Tag: Recent News

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Working together to bring broadband to rural Veterans

Our nation’s Veterans have contributed to our country in so many ways, in countless locations around the globe. When they return home, many Veterans who reside in rural areas are not able to access broadband internet which is critical to using telehealth services, gaining educational opportunities, and growing a small business or running a family farm.

There are 2.7 million Veterans enrolled in Veterans Affairs (VA) who are living in rural communities, 42% of them do not have internet access at home which could support their use of VA telehealth services, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’, Veterans Health Administration’s Office of Rural Health. These rural Veterans live in areas where access to fast, reliable internet service may be limited or inaccessible and are facing higher rates of unemployment, longer drives to reach the nearest clinics and medical centers, and lower levels of educational attainment compared to their urban counterparts. Connectivity has the potential to improve this reality — with broadband, they can access telehealth services offered by the VA, identify and compete for well-paying jobs, improve and grow their own businesses, and take advantage of online education classes.

Microsoft and VA have been strategic partners, working together to improve the lives of Veterans, for more than 20 years. Today, I’m excited to share that Microsoft will begin expanding that work by helping VA to help bring connectivity to many Veterans living in rural towns and communities. Microsoft and its partners will be working with VA to provide capital, technology expertise, and training resources to bring broadband access to people in these underserved communities. Our hope is that this effort will unlock new economic opportunities, while also enhancing quality of life.

Through the partnership, we’ll help VA identify communities with Veterans in need and work with our internet service provider (ISP) partners across the nation to bring broadband services to those regions. Following our Airband Initiative model, we’ll also provide the Veterans in these newly connected communities with digital skills training so they can take advantage of the tools and services connectivity enables, including critical telehealth services provided by VA.

In the past 22 months, through the Microsoft Airband Initiative, we have seen firsthand just how many communities lack connectivity at broadband speeds and how this can hinder growth and new opportunities. We’ve also seen that partnering with ISPs to serve those most in need is an effective strategy to make progress quickly on this important issue. Our work with VA builds on those lessons and approach, which has resulted in partnerships that will bring connectivity to 1 million unserved rural residents in 16 states to date, with a plan to reach 3 million by 2022.

This also builds on our commitment to the military and Veteran community. We’re passionate about our work with this community and take a holistic approach to helping Veterans gain the critical career skills required for today’s digital economy through career training and re-training, soft-skills support, and hiring. The company’s cornerstone Veteran program, Microsoft Software & Systems Academy (MSSA), provides the Veteran community with an 18-week (or two nine-week terms) training for high-demand careers, with graduates gaining an interview for a full-time career at Microsoft or one of the company’s more than 400 hiring partners. We’re also proud of our strong network of partners, all of whom champion our same vision to assist the community.

We owe it to the men and women who have sacrificed so much for our nation. Veterans living in rural communities deserve to have the broadband internet access enjoyed by many who live in urban areas. Addressing the broadband gap across the country requires innovative solutions from both the public and private sectors, and we hope this partnership will help us make significant progress toward closing the connectivity gap for the Veteran community.

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New Xbox Game Bar available on machines running Windows 10 May 2019 Update

At Xbox, we put gamers at the center of our vision – enabling them to play the games they want, with the people they want, and on the devices they want. As part of our efforts and commitment to improve the gaming experience on Windows 10, we want to bring PC players highly requested features based on their feedback. The first step in that is understanding how gamers engage on Windows and making the features and experiences they want easier to access, including social, music, performance and more. Today, we are excited to release a host of new features for PC gamers to the new Xbox Game Bar on machines running the updated versions of Windows 10.

Xbox Game Bar is the customizable gaming overlay built into Windows 10. Xbox Game Bar works with nearly all PC games, giving you instant access to widgets for screen capture and sharing, controlling your music, finding new teammates with Looking for Group (LFG), and chatting with Xbox friends across Xbox console, mobile, and PC—all without leaving your game. You can access these new features by pressing the Windows key and the “G” key at the same time – “Win+G” – to bring up the Xbox Game Bar when playing nearly all PC games or choose your own custom keyboard shortcut.

Here’s a detailed rundown of all the features in Xbox Game Bar:

Spotify
Like many of you, we believe music is a very important part of the gaming experience. Now you can easily control music and podcasts on Spotify from the Spotify widget in the Xbox Game Bar, including favoriting, shuffling and selecting playlists recommended for you by Spotify. You’ll need the Spotify app for Windows installed to take advantage of this new feature, so be sure to get it from the Microsoft Store or Spotify.com.

