Recent News – Page 51

Posted on April 21, 2022 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Microsoft and partners are building a more sustainable future

As we observe Earth Day 2022, we know that protecting the planet is critical, and we are committed to creating a more sustainable future. For Microsoft, sustainability isn’t just an ambition — it’s part of our culture. Our commitments and actions on sustainability are far-reaching and are some of the most ambitious out there. Our goal isn’t just to become more sustainable though, we want to help every organization on the planet to do the same. Organizations around the world need to transition to a net zero, environmentally sustainable future in a short period of time, and our partners are leveraging the Microsoft cloud, Cloud for Sustainability, data and AI to build innovative applications, solutions and services to help customers transform their operations, products, services and supply chains, to facilitate their transition to net zero, and achieve their sustainability goals.

Partner innovations enable sustainability

Through the Microsoft #BuildFor2030 Initiative we aim to accelerate innovation and collective impact with our partner ecosystem, helping to advance the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Together we can deliver solutions and services that are good for the planet, and good for business. For Earth Day, and every day, we are proud to celebrate some of our partners who are working to build a more sustainable future.

Optimizing technology for a more resilient future

Our partners offer a variety of Microsoft cloud solutions that empower customers to understand, minimize and manage environmental impact, gain operational efficiencies and achieve more responsible supply chain practices:

The Awesense Digital Energy Platform is a data model-based framework that energy providers and solution builders can use to scale at the same pace as the rapidly growing energy grid, unlocking and combining energy and geospatial data to enable analytics and visualizations.

The CadDo Calculate solution helps financial organizations augment financial performance with rigorous, investment-grade SDG metrics to inform investment decisions for improved sustainability.

Earth Knowledge’s Foresight Platform is providing institutions with forward-looking planetary intelligence that helps companies mitigate future risk and guides investment decisions, bringing clarity to the economic risk of climate change and biodiversity loss.

Honeywell Forge Predictive Maintenance is a cloud based solution that collects data from building assets and uses machine learning to understand how equipment is running against optimal performance in order to achieve better building performance and realize operating efficiencies.
ICONICS Water Management solution provide insights to ensure water treatment and filtration happens exactly as planned. Customer benefits include energy and labor savings, leak detection, pollution reduction, government compliance and sustainability improvements.
SAS worked with Wienerberger AG to develop and deploy a process optimization solution that uses analytics to reduce energy consumption and emissions in the production of bricks. It utilizes a data-based model to compensate for the large fluctuations that occur during the processing of raw materials used to create bricks.
Uptake provides asset-intensive companies with the traceable, secure, cost-effective ability to connect their machines, people and data together to embrace their fiduciary duty and act in service of global sustainability.

Solutions from systems integrator and advisory partners enable business transformation

Our systems integrator and advisory partners are working with companies around the world, applying their deep industry expertise to deliver Microsoft Cloud-powered sustainability solutions and innovative services that help customers drive operational efficiencies, enable business transformation and achieve their sustainability goals:

Accenture, Avanade and Microsoft are driving joint sustainability efforts including their pioneering role in the Green Software Foundation, a nonprofit that’s building a trusted ecosystem of people, standards, tooling and practices to enable green software development. And, through Project Amplify, Accenture and Microsoft support dozens of startups that focus on driving social impact and sustainability by providing access to emerging technology and expertise to help them scale their solutions.
Cognizant believes that technology can help businesses make informed decisions about ESG, lead the transition to lower carbon and build a more inclusive economy that will positively impact the environment. Cognizant and Microsoft collaborated to develop industry-leading solutions on the Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability including Connected Factory by APEX and OneFacility.
EY is driving innovation with Microsoft in order to support clients with challenging ESG (Environmental, social and governance) issues including energy transition and decarbonization, stakeholder and risk management, ESG ratings management, regulatory compliance and external reporting. EY’s Microsoft Cloud solutions such as ESG IQ and the Decarbonization Platform, are focused on helping clients solve the new business challenges that ESG presents.

Corey Glickman, VP Sustainability & Design at Infosys, and Jeff Kavanaugh, head of the Infosys Knowledge Institute, wrote “Infosys – The Practical Sustainability Book” to provide organizations with a practical approach to creating and connecting smart buildings and spaces that deliver proven results and can be replicated by others including global enterprises, small companies or government entities.
Kyndryl believes that it is mission critical to be a leader who is providing climate change solutions, and they are working with employees, customers and partners to transform our world to net zero. For Kyndryl , the #heart of progress is to build a more sustainable world for today, and for future generations.
New PwC solutions for smart stadiums utilize digital twins, IoT sensors and AI to promote a more modern, more rewarding experience for everyone entering a stadium or sports facility. These solutions provide a safer, healthier environment for both customers and staff by removing barriers and helping people get where they need to go faster, and behind the scenes, facility managers can realize reduce costs through centralized core functions, smarter resource planning and predictive analytics to monitor, predict and manage equipment status, waste removal and climate control.
TCS Clever Energy is an enterprise energy and emission management system that helps commercial and industrial organizations be more sustainable, ensures energy and cost efficiencies, decrease carbon emissions, and achieve their carbon neutral goals. The solution accelerates customers’ journey towards neutrality by reducing energy and CO2 consumption by up to 15%, and typically produces a ROI within a year. Over the next five years, TCS expects that the Clever Energy solution will save the company and its customers more than $200 million dollars, and up to 170 tons of CO2 emissions.

