeline.
Also presenting at the event was Louisville Chief of Civic Innovation and Technology Grace Simrall who said, “In essence, the goal of this collaboration is to create a regional hub, a center of gravity for AI and IoT.”
A changing landscape
In recent years, some 12% of jobs in the Louisville region have been in manufacturing, employing over 250,000 workers. Some 285,000 people in the region are currently working in healthcare and education. As digital transformation brings increased efficiency to these and other industries, there will be a growing demand for workers who command strong digital skills. In addition to manufacturing and healthcare, AI will bring new opportunities in fields ranging from public safety to smart building design and construction. The alliance will help bridge the digital divide to help communities thrive in the coming job market.
Focus on AI
The digital alliance will work to create a comprehensive strategy focusing on the impact of AI, IoT, and data science and on how to help communities adapt to them. All components of the digital alliance will emphasize building people’s agility with these technologies. Four fellows will be sponsored to act as ambassadors for the city’s AI initiatives within industry and non-profit organizations. Public events will include ideation and design-thinking workshops and symposiums to explore what an AI future looks like.
Full lifecycle educational pipeline
The digital alliance will take a multi-pronged approach to reach people at various points along the continuum of job readiness, from familiarizing children with the basic concepts of digital literacy to empowering current or returning members of the workforce to reskill and upskill for the new economy.
Empowering youth
The alliance will provide virtual and in-person programs for youth in the schools and during public events activities for the entire K-12 and P-20 learning spectrum. Programs will include one-time public events such as youth esports and robotics competitions and longer programs including the following.
YouthSpark Live events bring young people together to plan their futures. Students identify necessary skills, learn how technology fits in, and get connected to programs that will help them get where they want to go. The events focus on three key areas: employment, careers and entrepreneurship.
DigiGirlz teaches middle and high school girls about technology careers, connects them with STEM industry professionals and Microsoft employees, and lets them participate in hands-on computer science workshops.
DigiCamps provides the same experience of developing and learning about cutting-edge technologies as DigiGirlz for both girls and boys.
Training the workforce
The digital alliance will coordinate and host digital literacy workshops for parents, transitioning members of the workforce and veterans to expand digital literacy skills in a consistent, predictable manner using Microsoft’s Digital Literacy curriculum. The training, which is available in 30 languages, is online and downloadable. In addition, the three training levels, from basic to advanced, are developed to be self-directed and self-paced.
The digital literacy curriculum starts with the absolute basics of computer and software use and progresses to larger issues of online safety and digital lifestyles. Microsoft will provide resources for Train the Trainer sessions for Microsoft certifications through the Digital Literacy curriculum.
Developing thought leadership
The alliance will host a high-level AI, IoT, and Data Science Summit in Louisville in the coming year, corporate AI briefings, and business roundtables. Executive briefings will be held at the Microsoft Executive Briefing Center in Redmond, WA, to support corporate digital transformation with directors and cabinet officials focused on innovation, AI, cybersecurity, and digital transformation.
To tap into and further grow the capacity of existing tech leaders, the digital alliance will host at least three start-up and tech hackathons focused on civic innovation. Hackathons connect the city with local tech leaders, start-ups, partners, and technology thought leaders to explore solutions to local challenges. The Civic Innovation hackathon will challenge participants to use design thinking and technology to address topics such as public safety, security, smart city, transportation, and education. Microsoft will aid with program development, session facilitators, and speakers.
Learn more about how Microsoft is empowering digital transformation and innovation for state and local governments at the Microsoft Smart Cities website.
Microsoft announced today that it is integrating tools built by the blockchain startup Truffle into its Azure cloud computing service to help developers build and manage enterprise blockchain applications.
Truffle tools have been available on Microsoft Azure since May 2, and according to the company have been used by thousands of people on the platform so far.
“We really believe in the power of blockchain. This is not some arbitrary thing that we’re going to do because customers are forcing us,” says Marc Mercuri, principal program manager at Azure Blockchain Engineering.
Truffle, one of the earliest projects at the Brooklyn-based Ethereum incubator ConsenSys, started out making tools for developers to help them build applications on Ethereum at a time when blockchain developer work required an extremely specialized set of skills.
“We wanted to open that up and make access to the blockchain more available to a large swath developers,” says Truffle founder and CEO Tim Coulter. Truffle officially spun off from ConsenSys this year and in May received a $3 million injection of capital from the organization to support enterprise expansion.
Truffle is also integrated with Quorum, the open-source enterprise blockchain used by JPMorgan for its newly launched JPMCoin, and AxCore, a blockchain built by Axoni that is currently being used by the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation.
Truffle tools have been downloaded more than 2.7 million times, and the new integration with Microsoft means that Azure customers, which include major companies like Adobe, HP, and the International Hotels Group as well as legions of smaller projects, will be able to build on public or private Ethereum blockchains with support from Microsoft.
“What we’re doing with this partnership is extremely exciting, because it it opens up all of those developers to Truffle and it opens Truffle up to all of the services that Microsoft provides,” Coulter says.
One of Azure and Truffle’s newly integrated services, an extension to Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code, helps developers create smart contracts and test them locally before deploying them. Another new service is designed to help teams monitor the performance of blockchain apps in real time.
Of course, Azure is not the only web services platform to embrace blockchain in recent months. Amazon Web Services offers its own blockchain services and has partnered with Kaleido, another ConsenSys project, on a marketplace for blockchain tools for businesses. Oracle also has its own enterprise blockchain platform, and Salesforce introduced its iteration of a blockchain developer tool last month.