You can get started in three simple steps:

  1. Press Win+G to bring up Xbox Game Bar
  2. Click on Spotify in the widgets menu
  3. Sign into your Spotify account

Want to tweak the volume of that song you just started listening to? Pull up the audio widget in Xbox Game Bar to change volume settings across apps quickly and easily without having to alt-tab out of your game.

Friends, Chat, Mixer, and Looking for Group (LFG)
The social features in Xbox Game Bar allow you to have conversations with friends who play on PC, Xbox One, and mobile, as well as watch their Mixer streams and send them your creations instantly. Players can use the Looking for Group (LFG) feature on Xbox Game Bar to find new teammates or a raid party with a common play style, all without using a third-party site. Gamers can chat with their friends, using voice or text, in Xbox Game Bar across Xbox One, mobile apps, and PC. Conversations are synced on all Xbox apps, so keep chatting after the game to share memes and coordinate your next session.

Press Win+G at any time to bring up Xbox Game Bar, send a quick message, and get back into the action without taking your eyes off the game.

Broadcast & Capture
Back in December, we promised to make it simple to capture your epic gaming moments. Currently, you can easily capture and view your gameplay screenshots, then share directly to Twitter without leaving your game.

With today’s update, you can take this a step further by turning your captured screenshots into memes. During your game, hit Win+G to call up Xbox Game Bar, open the Broadcast & capture widget in the widgets menu, and take a screenshot. Use the Captures widget to add overlay text to your screenshot and make a meme, which you can share with your friends via a message or with the world via Twitter.

Customizable UI
We recognize that customization is central to a rich gaming experience on PC. You can customize Xbox Game Bar to make the overlay your own. You can choose which widgets to show/hide, where you want them located, and pin specific widgets to be always visible. Build your own favorite Xbox Game Bar layout based on the way you prefer to play to enhance your gaming experience.

Here at Xbox, we are a passionate team of gamers who are inspired to continue improving the gaming experience on Windows 10. We’re in the early stages of our journey and the updated Xbox Game Bar experience is just the beginning. As always, your feedback is important to us and our partners as we continue to evolve Xbox Game Bar. So please share your ideas at the Xbox Idea Hub.

And last, but not the least, a huge thank you to all our Insiders for helping us improve the Windows 10 gaming experience!

P.S.: There are a small set of games that Xbox Game Bar may not work over (e.g. games built using the Vulkan API). For these games, you may need to run the game in windowed mode in order for Xbox Game Bar to display.

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Microsoft Quantum collaborates with Willis Towers Watson to transform risk-management solutions

Screen with stylusScreen with stylus

Willis Towers Watson (NASDAQ: WLTW)—a leading global advisory, broking, and solutions company—has long used complex mathematical models to deliver great results for clients and turn risk into growth. However, some problems are still so challenging that they remain intractable with even the most advanced contemporary computational solutions.

Because of that, Willis Towers Watson has joined the Microsoft Quantum Network to partner with Microsoft to explore the ways that quantum-inspired algorithms might assist the firm with its work in the areas of risk management, financial services, and investing.  Quantum-inspired algorithms harness the power of quantum physics to solve hard computational problems in new ways. Using these techniques, Microsoft is already able to gain orders of magnitude of performance acceleration in Azure.  Once quantum computers become available at scale, even greater acceleration is possible.

“Current modelling techniques to quantify risk require a huge amount of computing power, using thousands of computers over many hours,” says Willis Towers Watson CEO John Haley. “Quantum computing offers us the chance to look at our clients’ problems in a different way. By focusing on how we would model the problems on quantum computers when they become available at scale, we are able to work with Microsoft to redefine the problems and speed up our solutions on existing hardware.”

Engaging with our expertise in quantum computing is a natural extension of Willis Towers Watson’s long partnership with Microsoft. It already has improved business agility and productivity with the help of Microsoft’s Office 365 and developed a specialized insurance model on Azure.

“Willis Towers Watson’s ability to apply technology in novel ways to benefit their customers is always inspiring,” said Peggy Johnson, Executive Vice President of Business Development for Microsoft. “We’re thrilled to have our Microsoft Quantum team working side-by-side with their experts to develop next generation modelling tools.”

This sentiment was shared by Haley, who noted: “We are excited to work with Microsoft—they have an incredible amount of brainpower and are on the forefront of quantum computing.”

