Recent News – Page 193

Posted on February 12, 2019 by — Leave a comment

European teens use their voices for digital good at Italy’s Safer Internet Day events

Cyberbullying, sexting and online well-being are among 16 priority areas selected by young people across the globe as part of the 2020 Smarter Internet for Kids Agenda announced last week in Italy. Microsoft was on hand to hear the ideas and view the work of dozens of teens, all while continuing to promote digital civility, safer and healthier online interactions among all people.

In an online vote conducted by the European Council for Digital Good, (a “sister” council to Microsoft’s inaugural Council for Digital Good), more than 2,000 youth from 34 countries[1], chose the most significant and topical online safety issues. Privacy and data protection topped the list, while child sexual exploitation, misinformation and hate speech also ranked among the top 16. Digital civility/netiquette came in at No. 18, just missing the top 16 priorities. Yet, related topics online well-being and online safety, took the No. 12 and No. 13 spots, respectively. The 16 goals were selected to mark 16 years of international Safer Internet Day and were announced in Milan on Feb. 4, the eve of Safer Internet Day 2019.

Once the 16 priority areas were identified, young people from 10 countries designed specific targets for each priority, as well as the means of achieving them. On Feb. 3, the teens memorialized their plans in posters that were displayed at a more public event on Feb. 4. Those attending the event voted on the most compelling and informative poster, with the critical topic of online well-being taking the top honor. Across these priorities, youth are calling on people around the world to work with them to reach their goals in just one year, by Safer Internet Day 2020. (Learn more at www.smarterinternet.org.)

Microsoft hosts pre-Safer Internet Day activities in Milan

I had the privilege of attending this series of pre- and Safer Internet Day activities with the teens, including the working session on Feb. 3, held at the Microsoft House. There, 60 young people gathered to learn of the priority areas from members of the European council, discuss the issues and create their posters. Nine teens were then selected to prepare for three separate panel discussions the next day. I worked with and helped to prepare three incredible teens from Greece, Iceland and Italy for a panel on online well-being where sexting, cyberbullying and incitement to harm were the featured topics. The next day, I delivered a presentation about Microsoft’s own Safer Internet Day release and served as the adult respondent on the panel.

“Just touching our screen, we are changing someone else’s life,” Paola from Italy told the audience during the online well-being panel. “Humans are not perfect; we are not perfect, but are we being asked to be perfect” for fear that all of this generation’s youthful missteps will be played out online?

These and other questions made for a thought-provoking and compelling session, where the participants drew distinctions between growing up in decades past and growing up in an online era. They spoke of friends and classmates being driven by “likes” and “followers;” they debated the risks and realities of sexting and encouraged others to stand up for those being bullied or treated uncivilly online.

“Listening and heeding the voice of youth is essential in the online world,” said Janice Richardson, the creator of international Safer Internet Day and the coordinator of the European council. “Children and young people are generally the early adopters of new technology, at a time when they are still developing their values and attitudes and don’t yet have the life experience upon which resilience is built.” (Along with university professor Ernesto Caffo of Telefono Azzurro, Italy’s helpline for children and adolescents, Richardson co-sponsored the events in Milan.)

Adults: Be open to questions from youth about life online

That is precisely why it is equally important to involve and educate parents, teachers, coaches, counselors and other adults in the ways teens and young people are engaging with technology. Youth need to be able to go to adults for advice and guidance about online risk exposure, and this is borne out in research.

On Safer Internet Day 2019, Microsoft released its third annual installment of research from teens and adults in 22 countries about their exposure to 21 different online risks. Data show that now more than ever, teens around the world are turning to parents and other trusted adults for help with online issues. Across the countries surveyed, 42 percent of teens said they asked a parent for help with an online risk in the last year, up 32 percent from the previous year. Meantime, 28 percent of teens said they turned to another trusted adult, up 19 percent. In Italy, those percentages jumped to 44 percent and 21 percent, respectively, up from just 5 percent for both adult groups a year earlier.

The messages from these data for both adults and teens are clear. Parents and teachers need to familiarize themselves with teens’ online activities and the risks young people may encounter online. Most importantly, adults need to be open to talking with youth, focusing on listening and suspending judgment. Meanwhile, teens need to reach out to grown-ups whom they trust if something they see online threatens them or makes them uncomfortable; odds are their friends and classmates are doing the same thing. (View the full 2019 research report here.)

Another youth-focused event took place on Safer Internet Day, Feb. 5 in Rome. Government and law enforcement officials, representatives from technology companies and leaders of nongovernmental organizations assembled to make short presentations to some 200 young people and to respond to their questions. This event was also sponsored by Telefono Azzurro.

Microsoft’s Council for Digital Good champions SID 2019

Meanwhile, back in the U.S., members of Microsoft’s inaugural Council for Digital Good took these messages to their peers and younger kids on Safer Internet Day 2019, with several members holding workshops and after-school activities about embracing digital civility and staying safe online. Our inaugural council was made up of 15 teens from 12 U.S. states selected in 2017 to help spread the word about digital civility and to grow a generation dedicated to safer and healthier online interactions. (Learn more here and here.) Although the official pilot program wound down in July 2018, several teens remain active in promoting digital civility and online safety.

Erin, from Michigan, hosted an event, and got 150 9- to 12-year-olds to commit to safer online habits and practices by advocating for the four tenets of the Microsoft Digital Civility Challenge:

Live the Golden Rule
Respect differences
Pause before replying, and
Stand up for one’s self and others. (Click here to read the full Digital Civility Challenge.)