Device and chip maker partners help drive sustainability from start to finish

Our hardware partners deliver innovative devices and demonstrate their commitment to the sustainability of our planet through the examination and optimization of their own operations and by sourcing renewable or ocean-bound plastics into their PCs.

AMD has a proven track-record of prioritizing and delivering on environmental sustainability initiatives and performance backed by over 25 years of public reporting. AMD environmental programs and initiatives span across its value chain including operations, supply chain, manufacturing and products. The company has set ambitious goals through 2025/2030, focused on bold advancements in energy efficiency for accelerated computing applications, a science-based greenhouse gas emissions reduction goal for operations (aligned with the international goal of trying to limit future warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius), and work with suppliers to increase efficient use of resources and renewable energy.
Acer’s Earthion mission is to provide outstanding products that carefully consider environmental factors in every stage of the product life cycle, and since the launch of the Aspire Vero, based on the Earthion mission, Acer has expanded its Vero line of green products to include more notebook models, desktops, displays and accessories. And the Acer “Earthion” platform unites the strengths of its employees and supply chain partners to help tackle environmental challenges and expand the circle of impact of its sustainability efforts.
ASUS reduces their environmental footprint by optimizing their packaging and shipping practices. A report found that only 5% of plastic packaging was effectively recycled, so ASUS uses cardboard cartons made of 85% to 90+% recycled paper. In the spirit of reduce, reuse and recycle, the accessory boxes are designed to be converted into laptop stands, and thoughtful consideration for packaging materials’ size, weight, and the way they’re stacked improves energy utilization, which indirectly reduces carbon emissions during transportation.
Dell just launched a Global Recycling Drive, focused on reducing e-waste through recycling. Consumers in the U.S. can turn eligible devices into credit for their next purchase through Dell Trade-in, or take advantage of Dell Reconnect, a program operated in partnership with Goodwill Industries, to recycle any brand of used computer equipment. Globally, consumers can recycle their computer equipment with Dell’s mail-back program, and business customers can take advantage of Dell’s Asset Recovery Services to securely resell, recycle or return to lease their excess hardware in an environmentally conscious manner that complies with local regulatory guidelines.
HP is committed to sustainability and has launched more than three hundred new products made with ocean-bound plastic since 2017. Through the company’s advances in technology and commitment to considering the entire lifecycle of its products, HP has diverted a massive amount of waste including 200.8 million pounds of recycled fiber, 61.6 million pounds of post-consumer recycled plastic and eight million pounds of recycled metals. The HP Dragonfly G3 and HP EliteBook 860 G9 commercial PCs are built with ocean-bound and post-consumer recycled plastics.
On April 13, Intel committed to further reduce its direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions, and to work with customers and industry partners to create solutions to lower the greenhouse gas footprint of the entire technology ecosystem. Intel committed to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions across its operations, (Scope 1 and 2 emissions, by 2040.) And, to support customer sustainability goals and reduce Scope 3 product-use greenhouse gas emissions, Intel will increase the energy efficiency of its products and continue to drive the performance improvements that the market demands.
Lenovo is determined to create a better world, not only through the products, solutions and services they offer, but also in their commitment to implementing sustainable practices. Lenovo endorsed the U.N. CEO Water Mandate, and have implemented a water resiliency policy to manage and measure water consumption throughout their supply chain. In addition, Lenovo is focused on achieving their science-based 2030 commitments to reduce carbon emissions and is evaluating potential pathways to achieve net zero carbon consumption.
Razer, which builds powerful gaming devices, has an ambitious 10-year road map called Go Green with Razer focused on using recyclable CNC milled aluminum, post-consumer recycled plastics, conflict-free minerals and raw materials in their device manufacturing process, and have pledged to use recycled or recyclable materials in all products by 2030. Customers are encouraged to return their old Razer products to stores for free recycling, and by 2025 Razer will enable consumer disposal and recycling of their products globally.
Samsung is committed to developing innovative, high-performing products that have minimal impact on the environment, and the company continues to expand its use of renewable energy sources such as solar and geothermal heat in its facilities, and is incorporating use of recycled water and waste as well. They’ve replaced plastic and shrink wrap with packaging made of renewable biomaterials, and are expanding their closed-loop recycling system to recover and reuse more iron, copper and plastics from e-waste. Samsung has committed to achieve zero waste landfills at its mobile work sites by 2025 through initiatives like Galaxy Upcycling, Certified Re-Newed and Trade-In programs.

Giving new life to older devices through the Microsoft Authorized Refurbisher program

Reusing and recycling has always been important to Microsoft, and increased demand for PCs to meet work and learn-from-anywhere needs has made bringing old devices back to life critical. Millions of PCs and other electronics are being repurposed through the Microsoft Authorized Refurbisher (MAR) program, in which partners decommission and refurbish PCs and servers and install the latest Windows software. In 2021, 4,855,068 Windows licenses were issued with refurbished computers, equaling enough electricity to power 1,441,524 houses each year. To help support digital inclusion, MAR partners provide the refurbished PCs to nonprofit organizations, businesses, schools and homes.