The addition of Willis Towers Watson to the Microsoft Quantum Network is the latest example of Microsoft working with world-class institutions to apply the techniques of quantum computing to real-world problems. For instance, we have partnered with Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) to show how the power of quantum computing could enhance Case Western’s approach to detecting cancerous tumors. By using a quantum-inspired algorithm that runs on today’s classical computers, Case Western researchers are working to improve the diagnostic capability of magnetic-resonance imaging devices, a key tool used for detecting and fighting cancer.

We’re also working with the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA) on developing new quantum-based solutions to address energy optimization and other challenges where classical computers have serious limitations.

Microsoft is pioneering the emerging quantum era through an approach that will deliver the industry’s most stable and scalable quantum computer. As the development of the quantum computer progresses, select partners such as Willis Towers Watson can access new quantum-inspired Azure services through membership in the Microsoft Quantum Network for the most complete, end-to-end quantum programming.

While there is still much work to be done, Willis Towers Watson and Microsoft are excited to see just how quantum-inspired solutions will help transform the way financial industries improve risk management.

To learn more about the Microsoft Quantum Network, visit the Microsoft Quantum website.

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How scientists are confronting environmental challenges with the help of AI

Counting trees

mountains trees and sky

Using AI and machine learning, SilviaTerra maps and monitors forests, yielding data about trees across the continental United States. The high-resolution, tree-level map of the United States is the first of its kind. It gives conservationists and landowners critical details to sustainably manage forests at a fraction of the time and cost of traditional surveys.

Growing more with less

man works in garden

Farmers face an uphill battle as arable land and water supplies dwindle, while the global population grows. FarmBeats, a program that uses Microsoft’s cloud and AI technologies to help farmers sustainably improve yields and lower costs, evaluates sensor data and aerial imagery against weather forecasts and crop predictions to enable data-driven agricultural practices.   

Identifying snow leopards by their spots

a snow leopard with mountain in the background
Photo by SLCF Mongolia/Snow Leopard Trust

Snow leopards are rare, with an estimated population of just 4,000 to 6,000 in the wild, and remote camera trap photography is one of the only reliable ways to study their behaviors. Historically, researchers have sifted through thousands of photos manually to find snow leopard images and use that data to protect the species from poaching, mining, climate change and other threats. Now researchers at the Snow Leopard Trust are using a Microsoft AI automation tool to automatically classify images in minutes rather than hours, combining years of data into a comprehensive database. This allows them to focus on advancing conservation science instead of manually poring through images.   

Protecting key watersheds

satellite data map
Photo provided by Chesapeake Conservancy

Scientists are using Microsoft’s AI and cloud technologies to create highly detailed maps to help conserve the world’s water resources. Chesapeake Conservancy, supported by an AI for Earth grant, is working to integrate AI technology to produce high-resolution land cover and land use maps for precision conservations to improve water quality throughout the Chesapeake Bay watershed. With this data, the Conservancy is supporting progress in the restoration of the bay. 

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‘Gears of War’ 2019 Funko Pop! collection available May 23

The next wave of Gears of War Funko Pop! figures are about to hit store shelves this Thursday, May 23! As we announced earlier this month, the mainline collection includes Kait Diaz in her winter gear from last year’s Gears 5 trailer, Marcus Fenix in his classic gear, Queen Myrrah, the Locust Boomer and the GameStop exclusive Skorge.

But that’s not all! Also releasing on Thursday is a limited-edition Collector’s Box which includes four Gears Pop! pins, a Gears Pop! baseball hat, a Gears Pop! artbook and four limited release Pop! figures: a red Skorge with shaded details, a gold-dipped of Marcus Fenix, a patinaed Myrrah, and Anya Stroud. The Collector’s Box is available exclusively at GameStop (in-stores and online) with limited quantities at EB Games, Sportscard Australia, select retailers throughout Europe and at E3.

All of these Pop! figures include a digital code for the upcoming Gears Pop! mobile game, which releases later this year. The code can be redeemed to your Xbox Live account starting May 23 – once the game has launched, the specific content associated with the code will unlock as it is released in game.

For more information on the Gears franchise, stay tuned to Xbox Wire, and to keep up to date with the latest information about Gears Pop!, you can visit www.gearspop.com and follow @GearsPop on Twitter.