Fishing is a way of life for coastal communities around the world. An estimated four million fishing vessels sail the world’s oceans, providing fish for a global seafood market valued at over $120 billion.
“It’s hard to overstate the importance of fish,” says Nick Wise, CEO of the nonprofit organization OceanMind. “There are three billion people in the world who rely on seafood as their primary source of protein, mostly in developing nations. Twelve percent of the world’s population relies on the wild-capture seafood industry directly or indirectly for their livelihoods.”
Overfishing — when fish is caught faster than stocks can replenish — is a significant factor in the decline of ocean wildlife populations, not least because of the bycatch of other marine life such as turtles and cetaceans. Each of these creatures is an important part of ecosystems and the biodiversity of the ocean.
“A collapse in fish stocks and a failure to manage fishing sustainably,” says Wise, “would lead to a food security crisis and result in significant poverty around the world.”
To fight back against this overfishing, OceanMind is using the power of AI to map data and then feeding that information to government authorities to help catch perpetrators.
Regional, national and international regulations are used to manage fishing efforts and can include restrictions on fishing out of season, using banned gear or techniques, or catching more than a set quota.
There are many ways of trying to catch those flouting the law, such as patrol boats, on-board cameras, and the remote electronic monitoring of discards.
However, the vastness of the ocean makes the job difficult.
OceanMind’s system currently tracks thousands of boats, with the capability of tracking millions, across the globe by gathering data from a wide range of sources, including collision-avoidance transponders aboard boats; radar images; satellite imagery; and cellphone signals. Analyzing these enormous datasets is beyond the capability of any one person. OceanMind has developed machine-learning algorithms that predict the type of fishing behavior based on vessel location, and flags suspicious and potentially illegal activity such as fishing too close to the shore.
But the system can’t tell on its own whether anyone is breaking the law.
“The difference between legal and illegal fishing is simply whether or not the vessel had a license to do what it did in that place, at that time, and in that way,” says Wise. “That’s what makes combating illegal fishing challenging: One vessel making a particular maneuver might be legal, another vessel doing the same thing next to it might be illegal.”
OceanMind’s fisheries experts verify the alerts flagged by AI and coordinate closely with the relevant authorities, who can then decide whether to investigate further. The organization already has partnerships with governments, including Thailand’s, which can then target resources to catch offenders.
Real-time advances
Until now, OceanMind has used onsite servers to process the data that comes in every day. “We were basically running a day behind,” explains Wise. “We reviewed things that were happening yesterday.”
Through a Microsoft AI for Earth grant, OceanMind is moving its data analytics to the Microsoft Azure cloud. “The collaboration with Microsoft is going to bring all of that data through our system much more quickly and apply the AI in near real time.”
That transformation will make a big difference to enforcement. Real-time monitoring will help authorities plan patrols that can catch illegal fishing as it happens.
Inspire 2019, taking place in Las Vegas July 14–18, is Microsoft’s premier event for partners and an experience for anyone interested in growing their business and strengthening their Microsoft partnership. The event brings together thousands of attendees from 130 countries around the globe for a week of networking and learning — all with the goal of increasing partner profitability and accelerating business growth. This year the keynote speaker lineup will include Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, President Brad Smith, Executive Vice President Judson Althoff, who leads Microsoft’s Worldwide Commercial Business organization, and Corporate Vice President Gavriella Schuster, who leads Microsoft’s One Commercial Partner organization. You can find other featured speakers listed online.
With E3 coming up on Sunday, we’ve got some final details on what Xbox has got going on for the biggest gaming event of the year!
We’ll be kicking things off with our annual Xbox E3 2019 Briefing, which you can watch live beginning on Sunday, June 9 at 1:00 p.m. PDT. During the briefing, you’ll have a chance to check out everything from trailers for unannounced titles coming in 2019 and beyond to in-depth looks at previously announced games. You can watch the Xbox E3 2019 Briefing live beginning at 1 p.m. PDT on June 9 on the official Xbox Channel on Mixer, or on the Mixer app for Xbox One and mobile. Once again, we will plan to have a MixPot (the Mixer feature that drops free content for logged-in viewers on certain streams) for our briefing, so be sure to log in to Mixer to get your free MixPot content!
As with last year, the Xbox E3 2019 Briefing on Mixer will be offered in six languages: English, German, French, Italian, Spanish (LATAM), Portuguese (LATAM), and includes support for English Closed Captions. To select an alternate language, click the “cog” button within Mixer to view the available list. We’re excited for fans all around the world to join in on the Xbox E3 2019 Briefing festivities.
We’re also very happy to announce that we’re partnering with Fuse Media to bring the Xbox E3 2019 Briefing to Fuse viewers at 1:00 p.m. PDT (or 4:00 p.m. EDT for you east coast dwellers!). Encore presentations will air on Fuse at 3 p.m. PDT (6:00 p.m. EDT) and be available on the Fuse VOD platforms the week of 6/10. Be sure to hit up Fuse.tv to find out where you can watch Fuse.
As we announced a few weeks ago, we’re also bringing Inside Xbox back to E3 this year! Inside Xbox will air Monday, June 10 at 3 p.m. PDT and will feature a livestream full of exclusive announcements, game demos, interviews, giveaways and more.
Be sure to head on over to the Xbox E3 Online Experience for more information and details on what we’ve got going on for the week.