Working together to accelerate progress toward a more sustainable world

It will take all of us working together to drive the changes needed to ensure the future of the planet.

The first step is to understand impact, and the Emissions Impact Dashboard can help measure emissions related to Microsoft cloud services. Purchasing partner or Microsoft devices built with sustainability in mind can help people begin to reduce their environmental impact, and Microsoft Sustainable Partners can help organizations measure, model and manage their global operations at scale.

No matter where an organization is in the sustainability journey, our partners’ devices, solutions, and services can help organizations minimize environmental impact, deliver new value, accelerate business transformation and achieve sustainability goals. One company with ambitious commitments, together with an entire ecosystem of partners with ambitious goals, will make a difference around the world!

Let’s recommit to protecting our planet today and every day. This important work represents some of the greatest challenges and biggest opportunities of our lifetime, and the benefits will be tremendous! Learn more about how to advance sustainability initiatives at Microsoft.com/sustainability, and explore partner solutions featured in the Microsoft #BuildFor2030 Initiative.

Posted on April 21, 2022 by sick skills — Leave a comment

AI-based mobile app All Aboard makes bus stops more accessible

When was the last time you used GPS services to navigate to a location? Probably just a few hours ago. From finding the fastest route to your destination, to navigating public transportation options, we often rely on this type of service. Imagine needing to find a bus stop based on a GPS service alone, without the ability to see its exact location even when in its proximity. For those who are blind or low vision that scenario is a reality, often having to rely on spatial geolocation data is not accurate enough, commonly referred to as the “last 30-feet problem.” Oftentimes, in the bus stop scenario, even a small gap in navigation can cause people to miss their bus entirely as the bus driver may misunderstand their intention of getting onboard.

A team at Schepens Eye Research Institute of Mass Eye and Ear, led by Associate Professor Gang Luo, has been focusing on vision assistive technology for over a decade, running research studies on technology development, intervention, evaluation, and human factors in mobility for people who are blind or low vision. While transit agencies have a mandate to improve accessibility to public transportation as part of the Americans with Disability Act, opportunities exist to improve existing technologies and further remove barriers. Developing a cost-effective tool was paramount for the team in their aim to make bus stops more accessible and easily identifiable to all. In their effort, they have developed and released a free app called All Aboard which prototypes 10 bus transit services across the US, Canada, UK and Germany. Their project has been awarded a Microsoft AI for Accessibility grant.

To utilize the app, a user needs to hold their mobile phone in upright orientation in proximity to the stop. The service will make a sonar-like sound to indicate it’s searching for the bus stop sign, followed by a beeping sound to indicate the bus stop was identified. The latter has different levels of pitch roughly representing various distances as demonstrated in this video tutorial.

To ensure the solution they were creating was centering the needs of those it was developed for, the team complemented its existing expertise in computer vision and programming by running focus groups with members of the disability community. Micro-navigation was identified as a key challenge, not only for bus stops, but for other places such as subways, stores, banks and more. Lastly, there was a wish that the micro-navigation functions to be integrated with other services, such as travel route planning, bus arrival announcements, indoor navigation and more. While All Aboard does not have that particular capability yet, the team at Schepens Eye Research Institute is searching for industry partners who have an interest to further the use of their technology.

The All Aboard app used deep neural networks to recognize bus stop signs, with the assumption the user is aware of the bus route they wish to take and is in proximity of the bus stop. By using object recognition, it can correctly identify bus signs which have the same design for a particular transit, while ignoring the exact route number on the signs. For each bus transit, around 5,000 to 10,000 bus stop sign images were collected, labelled, and used to train the neural network to automatically learn the features of the signage patterns. Consequentially, the neural network is capable of differentiating the bus stop signs from other objects and other types of road signs in images. For the recognition neural network to run in real time on a mobile device with lower computational power, a lightweight neural network was created, allowing processing on a mobile device.

Man holding his white cane in one hand and the phone in the other using All Aboard to navigate to a bus stop — User holding their phone towards the bus stop and using All Aboard to navigate

Posted on April 19, 2022 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Azure Purview is now Microsoft Purview—a comprehensive set of solutions to help you govern, protect and manage your entire data estate

In September of 2021, we announced the highly anticipated general availability of Azure Purview—a cloud-native data governance solution to enable organizations of all sizes to manage and govern their on-premises, multicloud, and software as a service (SaaS) data. Since Azure Purview was brought onto the market, thousands of organizations including London Heathrow Airport, Grundfos, and illimity have collectively discovered tens of billions of data assets as well as served up millions of searches every month to empower knowledge workers to find valuable enterprise data quickly and easily.

Organizations that use Azure Purview have a more holistic understanding of their hybrid data estate, which is always kept up to date with automated data discovery and sensitive data classification. In addition to empowering knowledge workers, this understanding, along with insights from sensitivity, business context, and relationships between data assets is also being used by teams working under the Chief Data Officers (CDO), the Chief Information and Security Officers (CIO and CISO) and the Chief Risk and Compliance Officers (CRO and CCO) to govern, protect, and manage data more effectively.