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Harnessing big data in pediatric research to reimagine healthcare

For many of us, life begins in the hospital—and so does our health data. Health organizations worldwide are amassing more information than ever before from millions of patients throughout their lifetimes. Wrangling massive volumes of health data—from smart devices, medical devices, electronic medical records and community health systems—is no small task, but cloud computing offers researchers a promising way to tap into this resource to achieve meaningful medical progress and improved patient outcomes. Microsoft for Healthcare aims to do just that: harness the power of data to reimagine healthcare, improve the health of the population, and, ultimately, help save lives.

YouTube Video

Zeroing in on clues

One of the most promising examples of this is in our collaboration with Seattle Children’s Research Institute. We are working together to find clues to a persistent and tragic medical mystery that hits close to home: Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). Every year, more than 3,500 infants die of SIDS-related causes in the United States. One of these children was the son of John Kahan, my colleague and Microsoft’s chief data analytics officer. John has made it his mission for no parent to lose a child to SIDS, and with his data science team at Microsoft and our friends at Seattle Children’s, they are working toward that goal in earnest.

The team started with publicly available data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on 26 million births and deaths, and along with other data sets, studied 90 columns of data about every child born in the U.S. over a six-year period. Through this data science effort done in the cloud on Microsoft Azure, they discovered several correlations that showed statistical increases in SIDS. They then brought those findings to Seattle Children’s Research Institute, one of the world leaders in pediatric genomics and brain research— and lucky for us, right in our backyard.

Since then, we’ve been working together to expand the effort and the science, creating a collaborative genomics database for Seattle Children’s and the top SIDS medical researchers worldwide, and a world-class team of Microsoft data scientists. Together, we recently published our first manuscript from this collaboration in the peer-reviewed medical journal, Pediatrics, in which we used advanced modelling techniques to analyze the relationship between maternal smoking during pregnancy and SIDS-related deaths. Going forward, the hope is to use sequenced whole genomes as an additional data set along with the CDC data and other information in Microsoft Azure, helping to identify SIDS risk factors and, ultimately, ways to help prevent SIDS.

Similarly, we’ve been able to assist pediatric cancer researchers. Working with St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and our partner DNAnexus, we’ve been thrilled to be a part of the creation of the St. Jude Cloud—a cloud-based data-sharing and collaboration environment based on Microsoft Azure that contains an extensive public repository of pediatric cancer genomics data. St. Jude Cloud stores and shares thousands of cancer patient samples mapped against the human genome template, enabling researchers around the world to access and exchange data on a global basis. Researchers from more than 450 institutions across 16 countries now have immediate access to data that previously could take weeks to download, as well as access to complex computational analysis pipelines. The availability of this data could lead to progress in eradicating childhood cancer.

Clues like these seed future research, turning mere hints into new medical and biological knowledge, diagnostics, or therapeutics. Like John Kahan, many of our data scientists have been touched personally by medical or health issues and are exceptionally motivated to help solve these puzzles.

Reimagining healthcare

Collaborations like those with Seattle Children’s and St. Jude are just the beginning. Our technology is in virtually every healthcare organization in the world, from a nurse-led clinic in Kenya to larger organizations like Kaiser Permanente in the United States and NHS Glasgow and Clyde in the United Kingdom, putting us in a unique position to build and expand solutions with cloud computing and AI.

For us, reimagining healthcare starts with finding well-defined and well-scoped problems, then bringing together the best minds from a diverse set of disciplines and people—computer science, AI and data science, bioscience and medical—to solve them.

By analyzing masses of data with trusted cloud computing, one health concern at a time, we have a chance to extract new knowledge that could make a positive difference—empowering healthcare teams, improving operational outcomes and care coordination, and personalizing care.

Join us in reimagining healthcare. To learn more about harnessing the power of health data with cloud computing, take a look at our new e-book A New Framework for Healthcare in a Digital World. For a deeper dive on Microsoft Genomics visit here.

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Rebuilding an icon: a call for the sharing of open data to help restore Notre-Dame

Pigeon outside notre dameSince its completion more than 675 years ago, the medieval cathedral of Notre-Dame has captivated millions of people with its incomparable beauty. From its legendary stained glass rose window to its towering spire, it’s widely regarded as one of the most stunning examples of medieval architecture in history.

A staple of the Parisian skyline and a global icon, the recent tragedy which saw the cathedral engulfed in flames shook Parisians and onlookers around the world. While thankfully no one was hurt, the iconic spire, oak frame and lead roof were lost.

