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A moment of reckoning: the need for a strong and global cybersecurity response

The final weeks of a challenging year have proven even more difficult with the recent exposure of the world’s latest serious nation-state cyberattack. This latest cyber-assault is effectively an attack on the United States and its government and other critical institutions, including security firms. It illuminates the ways the cybersecurity landscape continues to evolve and become even more dangerous. As much as anything, this attack provides a moment of reckoning. It requires that we look with clear eyes at the growing threats we face and commit to more effective and collaborative leadership by the government and the tech sector in the United States to spearhead a strong and coordinated global cybersecurity response.

The evolving threats

The past 12 months have produced a watershed year with evolving cybersecurity threats on three eye-opening fronts.

The first is the continuing rise in the determination and sophistication of nation-state attacks. In the past week this has again burst into the headlines with the story of an attack on the firm FireEye using malware inserted into network management software provided to customers by the tech company SolarWinds. This has already led to subsequent news reports of penetration into multiple parts of the U.S. Government. We should all be prepared for stories about additional victims in the public sector and other enterprises and organizations. As FireEye CEO Kevin Mandia stated after disclosing the recent attack, “We are witnessing an attack by a nation with top-tier offensive capabilities.”

As Microsoft cybersecurity experts assist in the response, we have reached the same conclusion. The attack unfortunately represents a broad and successful espionage-based assault on both the confidential information of the U.S. Government and the tech tools used by firms to protect them. The attack is ongoing and is being actively investigated and addressed by cybersecurity teams in the public and private sectors, including Microsoft. As our teams act as first responders to these attacks, these ongoing investigations reveal an attack that is remarkable for its scope, sophistication and impact.

There are broader ramifications as well, which are even more disconcerting. First, while governments have spied on each other for centuries, the recent attackers used a technique that has put at risk the technology supply chain for the broader economy. As SolarWinds has reported, the attackers installed their malware into an upgrade of the company’s Orion product that may have been installed by more than 17,000 customers.

The nature of the initial phase of the attack and the breadth of supply chain vulnerability is illustrated clearly in the map below, which is based on telemetry from Microsoft’s Defender Anti-Virus software. This identifies customers who use Defender and who installed versions of SolarWinds’ Orion software containing the attackers’ malware. As this makes clear, this aspect of the attack created a supply chain vulnerability of nearly global importance, reaching many major national capitals outside Russia. This also illustrates the heightened level of vulnerability in the United States.

world map

The installation of this malware created an opportunity for the attackers to follow up and pick and choose from among these customers the organizations they wanted to further attack, which it appears they did in a narrower and more focused fashion. While investigations (and the attacks themselves) continue, Microsoft has identified and has been working this week to notify more than 40 customers that the attackers targeted more precisely and compromised through additional and sophisticated measures.

While roughly 80% of these customers are located in the United States, this work so far has also identified victims in seven additional countries. This includes Canada and Mexico in North America; Belgium, Spain and the United Kingdom in Europe; and Israel and the UAE in the Middle East. It’s certain that the number and location of victims will keep growing.

Additional analysis sheds added light on the breadth of these attacks. The initial list of victims includes not only government agencies, but security and other technology firms as well as non-governmental organizations, as shown in the chart below.

cybersecurity chart

It’s critical that we step back and assess the significance of these attacks in their full context. This is not “espionage as usual,” even in the digital age. Instead, it represents an act of recklessness that created a serious technological vulnerability for the United States and the world. In effect, this is not just an attack on specific targets, but on the trust and reliability of the world’s critical infrastructure in order to advance one nation’s intelligence agency. While the most recent attack appears to reflect a particular focus on the United States and many other democracies, it also provides a powerful reminder that people in virtually every country are at risk and need protection irrespective of the governments they live under.

As we have now seen repeatedly, Silicon Valley is not the only home of ingenious software developers. Russian engineers in 2016 identified weaknesses in password protection and social media platforms, hacked their way into American political campaigns, and used disinformation to sow divisions among the electorate. They repeated the exercise in the 2017 French presidential campaign. As tracked by Microsoft’s Threat Intelligence Center and Digital Crimes Unit, these techniques have impacted victims in more than 70 countries, including most of the world’s democracies. The most recent attack reflects an unfortunate but similarly ingenious capability to identify weaknesses in cybersecurity protection and exploit them.

These types of sophisticated nation-state attacks are increasingly being compounded by another technology trend, which is the opportunity to augment human capabilities with artificial intelligence (AI). One of the more chilling developments this year has been what appears to be new steps to use AI to weaponize large stolen datasets about individuals and spread targeted disinformation using text messages and encrypted messaging apps. We should all assume that, like the sophisticated attacks from Russia, this too will become a permanent part of the threat landscape.