Traditional data management solutions rely on multiple unconnected, duplicative business processes, and a patchwork of software products augmented with custom code and point-wise integrations. Dozens of products are sometimes used together to address fragments of the data governance and compliance landscape, forcing Chief Data, Security, Compliance, and Legal Officers to stitch together solutions that don’t work together, expose infrastructure gaps, and are costly and complex to manage. A survey of US-based decision-makers showed that to meet their compliance and data-protection needs, almost 80 percent had purchased multiple products, and a majority had purchased three or more.¹ The result is increased operations costs, ineffective data governance, poor security outcomes, failed compliance audits, and damage to brand reputation. Additionally, as the threat landscape continues to evolve, the types of risks organizations face inevitably expand and extend well beyond the traditional cybersecurity risks. This means that risk roles within the organization are blurring, requiring a collaborative and cohesive approach across data, compliance, and risk officers, as each drives an integral part of an effective data strategy. We believe the new way to optimize your data strategy is to deliver a unified view of data in the organization across hybrid, multicloud environments by bringing together the business users of data with the protectors of data.

In the past, we have shared how Azure Purview and Microsoft 365 Compliance are used together to ensure consistent, automated application of sensitivity labels to data assets across the data estate to simplify how organizations understand their sensitive data.

Today, we are excited to introduce Microsoft Purview—a comprehensive set of solutions from Microsoft to help you govern, protect, and manage your entire data estate. By bringing together the former Azure Purview and the former Microsoft 365 Compliance portfolio under one brand and over time, a more unified platform, Microsoft Purview can help you understand and govern the data across your estate, safeguard that data wherever it lives, and improve your risk and compliance posture in a much simpler way than traditional solutions on the market today.

Microsoft Purview

Helps you gain visibility into assets across your entire data estate.
Leverages that visibility to manage end-to-end data risks and regulatory compliance.
Governs, protects, and manages data in a new, more comprehensive, and simpler way.

Customers of the Azure Purview portal can now use the Microsoft Purview governance portal. For customers of Microsoft 365 E5 or Microsoft E5 Compliance, check out the Microsoft Purview compliance portal to see what’s new!

Get started with Microsoft Purview today

¹February 2022 survey of 200 US compliance decision-makers (n=100 599-999 employees, n=100 1000 plus employees) commissioned by Microsoft with MDC Research.

Posted on April 19, 2022 by sick skills — Leave a comment

What’s new in Microsoft 365 accessibility: Intelligent tools to support neurodiversity in the hybrid workplace

As we observe World Autism Month this April, I want to highlight several improvements across Microsoft 365 that help users focus on their work and support effective reading and writing. These are useful capabilities for everyone, but are especially important for those with cognitive differences like autism, ADHD, dyslexia, and dyspraxia – a group that, by some estimates, makes up as much as 40% of the population.

Having been diagnosed with dyslexia early in life, this is more than an abstract statistic to me. When I was younger, I struggled with tasks such as reading and writing, which made everything else more challenging. I often found myself gravitating away from these activities, filling my time with skiing and playing music instead.

As much as I tried to escape it, I eventually realized that reading and writing were going to be part of my life and I needed to develop tools to navigate. When it came to reading, one of the hacks I leveraged was to identify the words based on the number of characters, allowing me to do a quick process of elimination to narrow in on the word.

as the Office apps have expanded their accessibility features, I have found myself becoming a power user of features like Immersive Reader, Editor, and Thesaurus, allowing me to stop relying on my own internal hacks and leverage technology to overcome these challenges. This has completely transformed how I get things done and provided a new form of confidence that I never thought I would find.

And those tools are continuing to improve and expand. Let’s take a closer look at how recent features in Microsoft 365 can support focus and productivity for neurodiverse and neurotypical workers alike.

Posted on April 14, 2022 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Microsoft Translator adds Basque and Galician

The Basque region in the Pyrenees Mountains straddling Spain and France

Today we’re adding two new languages, Basque and Galician, to the list of languages supported by Translator, a Microsoft Azure Cognitive Service. Basque and Galician are both Western European languages spoken by 750,000 and 2.4 million people respectively.

Basque is a language isolate, meaning it is not related to any other modern language. Basque is spoken in northern Spain and southern France in a region that straddles the Pyrenees Mountains. Galician is spoken in northern Portugal and western Spain. It is a Romance language that is closely related to Portuguese. Both languages are co-official languages of Spain.

Using Translator, you can translate to or from any of 100+ languages and dialects, now including Basque and Galician. As we continue to add new languages, Translator is available to help people translate in their personal lives, to help businesses expand their global reach, and is also used to help preserve at-risk and endangered languages.

Break the language barrier

The goal of Translator is to break the language barrier so that people can communicate freely in their language of choice and be understood by anyone around the globe. Whether you are a tourist travelling abroad, recently moved to a new country, or trying to email someone on the other side of the world, Translator powers the tools that help you communicate when and where you need.

The Microsoft Translator app for iOS and Android is your multifunctional personal translator. With the Microsoft Translator app, you can translate text, voice, images, and conversations. Translator for Bing is also available to translate text quickly on the web. You can use the Translator feature of the Edge browser to read webpages from around the world, you can quickly switch between languages on your mobile device with SwiftKey, and use Outlook to communicate with people via email regardless of the language they speak.

Expand the reach of your business

Translator is integrated into Microsoft products and is available as a service to help expand the reach of your business. With Microsoft 365, previously known as Office, you can instantly translate your Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations to make them accessible to a worldwide workforce or global customer base. You can also translate your Outlook emails to communicate around the globe.