Bronte, an 18-year-old from Ohio, reached out to fellow high school students, asking them what their ideal internet would look like, and suggesting they sign a “pledge for a safer internet.” Indigo, from California, led 50 fourth- and fifth-graders in games and activities that she created to instill good online behaviors. Other council members also held events in their schools and communities.

We can’t say enough about the young people we’ve met and continue to meet, as we spread the (still fairly new) message of digital civility. We thank them for valuing the concept and for being leaders among their peers and other youth.

Safer Internet Day 2019 may be in the rearview mirror, but there’s still time to commit to putting our best digital foot forward by taking the Digital Civility Challenge and committing to its four ideals. It’s not too late to share your pledge on social media. Use the hashtags #Challenge4Civility and #Im4DigitalCivility. For other information about online safety, visit our website and resources page, and for more regular news and information, connect with us on Facebook and Twitter.

[1] Albania, Armenia, Australia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, Faroe Islands, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, India, Iraq, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Mongolia, Morocco, Poland, Romania, Senegal, Slovakia, Spain, Syria, The Netherlands, Tunisia, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States

Posted on February 12, 2019 by — Leave a comment

Introducing the Imagine Cup Asia Regional Champions: Team Caeli from India

We are excited to introduce the winners of the Asia Regional Final! Team Caeli won top honors for their automated anti-pollution and drug delivery mask which utilizes Azure Machine Learning to improve quality of life for respiratory patients living in polluted areas.

At its core, Microsoft Imagine Cup has a mission to empower student developers to achieve more and create the next great technology solutions for the chance to win cash, prizes, mentoring, and travel. We believe that with student innovation and creativity, partnered with Microsoft technologies and Azure cloud resources, the possibilities are endless.

The first out of three Regional Final events kicked off this weekend at Ignite | The Tour. Asia regional competitors were challenged to submit an original technology project utilizing Azure, and hundreds of teams were evaluated in the preliminary Online Semifinals round. 12 finalists were selected to move forward to the in-person Asia Regional Finals. The finalist teams traveled to Sydney, Australia on February 11 and participated in an Entrepreneurship Day and Ignite | The Tour activities to learn how to take their project to the next level and integrate the latest and greatest technologies into their solutions. Their experience culminated in giving a live demo of their Imagine Cup projects to a panel of judges and the top three were selected.

Team Caeli will advance to the Imagine Cup World Championship this May, where they will compete against the winners of the EMEA and Americas Regional finals for a chance at USD100,000 and a mentoring session with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Follow the action on Twitter and Instagram to stay up to date with the competition.

1^st place – Caeli, India

Caeli is a smart automated anti-pollution and drug delivery mask specifically designed for asthmatic and chronic respiratory patients. Caeli implements breakthrough features and Azure Machine Learning in a portable format to improve the quality of life for respiratory patients living in polluted areas.

Prize: USD15,000 and a spot in the Imagine Cup World Championship

2^nd place – RailinNova, China

The team developed a Rail Component Inspection Robot which operates through automatic positioning using AI and IoT, and identifies various railroad defects through multi-sensor fusion in order to replace the number of workers needed in a rail inspection project. The results can be processed in real-time to identify possible defect areas.

Prize: USD5,000

3^rd place – AidUSC, Philippines

The team developed Aqua Check, which utilizes Microsoft Azure’s Custom Vision to empower anyone to analyze for contamination by taking a photo of a water sample through a microscope. Using Azure Web and Azure Maps, the project can map contamination locations.

Prize: USD1,000

Congratulations to all the Asia Regional Finalists for all their incredible innovations this year. Do you want to build the skills necessary to bring your technology solution to the next Imagine Cup? Get started learning Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Mixed Reality and more with Azure for Students.

Posted on February 11, 2019 by — Leave a comment

Hear from education experts around the world in the new Microsoft Flagship School Podcast

Launching a new school is one of the most inspiring challenges leaders and educators can take on. The Microsoft Flagship School Podcast provides practical ideas and experiences from leaders around the globe, to make this journey to transform from the ground up, a little easier.

Today, I am pleased to share the release of a new podcast series to help inspire leaders around the world as they take steps on the journey to transform from the ground up. Drawing inspiration from our work with participating schools in our Flagship School program – an advisory to support ideation on new school construction and development – this new podcast provides an easily accessible source of information that can be listened to any time, on your popular podcast platforms.

Featuring many thought leaders in the education space working across different facets of education and learning design, construction and furnishing through to Microsoft experts on the technology front, the Microsoft Flagship School Podcast provides 20-minute injections of inspiration to share knowledge and best practices on building a new school. It’s also a great source of tangible actions that align to the pillars of the Microsoft Education Transformation Framework and shares ideas on how to build with the 12 tenets in mind.

All episodes are available today for listening on demand via Apple Podcast, Spotify, Stitcher and Google Play Music.

Here is what we have in store:

Episode 1: The possibilities for your new school

The world is changing, fast. Launching a new school gives education teams an incredible opportunity to build a future-focused, engaging learning environment from the ground up. In our first episode I share some of my thoughts on education transformation alongside Beth Hamilton, founding Principal of Wilburton Elementary, Bellevue Washington, who shares her experiences on recently opening the new school.