The reconstruction and repair of the damage is a top priority, calling for the work to be completed within five years. One factor which could greatly aid in this process, is the vast amount of data, surveys and documentation that exist on Notre-Dame – information that has been recorded and collected by numerous parties over decades.

Microsoft and Iconem – an innovative startup that specialises in the recreation of endangered cultural heritage sites in 3D – have announced the Open Notre-Dame initiative. Together, they combine their skills to contribute to the restoration of Notre Dame through an open data project.

“Open Notre Dame” is a visual data provision in open source, designed to better understand and analyze the building in its history. This initiative will not only help gather and analyze as many existing documents as possible on the monument but also produce 3D models to make them available to everyone. Through this project, Iconem and Microsoft intend to contribute to preserve and spread the French heritage.

Having already created detailed 3D models of other French heritage sites such as Mont-Saint-Michel, Iconem’s access to data from third parties such as archival plans and photos can provide a historical evolution of the cathedral before the fire – improving the accuracy of the model and roof structure.

The temporal models of the Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral will be made available on GitHub, the world’s leading software development platform. The opening and the sharing of all these data via GitHub will come directly to feed different initiatives and competences: the EPFL of Lausanne (which creates dynamic models of cities), and Inria, the consortium Humanun (CNRS and Archeovision) – and will allow feeding all the scientific studies around the building. Many partners already contribute to the project thanks to their surveys, images, and plans that will serve as a basis for these open source models: aerial images (Yann Arthus-Bertrand, TSVP), very high-resolution images (Cornis company and first readings by Iconem), and thousands of pieces of documentation collected by Ubisoft.

If we continue to work together and sharing our knowledge, the great cathedral of Notre-Dame will be restored to its former glory once again.

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GDPR’s first anniversary: A year of progress in privacy protection

May 25 marks one year since the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation officially went into effect. GDPR is a groundbreaking privacy framework that empowers residents of the EU to control their personal information so they can use digital technologies to engage freely and safely with each other and with the world.

A lot has happened on the global privacy front since GDPR went into force. Overall, companies that collect and process personal information for people living in the EU have adapted, putting new systems and processes in place to ensure that individuals understand what data is collected about them and can correct it if it is inaccurate and delete it or move it somewhere else if they choose.

This has improved how companies handle their customers’ personal data. And it has inspired a global movement that has seen countries around the world adopt new privacy laws that are modeled on GDPR. Brazil, China, India, Japan, South Korea and Thailand are among the nations that have passed new laws, proposed new legislation, or are considering changes to existing laws that will bring their privacy regulations into closer alignment with GDPR.

Empowering people to manage their information through our privacy dashboard

The driving force behind the global movement to modernize privacy laws is the new understanding people have of their right to privacy as technology changes how people create and share information. Around the world, there is a growing expectation that everyone should benefit from digital technology without losing control of their personal information. This is why Microsoft was the first company to provide the data control rights at the heart of GDPR to our customers around the globe, not just in Europe.

One year later, the ever-growing number of people using our privacy dashboard is a clear sign that people want to be empowered to control their data. Since GDPR went into effect, more than 18 million people from around the world have used our tool to manage their personal information. The highest level of engagement, both on a per capita basis and in absolute numbers, continues to come from the United States where about 6.7 million people have used the dashboard. Not surprisingly, residents of European countries covered under GDPR also account for a significant percentage of people who have visited the privacy dashboard—to date more than 4 million of our customers in the EU have logged on to manage their data.

Map showing use of the Microsoft Privacy Dashboard around the world
But the demand is truly global. Japan ranks No. 2 in using the privacy dashboard and Canada is fifth. Other countries in the top 10 included Brazil, China, Mexico and Australia.

Transforming culture and advancing privacy throughout the digital economy

To elevate the importance of privacy and embed it in their operational systems, companies like Microsoft that have fully embraced GDPR have undergone a profound cultural shift that begins at the executive level and reaches across the entire organization. Today, at Microsoft our responsibility to protect our customers’ privacy is the starting point for everything we do. Our commitment to greater user control and empowerment is stronger than ever.

You can see the results of this cultural transformation across our products and services. Last month, for example, we announced new steps to increase transparency about the data we collect when people use our products and to provide them with greater control over how their data is used. Those steps include describing the data we collect in clear and simple language; and making it easier for people to control their personal information. To enhance transparency, we are improving documentation and introducing a new biannual report about our data collection procedures.