Using Translator, a Microsoft Azure Cognitive Service you can add text translation to your apps, websites, workflows, and tools; or use Translator’s Document Translation feature to translate entire documents, or volumes of documents, in a variety of different file formats preserving their original formatting.

You can also build neural translation systems that understand the terminology used in your own business and industry with Custom Translator. The customized translation system can then be used with Text and Document Translation to seamlessly integrate into existing applications, workflows and websites.

To add additional capabilities such as speech-to-text and image translation into your apps, you can use Translator with Cognitive Services such as Speech or Computer Vision.

Preserving endangered languages

In order to train new language models, we must collect a large amount of bilingual training data. That is, materials written in the target language and another language. As many languages around the globe are dying, Translator is helping to preserve at-risk languages. We have worked with language communities across the world to collect and translate materials, and then create language systems. Through this we can ensure that these languages are recorded and preserved for generations to come.

Some of the at-risk languages that we have worked to preserve include Inuktitut, Māori, and Yucatec Maya. If your language community is interested in partnering with Microsoft to add your language to Translator and the products that are using it, and you have access to digital documents in your language and another commonly spoken language, please contact us using this form.

Posted on April 13, 2022 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Notorious cybercrime gang’s botnet disrupted

Today, we’re announcing that Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit (DCU) has taken legal and technical action to disrupt a criminal botnet called ZLoader. ZLoader is made up of computing devices in businesses, hospitals, schools, and homes around the world and is run by a global internet-based organized crime gang operating malware as a service that is designed to steal and extort money.

We obtained a court order from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia allowing us to take control of 65 domains that the ZLoader gang has been using to grow, control and communicate with its botnet. The domains are now directed to a Microsoft sinkhole where they can no longer be used by the botnet’s criminal operators. Zloader contains a domain generation algorithm (DGA) embedded within the malware that creates additional domains as a fallback or backup communication channel for the botnet. In addition to the hardcoded domains, the court order allows us to take control of an additional 319 currently registered DGA domains. We are also working to block the future registration of DGA domains.

During our investigation, we identified one of the perpetrators behind the creation of a component used in the ZLoader botnet to distribute ransomware as Denis Malikov, who lives in the city of Simferopol on the Crimean Peninsula. We chose to name an individual in connection with this case to make clear that cybercriminals will not be allowed to hide behind the anonymity of the internet to commit their crimes. Today’s legal action is the result of months of investigation that pre-date the current conflict in the region.

Originally, the primary goal of Zloader was financial theft, stealing account login IDs, passwords and other information to take money from people’s accounts. Zloader also included a component that disabled popular security and antivirus software, thereby preventing victims from detecting the ZLoader infection. Over time those behind Zloader began offering malware as a service, a delivery platform to distribute ransomware including Ryuk. Ryuk is well known for targeting health care institutions to extort payment without regard to the patients that they put at risk.

DCU led the investigative effort behind this action in partnership with ESET, Black Lotus Labs (the threat intelligence arm of Lumen), and Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, with additional data and insights to strengthen our legal case from our partners the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (FS-ISAC) and the Health Information Sharing and Analysis Center (H-ISAC), in addition to our Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center and Microsoft Defender team. We also recognize the additional contribution from Avast in supporting our DCU field in Europe.

Our disruption is intended to disable ZLoader’s infrastructure and make it more difficult for this organized criminal gang to continue their activities. We expect the defendants to make efforts to revive Zloader’s operations. We referred this case to law enforcement, are tracking this activity closely and will continue to work with our partners to monitor the behavior of these cybercriminals. We will work with internet service providers (ISPs) to identify and remediate victims. As always, we’re ready to take additional legal and technical action to address Zloader and other botnets.

Posted on April 12, 2022 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Looking back at Bett 2022: In-person inspires and energizes

A few weeks ago (March 23-25), members of the Microsoft Education team took our first trip as a group in over two years, to Bett UK, the largest education conference in the world. After such a long time away from the energy and excitement of seeing colleagues, partners, and educators gathering to connect and share information, it was an incredible feeling to be together in person at the massive ExCeL center in London once more.

There were differences, to be sure. Due to ongoing safety considerations, our team’s numbers were significantly smaller than in past years. But those in person, along with the support of many others back home worked together to present demos, keynotes, trainings, and dozens of meetings. The education community came out in large numbers as well: Bett management reports that 22,600 people attended over the course of the three days and that 30 percent of the audience were educator leaders, one of the highest representations of leaders ever at a Bett event.

The overall theme of our content and events was focused on supporting educators in their efforts to drive equity and accelerate learning. Our many representatives and presenters shared these messages in a variety of ways from the keynote address, “What’s now, what’s next,” that packed the Bett Arena, to sixteen different sessions across eight Bett Theatres covering topics designed for teachers, education leaders, and IT professionals. These sessions were primarily presented by educators who shared real-world case studies and examples of using Microsoft Education products in their classrooms. Audience favorite topics included “Elevate your digital transformation and build community by collaborating with Microsoft,” “Learning from what works: How Microsoft Showcase Schools are preparing students for tomorrow,” and “Fostering well-being and engagement with Microsoft education solutions.“

Our booth was a bustling hub of activity, with opportunities to get hands-on experience with Minecraft: Education Edition, MakeCode, and the newest devices for learning. Our teams guided thousands of people through the features of our new and updated literacy tools, Reading Coach and Reading Progress, shared tips and insights for making the most of Windows 11 and Windows 11 SE for education, and introduced educators to some of the incredible professional development opportunities in the Microsoft Learn Educator Center.