Episode 2: The learning approach in your new school

Every part of a school from the building, to the devices deployed, to the furniture purchased should work towards the goal of improving learning. Therefore, before we explore the many components to think about in your new school, we dig into what the learning approach will be for students. This episode features Tom Vander Ark from Getting Smart, and education leader Michelle Zimmerman from Renton Prep.

Episode 3: Learning environments in your new school

When designing from the ground up, we have an opportunity to consider the latest research in how the learning environments impact student experiences. In this episode, we speak with experts Madelyn Hankins, General Manager of Steelcase Education and Prakash Nair, CEO and Founder of Fielding Nair International, who have both led school design and furnishings across the world. We also spend some time with Terry Byers of Churchie Grammar, Queensland.

Episode 4: Personalized learning and data in your new school

Data is the new oil. With focus, careful collection and refinement, data can fuel a student’s learning path in meaningful ways. It exemplifies how technology can play a pivotal role in shaping students’ learning in ways not previously possible. In this episode, we hear from experts Maria Langworthy of Microsoft Education, Aidan McCarthy, a system leader in the Catholic education system in Western Australia, and James Protheroe, an education leader from Wales.

Episode 5: A positive culture in your new school

There is growing awareness of the importance of culture and mindset. We need new schools to be built with a strong culture that will help students and staff thrive. In this episode, we talk to Professor Lea Waters, a global expert on positive education, who shares the link between well-being and learning, and the importance of creating a positive school culture.

Episode 6: Accessibility and inclusion in your new school

Every new school needs to be built with a strong lens of accessibility and inclusion. Together they are a powerful force that is essential for every new school to incorporate deeply throughout its learning environments. In this episode, we talk to leaders from Microsoft, Megan Lawrence, Mike Tholfsen and Will Lewis, focusing on how technology can accelerate the path to making an inclusive and accessible school even more achievable.

Episode 7: Advancing the smart in your new school

Technology can play a huge role in advancing physical structures, design, and operations to put more smarts into school facilities and management. In this episode, we hear from Bert Van Hoof of Microsoft and Mark Hepburn of Iconics, who are both doing important work to support sustainable and advanced ideation on what it means to leverage technology to improve the way we live, learn, and play.

Episode 8: Making, creating, and coding in your new school

When you bring together passion and education, learning thrives. Learning styles are increasingly taking a playful approach designed to drive skills through the use of Minecraft: Education Edition and physical computing. In this episode, we hear from Deirdre Quarnstrom, GM of Minecraft Education at Microsoft, Jacqueline Russell, Principal Program Manager at Microsoft and classroom teacher Chhaya Narayan, and her students Emily and Tawara from Elim Christian College, NZ.

Episode 9: Acquiring devices in your new school

In this episode we hear how to choose the right devices for your school – from individual devices to larger form devices – and how to create a successful foundation to surround 1:1 to set up for success. In this episode hear best practices from Jason Wilmot, K12 leader at Microsoft Education and Jonathan Bishop, Head Teacher of Broadclyst Community Primary School, UK

Episode 10: Creating the future with your new school

In this uncertain century, there is one constant: continuous change. We can’t predict the future of education, but we can guide it by ensuring our schools are adaptable and creative environments, and our educators and leaders evolve with the technology. We end this season hearing insights from Microsoft leader and former school principal Mark Sparvell, and some final thoughts from me to close out the series.

We hope this new resource is helpful to spark ideas for your own school. And if you like it, give us a rating of 5 stars!

Posted on February 11, 2019 by — Leave a comment

Next Generation Washington: Our priorities for 2019 session of Washington State Legislature

The Washington State Legislature recently began its 2019 session. In keeping with Microsoft tradition, I’d like to share with you our legislative priorities. What follows are a few of the issues at the top of our agenda this year.

Ensuring a healthy community: the need for affordable housing in the Puget Sound region
Growth in the Puget Sound region has created new challenges and, chief among them, is a now-critical need to increase the supply of affordable housing. To help address the affordable housing crisis in our community, Microsoft recently announced a commitment of $500 million in the Puget Sound region. Our investments will take the form of funds to support the creation of low- and middle-income housing, as well as grants to homelessness-related initiatives.

This session, we also ask lawmakers to join us by renewing and expanding the state’s commitment to this important issue. We are urging legislators to continue making direct public investments in affordable housing by appropriating $200 million in the 2019-21 capital budget to the Housing Trust Fund to expand increase development of housing for low-income individuals and families. Although this figure represents a significant increase from the $110 million included in recent budget cycles, we believe it is appropriate given the scale of the problem at hand.

Beyond direct public investment, we are requesting that lawmakers enact policies that encourage private development of affordable housing. Condominium liability reforms, for example, would eliminate barriers and stimulate new development of affordable housing units for the middle-income market. Allowing cities to extend the multifamily tax exemption beyond its existing 12-year limit is another idea we are advocating. Finally, we encourage lawmakers to provide incentives for local communities to reduce zoning and permitting hurdles to allow increased production of other forms of affordable housing in their communities, especially near transit hubs.

The bottom line: We are committed to efforts that increase the availability of affordable housing and provide opportunities for a diverse range of citizens to live in the communities in which they work.

Closing the rural broadband gap
In Washington, about one in 10 residents in rural communities lack broadband communications access. These figures reflect a nationwide problem: Nearly 20 million Americans in rural areas lack access to a service that has become as fundamental as electricity.