We are also providing tools to help our customers meet their own privacy obligations under GDPR. To make it easier for game developers to comply with GDPR, we developed tools so they can allow players to view or delete data that is stored about them. We’re delivering features that improve how businesses secure sensitive data and protect the privacy of their employees and customers. We offer encryption to enable companies to protect sensitive data including credit cards and national IDs such as U.S. Social Security numbers. To help companies safeguard sensitive information on mobile devices, we announced a set of advanced privacy and security capabilities that enable companies’ IT administrators to better enforce privacy and security protection policies. And in April, we released new privacy tools for Office365 ProPlus that provide greater control over diagnostic data that is sent to Microsoft, and over optional cloud-based features in Office that enhance functionality.

Toward a framework for new privacy laws in the U.S. and interoperability around the globe

No matter how much work companies like Microsoft do to help organizations secure sensitive data and empower individuals to manage their own data, preserving a strong right to privacy will always fundamentally be a matter of law that falls to governments. Despite the high level of interest in exercising control over personal data from U.S. consumers, the United States has yet to join the EU and other nations around the world in passing national legislation that accounts for how people use technology in their lives today.

In the absence of federal action, California took an important first step forward in advancing privacy protection with the passage of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which goes into effect on January 1, 2020. A watershed for U.S. privacy law, CCPA was the first law in the United States to include rights inspired by GDPR.

Now, it’s Congress’s turn to adopt a new framework that reflects the changing understanding of the right to privacy in the United States and around the world. Like GDPR, this framework should uphold the fundamental right to privacy through rules that give people control over their data and require greater accountability and transparency in how companies use the personal information they collect.

California’s law is a good starting point. But federal legislation should go further and ensure that companies act as responsible stewards of consumers’ personal data. One way to achieve this is by requiring assessments that weigh the benefits of data processing against potential privacy risks to those whose data is processed.

This is important because the prevailing opt-in/opt-out privacy model in the United States forces consumers to make a decision for every website and online service they visit. This places an unreasonable—and unworkable—burden on individuals. Strong federal privacy should not only empower consumers to control their data, it also should place accountability obligations on the companies that collect and use sensitive personal information.

Federal law must also include strong enforcement provisions. As I saw first-hand when I served on the Federal Trade Commission, laws currently on the books are simply not strong enough to enable the FTC to protect privacy effectively in today’s complex digital economy.

Finally, while federal privacy legislation should reflect U.S. legal precedent—and the cultural values and norms of American society—it should also work with GDPR. For American businesses, interoperability between U.S. law and GDPR will reduce the cost and complexity of compliance by ensuring that companies don’t have to build separate systems to meet differing—and even conflicting—requirements for privacy protection in the countries where they do business.

In the year since it went into effect, GDPR has been an important catalyst for progress in privacy protection. Countries around the world have implemented new laws that reflect the new understanding people have for privacy in our digital era. Some companies are doing a better job of handling sensitive personal data and they have delivered new tools that make it easier for people to manage and control their personal information.

Now it is time for Congress to take inspiration from the rest of the world and enact federal legislation that extends the privacy protections in GDPR to citizens in the United States.

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Video games: A unifying force for the world

My father, a chemical engineer, brought home our first computer, a Sinclair ZX81, which came out in 1981. We played games together and then later, we wrote games together.

Today, for many people around the world, gaming is the first entry point into technology, just like it was for me.

I believe in two fundamental truths about gaming:

First, gaming is for everyone. No one group “owns” gaming. Instead, whether you’re new to gaming or are a diehard e-sports fan, you are welcome to play and welcome to all the fun and skill-building that comes with gaming. In this way, when everyone can play, the entire world wins.

If you imagine gamers as predominantly men and specifically teen boys, think again. We are a 2.6 billion-person strong community of parents playing with our kids, adventurers exploring worlds together, teachers making math wondrous, grandmothers learning about their grandchildren through play, and soldiers connecting with their folks back home. Most gamers today are adults; nearly half are women.

Second, gaming must promote and protect the safety of all. Gaming must be a safe environment. Creating community is shared work, and protecting community is essential work, so, we all carry part of the payload of community safety – game industry and gamers alike.

This widespread embrace of gaming and its global communities have turned video games into the world’s leading cultural industry, bigger than movies or music. But it also comes at a time when digital life includes a growing toxic stew of hate speech, bigotry and misogyny.