Higher education was represented with “Ahead,” a space dedicated to higher education. Microsoft Education presented a keynote “Accelerating learning to help all learners engage, keep up, and get ahead,” and hosted several other opportunities for higher education leaders to connect, learn, and network.

Esports was a big draw this year as well, and our Minecraft takeover tournament generated a standing-room-only crowd. And speaking of esports, I was honored to be asked to take part in a panel discussion, “Esports, the vehicle to develop future-ready skills” with some of the UK’s best-known esports personalities. It was an excellent way to introduce more educators to the promise of engaging learners with games that build skills.

These are only a few examples of the types of experiences presented at Bett: there were also opportunities for teachers to get certified in different areas by Prodigy Learning, face-to-face meetings with school customers and product partners, and more demonstrations of devices and learning tools than you can count.

After two years (and a postponement of 2 months), without an in-person Bett, the energy in the exhibition hall felt even more electric and the people felt even friendlier than in years past. Perhaps that’s partly because we all have been craving the opportunity to gather and connect, but it’s also because, after the challenges of those past years, the community of teachers, education leaders, and education technology providers shares a single-minded focus: to provide each learner with what they need to reach their academic and social potential inside and outside the classroom.

To everyone who worked with us to make this event possible, and to all of the visitors who stopped by our booth and attended our sessions, a huge “THANK YOU!!” Your commitment to students and to the education industry is inspiring. I can’t wait to see you all again next year, mark your calendars for March 29-31, 2023!

Posted on April 12, 2022 by sick skills — Leave a comment

LinkedIn’s feature store Feathr now available on Azure

This blog post is co-authored by David Stein, Senior Staff Software Engineer, Jinghui Mo, Staff Software Engineer, and Hangfei Lin, Staff Software Engineer, all from Feathr team.

Feature store motivation

With the advance of AI and machine learning, companies start to use complex machine learning pipelines in various applications, such as recommendation systems, fraud detection, and more. These complex systems usually require hundreds to thousands of features to support time-sensitive business applications, and the feature pipelines are maintained by different team members across various business groups.

In these machine learning systems, we see many problems that consume lots of energy of machine learning engineers and data scientists, in particular duplicated feature engineering, online-offline skew, and feature serving with low latency.

Figure 1: Illustration on problems that feature store solves.

Duplicated feature engineering

In an organization, thousands of features are buried in different scripts and in different formats; they are not captured, organized, or preserved, and thus cannot be reused and leveraged by teams other than those who generated them.
Because feature engineering is so important for machine learning models and features cannot be shared, data scientists must duplicate their feature engineering efforts across teams.

Online-offline skew

For features, offline training and online inference usually require different data serving pipelines—ensuring consistent features across different environments is expensive.
Teams are deterred from using real-time data for inference due to the difficulty of serving the right data.
Providing a convenient way to ensure data point-in-time correctness is key to avoid label leakage.

Serving features with low latency

For real-time applications, getting feature lookups from database for real-time inference without compromising response latency and with high throughput can be challenging.
Easily accessing features with very low latency is key in many machine learning scenarios, and optimizations needs to be done to combine different REST API calls to features.

To solve those problems, a concept called feature store was developed, so that:

Features are centralized in an organization and can be reused
Features can be served in a synchronous way between offline and online environment
Features can be served in real-time with low latency

Introducing Feathr, a battle-tested feature store

Developing a feature store from scratch takes time, and it takes much more time to make it stable, scalable, and user-friendly. Feathr is the feature store that has been used in production and battle-tested in LinkedIn for over 6 years, serving all the LinkedIn machine learning feature platform with thousands of features in production.

At Microsoft, the LinkedIn team and the Azure team have worked very closely to open source Feathr, make it extensible, and build native integration with Azure. It’s available in this GitHub repository and you can read more about Feathr on the LinkedIn Engineering Blog.

Some of the highlights for Feathr include:

Scalable with built-in optimizations. For example, based on some internal use case, Feathr can process billions of rows and PB scale data with built-in optimizations such as bloom filters and salted joins.
Rich support for point-in-time joins and aggregations: Feathr has high performant built-in operators designed for Feature Store, including time-based aggregation, sliding window joins, look-up features, all with point-in-time correctness.
Highly customizable user-defined functions (UDFs) with native PySpark and Spark SQL support to lower the learning curve for data scientists.
Pythonic APIs to access everything with low learning curve; Integrated with model building so data scientists can be productive from day one.
Rich type system including support for embeddings for advanced machine learning/deep learning scenarios. One of the common use cases is to build embeddings for customer profiles, and those embeddings can be reused across an organization in all the machine learning applications.
Native cloud integration with simplified and scalable architecture, which is illustrated in the next section.
Feature sharing and reuse made easy: Feathr has built-in feature registry so that features can be easily shared across different teams and boost team productivity.