Here and elsewhere, this broadband gap constrains the ability of many rural residents to fully participate in the digital economy and the opportunities it provides. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to stay that way.

Microsoft is investing heavily in broadband development through our Airband Initiative, which focuses on bringing broadband coverage to rural Americans through commercial partnerships and investment in digital skills training for people in the newly connected communities. Proceeds from Airband connectivity projects are reinvested into the program to expand broadband to more rural areas. Rural Washington is a key focus area for Airband, and we recently announced important partnerships with providers like Native Networks and Declaration Networks that will bring broadband to more rural Washingtonians.

As for the public side of this public-private partnership, we encourage the Legislature to build on the $10 million it appropriated last year to support broadband development and deployment in rural areas by creating a State Broadband Office and investing $25 million in a competitive grant program to support additional broadband deployment in underserved areas.

The bottom line: We believe the public and private sectors, working together, can eliminate the rural broadband gap in our state within the next four years.

Protection of data and personal privacy
Today, we run our businesses, connect with friends and family, and live our lives in a digital world. Now, more than ever before, there is an urgent need to modernize privacy laws. We know it, and the public knows it.

At a time when the public’s growing concern with maintaining individual privacy threatens to undermine trust in technology and stifle the promise and progress it can bring, lawmakers have a duty to act decisively.

Microsoft has been advocating for new federal privacy laws since 2005, but progress at the federal level remains stalled. But privacy legislation is starting to sweep across the country, with California leading the nation last year with a major new privacy law that will protect that state’s consumers who use technology and other services. That state’s approach builds on important developments in other countries, including across Europe. It’s important for Washington state to be a leader in this space as well, and this legislative session provides an opportunity for it to do so.

Sen. Reuven Carlyle (D-Seattle) has introduced important legislation that represents the right approach to modernizing state law. And Rep. Shelley Kloba (D-Kirkland) has introduced the companion bill in the House. Sen. Carlyle’s bill builds on the best aspects of approaches elsewhere, and we endorse it. As the legislation moves forward, it will be important for stakeholders to come together to work through important details, including provisions that exempt small businesses that impact fewer consumers.

The bottom line: At Microsoft, we believe privacy is a fundamental human right, and we support efforts by lawmakers in Olympia to protect the data and privacy of Washington consumers in a manner that allows innovation to continue and is also sensitive to the needs of the state’s small businesses.

A principled approach to facial recognition technology
While the proliferation of facial recognition has created many new and positive benefits around the world, we believe that it is time for a clear-eyed look at the risks and potential for abuse of this growing technology. Three simple steps to put appropriate limits on use will address the potential for bias or discrimination in facial recognition systems, intrusions into privacy and the potential for use of mass surveillance to encroach on democratic freedoms.

We believe it’s especially important to empower customers and consumers alike by ensuring that companies that participate in the facial recognition market enable academics and third parties to test their services. There is no more reason for a company in the facial recognition market to object to third-party testing than there is reason for an automobile company to object to testing the airbags in a new car. The public deserves the transparency needed to evaluate whether these services are error-prone and biased in their results.

We look forward to working with state lawmakers on these issues.

The bottom line: By putting guardrails around the use of this maturing technology, Washington lawmakers have an opportunity to blaze a trail that can serve as a model for effective privacy legislation nationwide.

Investment in high-speed rail
Another initiative that will create unprecedented economic opportunities for Washington residents for generations to come is the development of a high-speed rail line linking Vancouver, Seattle and Portland.

Leaders in these communities are working collaboratively to formalize the Cascadia Innovation Corridor, a strategy to drive additional job growth and better position our area as a global center of innovation and commerce.

High-speed rail could reduce the travel time between Seattle and Vancouver to a little over an hour. Early feasibility studies have confirmed this service could be operated cost-effectively. It’s now time to move from the planning stage to the implementation phase. Microsoft is supporting the governor’s $3 million budget proviso to establish a formal partnership between Washington, Oregon and British Columbia to chart a path forward to develop and operate high-speed rail service within Cascadia corridor.

The bottom line: The Cascadia Innovation Corridor will be a game-changer. We must act now to develop the legal and financial structures to move forward.

New opportunities for Washington citizens
We support efforts to increase economic opportunities and enhance quality of life for the people of Washington. Beyond these priorities, Microsoft will continue to support other public policies and investments that create new opportunities for Washington citizens, including expanding computer science education, career-connected learning opportunities and programs that boost postsecondary credential attainment.

We’re proud that our company and more than 50,000 of our employees call Washington home, and we are honored to have this opportunity to share our ideas about how to make it an even greater place to live and work.

We look forward to working with lawmakers and other stakeholders, and we welcome your thoughts on our agenda for 2019.

Posted on February 11, 2019 by — Leave a comment

Email overload: Using machine learning to manage messages, commitments

As email continues to be not only an important means of communication but also an official record of information and a tool for managing tasks, schedules, and collaborations, making sense of everything moving in and out of our inboxes will only get more difficult. The good news is there’s a method to the madness of staying on top of your email, and Microsoft researchers are drawing on this behavior to create tools to support users. Two teams working in the space will be presenting papers at this year’s ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining February 11–15 in Melbourne, Australia.

“Identifying the emails you need to pay attention to is a challenging task,” says Partner Researcher and Research Manager Ryen White of Microsoft Research, who manages a team of about a dozen scientists and engineers and typically receives 100 to 200 emails a day. “Right now, we end up doing a lot of that on our own.”