No different from rock and roll, books and TV before them, video games are often dismissed or maligned as frivolous, fraught with violence or filled exclusively with hate-mongering. But gaming is uniquely designed for equality. We don’t just walk in someone’s shoes – we stand on equal footing, regardless of age, education, socioeconomics, race, religion, politics, gender, orientation, ethnicity, nationality, or ability. Gaming doesn’t just bring stereotype-defying gamers together; it unites us through our universal language of fun and answers our human need to play. Research has shown an effective way to battle polarization and prejudice is through relationships with people outside our own groups, known as intergroup contact theory. This is where gaming excels: forging unexpected friendships with people we might never meet in real life. Dr. Linda Tropp, a professor of psychology at University of Massachusetts Amherst, observes, “As an interactive form of entertainment, gaming environments have the potential to bring people together for collaborations across differences, and to build empathy and mutual understanding through play.”

When people call video games a waste a time, I point them to the well-documented health and social benefits of gaming. Beyond pure exhilaration, gaming helps children with autism make new friends and seniors with Alzheimer’s improve their memory. Researchers have found that gaming teaches adults leadership, improves decision-making and reduces stress and depression and also teaches kids computational skills and empathy. Gaming is the gateway to these 21st century skills and to STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math). Just consider: teen girls who play video games are three times more likely to pursue a STEM degree. Among teenagers who play games online with others daily, 74% have made friends online and 37% have made more than five friends online. 

By uniting as an industry, we can thoughtfully and deliberately continue building a safe and inclusive gaming environment for everyone. Microsoft, Team Xbox, and I are personally committing to this, beginning with the following principles and actions:

We commit to be vigilant, proactive, and swift. Our Xbox Safety team is nicknamed the “Defenders of Joy” because we will defend you in every humanly and technologically possible way, so gaming remains fun. We will identify potentials for abuse and misuse on our platform and will fix problems quickly. We are also intent on expanding the composition of our safety team so wide-ranging perspectives can help us identify future safety problems and solutions. Because hate and harassment have no place in gaming, we recently published a refreshed version of our Xbox Community Standards to communicate how each of us can keep gaming fun and safe for all and detail the consequences when any of us break these standards. A welcoming community is the key to a safe community, so our 150,000 Xbox Ambassadors – community leaders, stewards, and allies – will be engaged to embark on new community missions to help create an inviting and safe environment for all gamers. We will also continue to roll out new programs for the health of our entire gaming community.

We commit to empowering you to safeguard your gaming experience the way you want. We believe in equipping you with the tools to customize your gaming experience fit for your personal comfort level. This summer, we are empowering our official Club community managers with proactive content moderation features that will help create safe spaces for fans to discuss their favorite games. We plan to roll out new content moderation experiences to everyone on Xbox Live by the end of 2019. Creating a Child or Teen Account is the easiest way for parents and guardians to manage who their kids engage with as well as their family’s screen time, content and spending. While more than 26 million Child and Teen accounts have been created to-date, we will make it easier for parents and guardians new to console and PC gaming to discover and create Child or Teen accounts. This year, Microsoft Stores rolled out a series of family workshops to help parents understand the tools available to them on console and PC, and this summer we are launching Gaming Summer Camps offering young gamers new ways to explore life skills and practice healthy habits that can be used in gaming and everyday life. Additionally, we recently launched a new “For Everyone” destination on Xbox.com where parents, guardians and players can learn how we’re making gaming more fun for everyone with our new inclusivity, accessibility, and safety features. We’re innovating now in these and other concrete ways to reduce, filter, and develop a shared understanding of toxic experiences, and to ultimately put our community of gamers, and their parents or guardians, in control of their own experiences.

We commit to working across the gaming industry on safety measures. Because we intend to protect all gamers, we will openly share safety innovations with our industry the same way Microsoft has made PhotoDNA technology universally available to everyone from the police to the tech industry to fight the spread of child pornography. Today, multiple teams working in areas like moderation, user research, data science, and others are already aligning with industry partners to share insights, and best practices in areas of safety, security and privacy.

The gaming community continues to grow rapidly, and the imminent roll-out of new game services such as Apple Arcade, Google Stadia and Microsoft’s Project xCloud, will make gaming available to even more people worldwide. Our industry must now answer the fierce urgency to play with our fierce urgency for safety.

We invite everyone who plays games, and industry partners, to join us in following these principles to help unify the world and do our part: make gaming accessible for everyone and protect gamers, one and all.