Feathr on Azure architecture

The high-level architecture diagram below articulates how would a user interacts with Feathr on Azure:

Figure 2: Feathr on Azure architecture.

A data or machine learning engineer creates features using their preferred tools (like pandas, Azure Machine Learning, Azure Databricks, and more). These features are ingested into offline stores, which can be either:
- Azure SQL Database (including serverless), Azure Synapse Dedicated SQL Pool (formerly SQL DW).
- Object storage, such as Azure BLOB storage, Azure Data Lake Store, and more. The format can be Parquet, Avro, or Delta Lake.
The data or machine learning engineer can persist the feature definitions into a central registry, which is built with Azure Purview.
The data or machine learning engineer can join on all the feature dataset in a point-in-time correct way, with Feathr Python SDK and with Spark engines such as Azure Synapse or Databricks.
The data or machine learning engineer can materialize features into an online store such as Azure Cache for Redis with Active-Active, enabling multi-primary, multi-write architecture that ensures eventual consistency between clusters.
Data scientists or machine learning engineers consume offline features with their favorite machine learning libraries, for example scikit-learn, PyTorch, or TensorFlow to train a model in their favorite machine learning platform such as Azure Machine Learning, then deploy the models in their favorite environment with services such as Azure Machine Learning endpoint.
The backend system makes a request to the deployed model, which makes a request to the Azure Cache for Redis to get the online features with Feathr Python SDK.

A sample notebook containing all the above flow is located in the Feathr repository for more reference.

Feathr has native integration with Azure and other cloud services. The table below shows these integrations:

Feathr component	Cloud Integrations
Offline store – Object Store	Azure Blob Storage Azure ADLS Gen2 AWS S3
Offline store – SQL	Azure SQL DB Azure Synapse Dedicated SQL Pools (formerly SQL DW) Azure SQL in VM Snowflake
Online store	Azure Cache for Redis
Feature Registry	Azure Purview
Compute Engine	Azure Synapse Spark Pools Databricks
Machine Learning Platform	Azure Machine Learning Jupyter Notebook
File Format	Parquet ORC Avro Delta Lake

Table 1: Feathr on Azure Integration with Azure Services.

Installation and getting started

Feathr has a pythonic interface to access all Feathr components, including feature definition and cloud interactions, and is open sourced here. The Feathr python client can be easily installed with pip:

pip install -U feathr

For more details on getting started, please refer to the Feathr Quickstart Guide. The Feathr team can also be reached in the Feathr community.

Going forward

In this blog, we’ve introduced a battle-tested feature store, called Feathr, which is scalable and enterprise ready, with native Azure integrations. We are dedicated to bringing more functionalities into Feathr and Feathr on Azure integrations, and feel free to give any feedback by raising issues in Feathr GitHub repository.

Posted on April 12, 2022 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Registration now open for Xbox Mentoring Program partnering women in gaming careers across Xbox studios and products

Xbox is thrilled to announce the official start of the Xbox Mentoring Program aimed at partnering women in gaming careers across Xbox’s diverse range of studios and products with aspiring talent.

First introduced on International Women’s Day, the Xbox Mentoring Program gives you the chance to access valuable 1:1 coaching sessions with key leaders in select markets such as the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Japan, and Korea with additional markets to follow.

If you aspire a career in gaming and live in the above regions, register below for the Xbox Mentor in your country and receive the chance of accessing their coaching session. Submissions are accepted starting now through ~~April 6, 2022~~ April 17, 2022.

Meet Your Xbox Mentors

Hailey Geller (She/Her)
Xbox Social Marketing Manager
Region: US

Hailey is a strategic creative marketer who specializes in dreaming up evocative and meaningful campaigns for your favorite games and products.

Louise O´Connor (She/Her)
Executive Producer of Everwild
Region: UK

Louise has been working in the gaming industry for over 20 years and loves making games that players remember. Starting as an animator, she has had the privilege of working on some of the incredible Rare IPs that players all over the world enjoy. Now she is looking after the team responsible for creating the studio’s new exiting IP: Everwild.

Venessa Nyarko (She/Her)
Producer at The Coalition
Region: Canada

Venessa’s role at The Coalition involves bringing teams together to develop cohesive storytelling between gameplay, cinematics, and the sequences in between to create a unified experience for players. She develops the framework to make the best plays, getting the right people in the right conversations, and executing on bringing all the pieces together for an epic end result.

Tania Chee (She/Her)
Xbox Business Lead, Australia & New Zealand
Region: Australia & New Zealand

As Xbox Business Lead for Australia and New Zealand, Tania is responsible for driving the gaming platform’s business growth across the Tasman. Tania’s career spans 20+ years across roles in Australia and the UK from IT start-ups to managing Microsoft’s gaming, consumer software and office business through the retail channel.
Tania joined Team Xbox in 2008 in the UK and moved to the Australian business in 2011 driving Xbox’s subscription business, focused on subscriber growth and launching key app partners on the platform. Having also been involved in the success of multiple console generations and launches, Tania was announced as the Lead for Xbox ANZ in 2018 after a decade with the brand.

Ina Gelbert (She/Her)
Director of Xbox France
Region: France

As the first woman to lead the Xbox team in France, Ina’s main motivation is making gaming a diverse, safe and inclusive environment. With professional experiences in both the FMCG and gaming industries, she brings multi-cultural views and perspectives from various backgrounds to every discussion.