According to the McKinsey Global Institute, professionals spend 28 percent of their time on email, so thoughtful support tools have the potential to make a tangible difference.

“We’re trying to bring in machine learning to make sense of a huge amount of data to make you more productive and efficient in your work,” says Senior Researcher and Research Manager Ahmed Hassan Awadallah. “Efficiency could come from a better ability to handle email, getting back to people faster, not missing things you would have missed otherwise. If we’re able to save some of that time so you could use it for your actual work function, that would be great.”

Email deferral: Deciding now or later

Awadallah has been studying the relationship between individuals and their email for years, exploring how machine learning can better support users in their email responses and help make information in inboxes more accessible. During these studies, he and fellow researchers began noticing varying behavior among users. Some tackled email-related tasks immediately, while others returned to messages multiple times before acting. The observations led them to wonder: How do users manage their messages, and how can we help them make the process more efficient?

“There’s this term called ‘email overload,’ where you have a lot of information flowing into your inbox and you are struggling to keep up with all the incoming messages,” explains Awadallah, “and different people come up with different strategies to cope.”

In “Characterizing and Predicting Email Deferral Behavior,” Awadallah and his coauthors reveal the inner workings of one such common strategy: email deferral, which they define as seeing an email but waiting until a later time to address it.

The team’s goal was twofold: to gain a deep understanding of deferral behavior and to build a predictive model that could help users in their deferral decisions and follow-up responses. The team—a collaboration between Microsoft Research’s Awadallah, Susan Dumais, and Bahareh Sarrafzadeh, lead author on the paper and an intern at the time, and Christopher Lin, Chia-Jung Lee, and Milad Shokouhi of the Microsoft Search, Assistant and Intelligence group—dedicated a significant amount of resources to the former.

“AI and machine learning should be inspired by the behavior people are doing right now,” says Awadallah.

The probability of deferring an email based on the workload of the user as measured by the number of unhandled emails. The number of unhandled emails is one of many features Awadallah and his coauthors used in training their deferral prediction model.

The team interviewed 15 subjects and analyzed the email logs of 40,000 anonymous users, finding that people defer for several reasons: They need more time and resources to respond than they have in that moment, or they’re juggling more immediate tasks. They also factor in who the sender is and how many others have been copied. They found some of the more interesting reasons revolved around perception and boundaries, delaying or not to set expectations on how quickly they respond to messages.

The researchers used this information to create a dataset of features—such as the message length, the number of unanswered emails in an inbox, and whether a message was human- or machine-generated—to train a model to predict whether a message is deferred. The model has the potential to significantly improve the email experience, says Awadallah. For example, email clients could use such a model to remind users about emails they’ve deferred or even forgotten about, saving them the effort they would have spent searching for those emails and reducing the likelihood of missing important ones.

“If you have decided to leave an email for later, in many cases, you either just rely on memory or more primitive controls that your mail client provides like flagging your message or marking the message unread, and while these are useful strategies, we found that they do not provide enough support for users,” says Awadallah.

Commitment detection: A promise is a promise

Among the deluge of incoming emails are outgoing messages containing promises we make—promises to provide information, set up meetings, or follow up with coworkers—and losing track of them has ramifications.

“Meeting your commitments is incredibly important in collaborative settings and helps build your reputation and establish trust,” says Ryen White.

Current commitment detection tools, such as those available in Cortana, are pretty effective, but there’s room for further advancement. White, lead author Hosein Azarbonyad, who was interning with Microsoft at the time of the work, and coauthor Microsoft Research Principal Applied Scientist Robert Sim seek to tackle one particular obstacle in their paper “Domain Adaptation for Commitment Detection in Email”: bias in the datasets available to train commitment detection models.

Researcher access is generally limited to public corpora, which tend to be specific to the industry they’re from. In this case, the team used public datasets of email from the energy company Enron and an unspecified tech startup referred to as “Avocado.” They found a significant disparity between models trained and evaluated on the same collection of emails and models trained on one collection and applied to another; the latter model failed to perform as well.

“We want to learn transferable models,” explains White. “That’s the goal—to learn algorithms that can be applied to problems, scenarios, and corpora that are related but different to those used during training.”

To accomplish this, the group turned to transfer learning, which has been effective in other scenarios where datasets aren’t representative of the environments in which they’ll ultimately be deployed. In their paper, the researchers train their models to remove bias by identifying and devaluing certain information using three approaches: feature-level adaptation, sample-level adaptation, and an adversarial deep learning approach that uses an autoencoder.

Emails contain a variety and number of words and phrases, some more likely to be related to a commitment—“I will,” “I shall,” “let you know”—than others. In the Enron corpus, domain-specific words like “Enron,” “gas,” and “energy” may be overweighted in any model trained from it. Feature-level adaptation attempts to replace or transform these domain-specific terms, or features, with similar domain-specific features in the target domain, explains Sim. For instance, “Enron” might be replaced with “Avocado,” and “energy forecast” might be replaced with a relevant tech industry term. The sample level, meanwhile, aims to elevate emails in the training dataset that resemble emails in the target domain, downgrading those that aren’t very similar. So if an Enron email is “Avocado-like,” the researchers will give it more weight while training.

General schema of the proposed neural autoencoder model used for commitment detection.