Thankfully, there is a limited number of governments that can invest in the talent needed to attack with this level of sophistication. In our first Microsoft Digital Defense Report, released in September, we reviewed our assessment of 14 nation-state groups involved in cybersecurity attacks. Eleven of the 14 are in only three countries.

All this is changing because of a second evolving threat, namely the growing privatization of cybersecurity attacks through a new generation of private companies, akin to 21st-century mercenaries. This phenomenon has reached the point where it has acquired its own acronym – PSOAs, for private sector offensive actors. Unfortunately, this is not an acronym that will make the world a better place.

One illustrative company in this new sector is the NSO Group, based in Israel and now involved in U.S. litigation. NSO created and sold to governments an app called Pegasus, which could be installed on a device simply by calling the device via WhatsApp; the device’s owner did not even have to answer. According to WhatsApp, NSO used Pegasus to access more than 1,400 mobile devices, including those belonging to journalists and human rights activists.

NSO represents the increasing confluence between sophisticated private-sector technology and nation-state attackers. Citizen Lab, a research laboratory at the University of Toronto, has identified more than 100 abuse cases regarding NSO alone. But it is hardly alone. Other companies are increasingly rumored to be joining in what has become a new $12 billion global technology market.

This represents a growing option for nation-states to either build or buy the tools needed for sophisticated cyberattacks. And if there has been one constant in the world of software over the past five decades, it is that money is always more plentiful than talent. An industry segment that aids offensive cyberattacks spells bad news on two fronts. First, it adds even more capability to the leading nation-state attackers, and second, it generates cyberattack proliferation to other governments that have the money but not the people to create their own weapons. In short, it adds another significant element to the cybersecurity threat landscape.

There is a third and final sobering development worth noting from what has obviously been a challenging year. This comes from the intersection between cyberattacks and COVID-19 itself.

One might have hoped that a pandemic that cut short millions of lives might at least have received a pass from the world’s cyberattacks. But that was not the case. After a brief lull in March, cyberattackers took aim at hospitals and public health authorities, from local governments to the World Health Organization (WHO). As humanity raced to develop vaccines, Microsoft security teams detected three nation-state actors targeting seven prominent companies directly involved in researching vaccines and treatments for Covid-19. A crisis always seems to bring out the best and worst in people, so perhaps we should not be surprised that this global crisis was no exception.

Put together, however, these three trends point to a cybersecurity landscape that is even more daunting than when the year began. The most determined nation-state attackers are becoming more sophisticated. Risks are both growing and spreading to other governments through new private sector companies that aid and abet nation state attackers. And nothing, not even a pandemic, is off limits to these attackers.

We live in a more dangerous world, and it requires a stronger and more coordinated response.

A more effective strategy as we enter a new year

Put simply, we need a more effective national and global strategy to protect against cyberattacks. It will need multiple parts, but perhaps most important, it must start with the recognition that governments and the tech sector will need to act together.

The new year creates an opportunity to turn a page on recent American unilateralism and focus on the collective action that is indispensable to cybersecurity protection. The United States did not win World War II, the Cold War or even its own independence by fighting alone. In a world where authoritarian countries are launching cyberattacks against the world’s democracies, it is more important than ever for democratic governments to work together – sharing information and best practices, and coordinating not just on cybersecurity protection but on defensive measures and responses.

Unlike attacks from the past, cybersecurity threats also require a unique level of collaboration between the public and private sectors. Today’s technology infrastructure, from data centers to fiberoptic cables, is most often owned and operated by private companies. These represent not only much of the infrastructure that needs to be secured but the surface area where new cyberattacks typically are first spotted. For this reason, effective cyber-defense requires not just a coalition of the world’s democracies, but a coalition with leading tech companies.

To be successful, this coalition will need to do three things more effectively in the future:

First, we need to take a major step forward in the sharing and analysis of threat intelligence. In a new year that will mark the 20th anniversary of 9/11, we should remember one of the lessons from the tragic day that the 9/11 Commission called “a shock but not a surprise.” A recurring theme of the commission’s findings was the inability across government agencies to build collective knowledge by connecting data points together. The commission therefore focused its first recommendation on “unifying strategic intelligence” and moving from the “need to know” to the “need to share.”

If there is an initial question for the incoming Biden-Harris Administration and America’s allies, it is this: Is the sharing of cybersecurity threat intelligence today better or worse than it was for terrorist threats before 9/11?

In the wake of this most recent attack, perhaps no company has done more work than Microsoft to support agencies across the federal government. As much as we appreciate the commitment and professionalism of so many dedicated public servants, it is apparent to us that the current state of information-sharing across the government is far from where it needs to be. It too often seems that federal agencies currently fail to act in a coordinated way or in accordance with a clearly defined national cybersecurity strategy. While parts of the federal government have been quick to seek input, information sharing with first responders in a position to act has been limited. During a cyber incident of national significance, we need to do more to prioritize the information-sharing and collaboration needed for swift and effective action. In many respects, we risk as a nation losing sight of some of the most important lessons identified by the 9/11 Commission.