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Building responsible and trustworthy conversational AI

From financial robo-advisors to virtual health assistants, enterprises across every industry are leveraging virtual assistants to create outstanding customer experiences and help employees maximize their time. As artificial intelligence technology continues to advance, virtual assistants will handle more and more mundane and repetitive tasks, freeing people to devote more time and energy to more productive and creative endeavors.

But like any technology, conversational AI can pose a significant risk when it’s developed and deployed improperly or irresponsibly, especially when it’s used to help people navigate information related to employment, finances, physical health, and mental well-being. For enterprises and society to realize the full potential of conversational AI, we believe bots need to be designed to act responsibly and earn user trust.

Last year, to help businesses meet this challenge, we shared 10 guidelines for building responsible conversational AI. Today, we’d like to illustrate how we’ve applied these guidelines in our own organization and share new resources that can help developers in any industry do the same.

Responsible bot guidelines

In November 2018, Lili Cheng, corporate vice president of Microsoft AI and Research, announced guidelines designed to help organizations develop bots that build trust in their services and their brands. We created these bot guidelines based on our own experiences, our research on responsible AI and by listening to our customers and partners. The guidelines are just that — guidelines. They represent the things that we found useful to think about from the very beginning of the design process. They encourage companies and organizations to think about how their bot will interact with people and how to mitigate potential risks. Ultimately, the guidelines are all about trust, because if people don’t trust the technology, they aren’t going to use it.

Designing bots with these guidelines in mind  

The bot guidelines have already started to play a central role in our own internal development processes. For example, our marketing team leveraged the guidelines while creating an AI-based lead qualification assistant that emails potential customers to determine their interest in Microsoft products and solutions. The assistant uses natural language processing to interact with customers, ensuring they receive the information they need or are directed to the Microsoft employee who can best help them. To provide a useful example, we’ve highlighted the ways in which our marketing team has approached three of the guidelines below.

  • Articulate the purpose of your bot and take special care if your bot will support consequential use cases.

Since the assistant would be customer-facing, the marketing team recognized the importance of completely thinking through every aspect of how the bot would work. Before building the lead qualification assistant, they created a vision and scope document that outlined the bot’s expected tasks, technical considerations, expected benefits and end goals in terms of business performance. By outlining these details early in the design process, the team was able to focus on developing and refining only necessary capabilities and deploy the bot sooner. Creating this document also helped them identify and design for edge cases that the bot was likely to encounter and establish a set of effective reliability metrics.

  • Ensure a seamless hand-off to a person where the person-bot exchange leads to interactions that exceed the bot’s competence.

While considering these edge use cases, the marketing team identified a couple of scenarios in which a handoff to a person would be required. First, if the assistant can’t determine the customer’s intent (for example, the response is too complex or lengthy), then the assistant will flag the conversation for a person. The person can then direct the assistant to the next best course of action or respond directly to the customer. The person also can use key phrases from the conversation to train the assistant to respond to similar situations in the future.

Secondly, the customer may ask something that the assistant doesn’t have pre-programmed. For example, a student may request information about our products and solutions but not be interested in making a purchase. The assistant would flag the conversation instead of forwarding it to sales. A person can then reply through the assistant to help the student learn more.

  • Ensure your bot is reliable

To help ensure the bot is performing as designed, the marketing team reviews a set of reliability metrics (such as the accuracy of determining intent or conversation bounce rate) through a regularly updated dashboard. As the team updates and improves the bot, it can closely analyze the impact of each change on the bot’s reliability and make adjustments as necessary.

Helping developers put the guidelines into practice

We have taken lessons learned from experiences like this one and important work from our industry-leading researchers to create actionable and comprehensive learning resources for developers.

As part of our free, online AI School, our Conversational AI learning path enables developers to start building sophisticated conversational AI agents using services such as natural language understanding or speech translation. We have recently added another module, Responsible Conversational AI, to this learning path. It covers how developers can design deeply intelligent bots and also ensure they are built in a responsible and trustworthy manner. In this learning path, developers can explore topics such as bot reliability, accessibility, security and consequential use cases and learn how to mitigate concerns that often arise with conversational AI. We have also created a Conversational AI lab in which a sample bot guides developers through a responsible conversational AI experience and explains its behavior at each point of the experience.

Learn more

We encourage you to share the AI lab and the Responsible Conversational AI learning module with technical decision-makers in your organization.

You can also go to our new AI Business School to learn more about how Microsoft has integrated AI throughout our business and how your organization can do the same.

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