The most novel—and successful—of the three techniques is the adversarial deep learning approach, which in addition to training the model to recognize commitments also trains the model to perform poorly at distinguishing between the emails it’s being trained on and the emails it will evaluate; this is the adversarial aspect. Essentially, the network receives negative feedback when it indicates an email source, training it to be bad at recognizing which domain a particular email comes from. This has the effect of minimizing or removing domain-specific features from the model.

“There’s something counterintuitive to trying to train the network to be really bad at a classification problem, but it’s actually the nudge that helps steer the network to do the right thing for our main classification task, which is, is this a commitment or not,” says Sim.

Empowering users to do more

The two papers are aligned with the greater Microsoft goal of empowering individuals to do more, tapping into an ability to be more productive in a space full of opportunity for increased efficiency.

Reflecting on his own email usage, which finds him interacting with his email frequently throughout the day, White questions the cost-benefit of some of the behavior.

“If you think about it rationally, it’s like, ‘Wow, this is a thing that occupies a lot of our time and attention. Do we really get the return on that investment?’” he says.

He and other Microsoft researchers are confident they can help users feel better about the answer with the continued exploration of the tools needed to support them.

Posted on February 11, 2019 by — Leave a comment

Microsoft Business Applications for Healthcare: Empowering teams for exceptional patient experiences

This week at the HIMSS 2019 conference, the healthcare IT community will explore solutions to the most urgent challenges facing modern health. Microsoft will share new innovations to help health organizations navigate the complex technology transformations needed to deliver modern patient experiences that promote successful treatments and well-being.

The Microsoft Healthcare team will showcase intelligent healthcare solutions that connect health data and systems securely in the cloud, improve communication with teams and patients, and advance precision healthcare. These featured solutions—powered by Microsoft 365, Azure, and the new Microsoft Healthcare Bot service—interoperate with Microsoft Business Applications to enable personalized care, empower care teams, and advance precision healthcare.

Today, people want the same level of access and engagement with healthcare providers as they get from other digital brand experiences. Case in point: a recent survey by Transcend Insights found that 93 percent of patients expect care providers to provide access to information about their medical history, and 71 percent want to digitally provide status updates to better inform diagnoses and decisions.

Dynamics 365 unifies operations and patient engagement, breaking down silos created by the patchwork of business systems and databases within the organization. As patients interact with web portals and clinicians, providers can access a 360-degree view of the patient for more personalized service. And by using solutions like the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Health Accelerator, healthcare providers can more easily create new use cases and workflows using the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) based data model.

Improving patient engagement with virtual clinics

As the healthcare industry shifts to value-based care, many providers focus on face-to-face patient experiences at the clinic or hospital. Now imagine the challenge of improving care for patients scattered across remote, difficult-to-reach villages.

Helsinki and Uusimaa Hospital (HUS) are solving the issue by using Microsoft cloud solutions to create a virtual hospital that provides remote, virtual health services throughout Finland, including sparsely populated regions.

HUS moved to the cloud with Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365 to create digital hubs for its medical specialties, and then added Dynamics 365 for Customer Service. Now providers have tools to access a 360-degree view of patients across departments and care givers to improve treatment. Patients can access self-service portals for medical information and self-help therapies, plus receive virtual one-on-one treatments from specialists. It’s a win-win for everyone. Patients are empowered to feel more in control of their health which boosts confidence and support, and providers can provide personalized care to more patients.

HUS is also conducting pilot programs with artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to direct patients to the right place right away and improve digital healthcare services. Providers will be able to gain insights from complex data to develop precision medicine and treatments for different patients and groups.

Learn more about the HUS Virtual Hospital in this customer story, as well as in the short video below.

Empowering care teams for exceptional at-home services

Another way Dynamics 365 is improving patient care is by enabling care teams to remotely monitor patients, share knowledge across health teams, and coordinate the right level of care.

In Australia, more older citizens are choosing to live at home, rather than a nursing facility. For residential wellness provider ECH, this means making life simple for 15,000 clients while providing support for the domestic healthcare workers. ECH deployed Dynamics 365 to streamline the onboarding of new clients, helping to match them with the right specialists. They also adopted Dynamics 365 for Talent to attract and onboard skilled care providers and set them up for success which is critical in a field with high stress and turnover. They’re helping to reduce burnout and attrition by using Dynamics 365 to promote continuous learning, track employee accomplishments, and help workers get certified and trained.

Improving operational outcomes with no-code apps

A key to exceptional patient experiences is empowering staff to streamline care processes, reduce redundancy, and gain insights to make decisions faster.

New York’s largest healthcare provider, Northwell Health, is streamlining patient care processes using Dynamics 365 for Customer Service and the Microsoft Power Platform to give employees tools to optimize patient care, reduce costs, and ensure regulatory compliance.

Using PowerApps, a Northwell Health doctor with no technical expertise created an app that gives physicians, nurses, and administrators visibility into tasks that need to be completed like patient requests to ensure a patient gets a needed X-ray. The app takes data entered into Dynamics 365, stored in the PowerApps Common Data Service, and augments it with attributes from the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Healthcare Accelerator, which makes it easier to create new use cases and workflows using a FHIR-based data model.

By connecting the app to the Microsoft Bot Framework, clinicians and administrators can leverage predictive insights and automated workflows to quickly get fast answers about patients. Plus, all data is on the trusted Azure cloud that helps ensure the compliance, confidentiality, integrity, and accessibility of sensitive data.