Melek Balgün (She/Her)
Esports | Web | TV | Event Host
Region: Germany, Austria & Switzerland

Melek is a former professional gamer and started her career at ESL. Hosting and moderating is second nature to her, both online and on the big stage. Her web magazine “Art of Gaming” for TV station arte was nominated for the Grimme Award in 2018.

Mie Koshimizu (She/Her)
Xbox Category Manager
Region: Japan

Originally from Japan, Mie is the Xbox Category Manager supporting the Asian Xbox team based in Singapore. She is known for her friendliness and enthusiasm for her work. Mie is passionate about advocating for Women in Gaming – especially across Asia – and encouraging all gamers, including people in industry, to share their passion. Since graduating with a Master’s degree in Business Analysis, Mie has extended her knowledge and skills in consumer, market analysis/research, and user experience as well as stories that identify customer requirements and needs. Always looking for a new challenge, she enjoys working in a demanding environment and is willing to learn new things every day.

Boyoun Kim (She/Her)
Communications Manager Xbox
Region: Korea

Boyoun is a Communications Manager at Xbox and leads market communications across both Korea and Japan. She is seasoned in communications with deep regional experience in corporate reputation management, issues, and crisis communications. After receiving her Master’s in Social Policy from London School of Economics, Boyoun has built up a great understanding of planning and implementation of communications campaigns as well as regional digital and social media marketing strategies. She has over 10 years of experience having worked for hardware manufacturer Lenovo, Google and a German-based start-up.

With the Xbox Mentoring Program, Xbox is opening up their world to inspire and support the next generation of women leaders in gaming. We are beyond excited to share our knowledge and hope that the program generates meaningful engagements with tangible and purposeful actions to help foster career development in the games industry. Visit the Xbox Mentoring Program website to learn more about the program.

Posted on April 11, 2022 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Learn the latest cybersecurity techniques at the May 12 digital Microsoft Security Summit

In a world marked by change and uncertainty, innovation is more than a nice-to-have—it’s vital to any healthy organization. But fearless innovation becomes impossible when gaps in security can put those ideas at risk.

Many organizations try to increase their defenses by piecing together a patchwork of security solutions over time. Not only is this piecemeal approach costly and difficult to manage, but it also leaves many security administrators wondering, “Did I miss something?”

Safeguard your future with the latest security innovations

On May 12, 2022, at the Microsoft Security Summit digital event, join other cybersecurity professionals in exploring how a comprehensive approach to security can empower organizations to innovate fearlessly—even in the face of evolving cyberthreats.

You’ll also be among the first to hear exciting announcements from Vasu Jakkal, Corporate Vice President of Security, Compliance, Identity, and Management at Microsoft, and engage in energizing conversations with leading cybersecurity experts about the role comprehensive security will play in our collective future.

Get up to date on the security trends and projections

The security landscape is constantly evolving as the world continues to embrace a new model of hybrid work and bad actors shift their mode of attack. Cybercriminals are becoming more brazen and more sophisticated. It’s up to the collective security community to learn all we can about these criminals, familiarize ourselves with their techniques, and discover new ways to create better defenses against them.

At Microsoft, we’re doing all we can to help our customers stay ahead of bad actors and respond quickly when attacks occur. This includes informing security professionals about emerging risks and ensuring everyone who seeks to protect their organization is acquainted with the latest technologies.

This digital event is a great opportunity for you to listen in as Microsoft cybersecurity experts and technical researchers discuss the current threat landscape, the future of holistic threat intelligence, and share demos of brand-new security, compliance, identity, and privacy technologies already making waves in the industry. Staying informed is the first step to building a strong, resilient security strategy for your organization. We hope you’ll join us.

Extend protection to the outer limits

Comprehensive security starts with end-to-end coverage. Today’s organizations are moving increasingly more data and resources to the cloud while also working to integrate a growing number of unprotected devices into their security ecosystems. And the pace isn’t slowing.

To defend against sophisticated threats that move laterally across systems and platforms, you need a holistic view of your multicloud environment and a way to centrally manage the protection of your devices.

At this digital event, learn how to achieve least-privilege access across your multicloud, enable seamless information protection, identify critical privacy risks, and empower employees to make smart data handling decisions—without impeding productivity. This is an event you won’t want to miss.

Lay the foundation for a safer, more innovative future

Attend the Microsoft Security Summit on May 12, 2022, to experience the future of comprehensive security and explore the solutions that can get you there. Register to:

Learn how to strengthen your organization’s defenses in the face of evolving cyber threats.
Get insights you can act on from defenders on the cybersecurity frontlines on topics like extended detection and response (XDR), proactive threat hunting, Zero Trust, and more.
Hear exciting product announcements from leading voices in Microsoft Security.
Watch demos of brand-new security, compliance, identity, and privacy technologies.
Plus, ask Microsoft cybersecurity and threat intelligence experts all your most pressing questions in a live chat Q&A.

Safeguard your future. Be fearless.

Register now.

Microsoft Security Summit
Digital event | May 12, 2022
9:00 AM to 12:00 PM Pacific Time (UTC-7)

To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us at @MSFTSecurity for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.