Get the full story at HIMSS

These three stories are just a peek at how Microsoft Business Applications are helping transform patient experiences. If you are attending HIMSS, be sure to visit our booth (#2500) and attend sessions to learn more from our healthcare technology experts. Find more information about our location and sessions in this schedule, and be sure to check out the resources below:

Posted on February 9, 2019 by — Leave a comment

New $1M grant aims to advance the role of ‘humanware’ in academic research

Cloud computing is changing the model of cyber infrastructure for Academic Research. Microsoft is supporting the efforts of the Pervasive Technology Institute (PTI) at Indiana University to go beyond technology to invest in the people on campus who work with the Academic Research community to adopt technologies and tools that enhance collaboration, accelerate discovery, and share findings.

This Humanware project will provide an honorarium payment, cloud credits, and technical support to individuals on college campuses that apply directly to PTI to become members of the Cloud Research Software Engineers (CRSE) community. This is community that prides itself on combining technical expertise with human skills to help others across campus.

PTI Program Management and First Wave CRSEs attending Campus Computing Summit 2019

Brian Voss | Research Engagement Manager

Brian Voss, who originated the Humanware term, is leading this initiative for Indiana University as the Research Engagement Manager responsible for building the CRSE community at campuses throughout the US and North America. Brian is a respected technology executive with over 25 years experience with Higher Education institutions as CIO, and director of research computing infrastructure.

Craig Stewart, Executive Director of the Pervasive Technology Institute and recipient of the grant, will be participating in CCS and discussing NSF collaboration with WW and US Sales team.

Eight applicants have been accepted as First Wave members of the CRSE Community from Rice, UNC, Perdue, UC -Berkeley, U. Nebraska – Lincoln, Georgia Tech, Stanford, and U. Kentucky.

The following CRSEs will kick off the program, visiting Microsoft Headquarters in Redmond, WA and participating as guests in Campus Connections Summit 2019.

John Mulligan | Rice University

John will work with Humanities and Social Science focused teams to design and deliver interactive visualizations that allow researchers to see their data in a new light, and build custom web interfaces to automate the cross-indexing of several databases, allowing his researchers to accelerate and share their work.

Eleftheria (Ria) Kontou | University of North Carolina

Ria proposes to use Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio to integrate geospatial data from GPS, travel surveys and trip datasets with socio-demographics and economic characteristics, to assess the impacts of ride-sourcing on transportation’s systems safety. It will use 1.5 million ride-sourcing trips data from Austin TX, overlaid with accident and traffic datasets. The proposal will seek to leverage Applicant uses econometric models (time-series with spatial autocorrelation) and heuristic algorithms to perform the analysis.

Kris Ezra | Purdue University

Kris is proposing to enhance and exercise a model with respect to metrics of interest within a stochastic, parametrically defined design space, to showcase the tremendous benefit of high-performance cloud computing environments as efficient, cost effective, and well-suited to Systems of Systems (SoS) research, now and in the future.

Dan Sholler | University of California – Berkeley

Dan will study the status of cloud research in a discipline to categorize the types of research employing cloud-based tools, and document how cloud computing has changed the methodological approaches, research roles, and necessary skills required for scientific discovery. The proposal aims to develop actionable recommendations for promoting cloud research, governing cloud services use, and augmenting the humanware systems scientists rely upon to coordinate discovery.

Derek Weitzel | University of Nebraska – Lincoln

Derek will work with UNL community to advance the integration of cloud CI resources by adopting an NSF project, SciTokens, to securely store and transfer identity tokens, which allow access to secure storage and computing resources. This aims to overcome a barrier in using commercial cloud CI services: the management of security credentials.

Nuyun (Nellie) Zhang | Georgia Institute of Technology

Nellie, in her role with GaTech PACE will provide training and one-on-one support of the GA Tech research community, integrating Microsoft Azure HPC into their existing workflows for machine learning and data intensive research.

The CRSEs below are starting at the same time but are unable to visit Redmond this week due to scheduling conflicts.

Josiah K. Leong | Stanford University

Josiah will work with his lab to use Micrpsoft Azure’s Cognitive Services platform to analyze neuroimaging data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study.

Yongwook Song | University of Kentucky

Yongwook will work with his team to develop a machine learning-based data analysis platform using Microsoft’s Azure TensorFlow estimator API and TFRecordDataset to maximize throughput and the utilization of cloud-scaled GPUs against single molecule studies of in vivo protein oligomerization.

Posted on February 8, 2019 by — Leave a comment

Securing the future of AI and machine learning: Early findings from new research paper

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are making a big impact on how people work, socialize, and live their lives. As consumption of products and services built around AI and machine learning increases, specialized actions must be undertaken to safeguard not only your customers and their data, but also to protect your AI and algorithms from abuse, trolling, and extraction.

We are pleased to announce the release of a research paper, Securing the Future of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at Microsoft, focused on net-new security engineering challenges in the AI and machine learning space, with a strong focus on protecting algorithms, data, and services. This content was developed in partnership with Microsoft’s AI and Research group. It’s referenced in The Future Computed: Artificial Intelligence and its role in society by Brad Smith and Harry Shum, as well as cited in the Responsible bots: 10 guidelines for developers of conversational AI.

This document focuses entirely on security engineering issues unique to the AI and machine learning space, but due to the expansive nature of the InfoSec domain, it’s understood that issues and findings discussed here will overlap to a degree with the domains of privacy and ethics. As this document highlights challenges of strategic importance to the tech industry, the target audience for this document is security engineering leadership industry-wide.

Our early findings suggest that:

Secure development and operations foundations must incorporate the concepts of Resilience and Discretion when protecting AI and the data under its control.

AI-specific pivots are required in many traditional security domains such as Authentication, Authorization, Input Validation, and Denial of Service mitigation.
Without investments in these areas, AI/machine learning services will continue to fight an uphill battle against adversaries of all skill levels.

Machine learning models are largely unable to discern between malicious input and benign anomalous data. A significant source of training data is derived from un-curated, unmoderated public datasets that may be open to third-party contributions.

Attackers don’t need to compromise datasets when they are free to contribute to them. Such dataset poisoning attacks can go unnoticed while model performance inexplicably degrades.
Over time, low-confidence malicious data becomes high-confidence trusted data, provided that the data structure/formatting remains correct and the quantity of malicious data points is sufficiently high.

Given the great number of layers of hidden classifiers/neurons that can be leveraged in a deep learning model, too much trust is placed on the output of AI/machine learning decision-making processes and algorithms without a critical understanding of how these decisions were reached.

AI/machine learning is increasingly used in support of high-value decision-making processes in medicine and other industries where the wrong decision may result in serious injury or death.
AI must have built-in forensic capabilities. This enables enterprises to provide customers with transparency and accountability of their AI, ensuring its actions are not only verifiably correct but also legally defensible.
When combined with data provenance/lineage tools, these capabilities can also function as an early form of “AI intrusion detection,” allowing engineers to determine the exact point in time that a decision was made by a classifier, what data influenced it, and whether or not that data was trustworthy.

Our goal is to bring awareness and energy to the issues highlighted in this paper while driving new research investigations and product security investments across Microsoft. Read the Securing the Future of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at Microsoft paper to learn more.

Posted on February 8, 2019 by — Leave a comment

Test your quantum programming skills in the Microsoft Q# Coding Contest

Whether you’re new to quantum computing and want to improve your skills, or have done quantum programming before and need a new challenge, we have just the thing for you: The second Microsoft Q# Coding Contest. Designed to help developers ramp up quickly in quantum computing and quantum programming, this contest will help participants build the expertise they’ll need to be ready for the advent of true quantum computing.

Organized in collaboration with Codeforces.com, the contest will be held March 1-4, 2019. It will offer the participants a selection of quantum programming problems of varying difficulty. In each problem, you’ll write Q# code to implement a transformation on qubits, or perform a more challenging task. The top 50 participants will win a Microsoft Quantum T-shirt.

This contest is the second in a series that began last July. The first contest offered problems on introductory topics in quantum computing: Superposition, measurement, quantum oracles, and simple algorithms. This second contest will take some of these topics to the next level as well as introduce some new ones.

For those eager to get a head start in the competition, a warm-up round will be held February 22-25, 2019. It will feature a set of relatively problems and focus on helping participants become familiar with the contest environment, the submission system, and the problem format. The warm-up round is a great introduction to quantum programming, both for those new to Q# or those looking to refresh their skills.

Another great way to prepare for the contest is to work your way through the Microsoft Quantum Development Kit katas. The katas allow you to test and debug your solutions locally, giving you immediate feedback on your code.

Q# can be used with Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code or command line, on Windows, macOS or Linux, providing an easy way to start with quantum programming. Any of these platforms can be used in the contest.

We hope to see you at the second global Microsoft Q# Coding Contest!

Posted on February 8, 2019 by — Leave a comment

Lessons from the South Side: The dad who helped raise an empathetic engineer

One day, young Heather came home from junior high school with an idea. She’d often toss out ideas to her father for what she could be when she grew up. Back then, he was endearingly tough to please, she remembered. Not in an unloving way, but in a way that emboldened Heather to challenge herself.

Her dad was reading in his tattered, gray arm chair. She touched his arm gently and signed, “Dad! What if I become a sign-language interpreter?”

He peered at her over his book, set it down, and signed, “No.”

“What? I thought you’d be excited. I’ve been interpreting for you and mom my whole life,” she pressed. “Why not?”

“Too safe for you,” said Royce. “Believe in yourself. Do what makes you uncomfortable.”

While Heather walked out of the room thinking that it was strange that he wouldn’t want her to choose interpreting as a career, she knew that he was right. So even though she interpreted for then-president Barack Obama during a 2015 national monument dedication in Chicago, she respected his commitment to working hard for the sake of the family. So, she would keep looking for something that challenged her.

*****

After her sophomore year of high school, Heather went to a summer engineering program at Chicago State University. There, she got to dig in to the hardware of all the gadgets that she loved. As she soldered the circuit board for a phone, she thought about how so many people who have hearing loss, at that time, couldn’t use the phone easily—the feedback on hearing aid devices made people on the other end of the line sound like they were in a construction zone. “Wow, I could make accessible technology and really change people’s lives.”

“Today, I never take it for granted that I can send my dad a text if he doesn’t see me standing at the door. The world of pagers and mobile phones really changed our world,” Heather said.

It turns out that there was a name for being an inventor of technology for people who are Deaf or hard-of-hearing. She came home that summer and told her dad, “Engineer. I’m going to be an engineer.” At that point, Heather had never heard of any female, black engineers. Surely that qualified as uncomfortable.

Royce said nothing, his kind eyes narrowing in on hers. He smirked, shrugged, and then walked down the narrow hallway to rest up for the evening’s shift at the post office.