One indicator of the current situation is reflected in the federal government’s insistence on restricting through its contracts our ability to let even one part of the federal government know what other part has been attacked. Instead of encouraging a “need to share,” this turns information sharing into a breach of contract. It literally has turned the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations upside down.

It will be critical for the incoming Biden-Harris Administration to move quickly and decisively to address this situation. One ready-made opportunity is to establish a national cybersecurity director as recommended by the Solarium Commission and provided for in the National Defense Authorization Act.

Effective progress will also require a second realization that goes beyond anything the 9/11 Commission needed to confront. Cybersecurity threat intelligence exists in even more disconnected silos than more traditional information about national security threats. This is because it is spread not only among different agencies and governments but across multiple private sector companies as well. Even within a large company like Microsoft, we have learned that it is critical for our Threat Intelligence Center to aggregate and analyze data from across our data centers and services. And when there is a major threat, we need to share information and collective assessments with other tech companies.

Recent years have brought several important steps to better share cybersecurity information, and we greatly appreciate the dedication and support of many key people across the U.S. government. But we still lack a formal and cohesive national strategy for the sharing of cybersecurity threat intelligence between the public and private sectors. While there need to be important safeguards to protect government secrets and private citizens’ privacy, the time has come for a more systemic and innovative approach to the sharing and analysis of threat intelligence with those best positioned to act.

Second, we need to strengthen international rules to put reckless nation-state behavior out of bounds and ensure that domestic laws thwart the rise of the cyberattack ecosystem. While the world has important international norms and laws to address nation-state attacks, we continue to believe it is important to fill in gaps and continue to develop clear and binding legal obligations for cyberspace.

This should build on the lessons of 2020 and prioritize key and specific areas. For example, it should include the continued development of rules to expressly forbid the type of broad and reckless activity used against SolarWinds and its customers, which tampered with legitimate software and threatened the stability of a broader software supply chain. The international community has been moving in this direction, building on a 2015 report by a United Nations Group of Governmental Experts that received broad UN endorsement last year, as well as multi-stakeholder support by the Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace (GCSC). The U.S. government and its allies need to make crystal clear their views that this type of supply chain attack falls outside the bounds of international law.

We need similar strong and effective endorsements of rules that put attacks on health care institutions and vaccine providers off limits. (The recently convened Oxford Process has done important work to highlight the protections existing international law affords in this context.) And international rules should include stronger protections of democratic and electoral processes, as reflected in the principles of the Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace, which now has more than 1,000 signatories – the largest multi-stakeholder group ever assembled in support of an international cybersecurity-focused agreement.

In addition, governments should take new and concerted steps to thwart the rise of private sector offensive actors. As described above, these companies in effect have created a new ecosystem to support offensive nation-state attacks. The sooner governments take action to put this ecosystem out of business, the better.

An early opportunity for the Biden-Harris Administration will come in an appellate judicial case involving the NSO Group itself. NSO has appealed a lower court finding that it is not immune from claims that it violated the U.S. Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by accessing mobile devices without permission. Its argument is that it is immune from U.S. law because it is acting on behalf of a foreign government customer and hence shares that government’s legal immunity. NSO’s proposed recipe would make a bad problem even worse, which is why Microsoft is joining with other companies in opposing this interpretation. The Biden/Harris Administration should weigh in with a similar view.

NSO’s legal approach, while disconcerting, does the world a service by highlighting the path needed to thwart this new cyberattack ecosystem. It’s to ensure that domestic laws clearly and strongly prohibit companies from helping governments engage in unlawful and offensive cyberattacks and investors from knowingly financing them.

Consider the analogy to other forms of societally harmful activity, like human trafficking, narcotics or terrorism itself. Governments not only take strong steps to prohibit the illegal activity itself – such as engaging in drug trafficking – but also ensure that airlines don’t transport the drugs and investors don’t finance the activity.

A similar approach is needed to deter private sector offensive actors. We need steps to ensure, for example, that American and other investors don’t knowingly fuel the growth of this type of illegal activity. And the United States should proactively pursue discussions with other countries that are giving rise to these companies, including Israel, which has a strong cybersecurity ecosystem that can be drawn into dangerous support of authoritarian regimes.

Finally, we need stronger steps to hold nation-states accountable for cyberattacks. Governments and private companies have taken stronger steps in recent years to hold nation-states publicly accountable for cyberattacks. We need to build on this course and continue to press forward with it, with governments ensuring that there are greater real-world consequences for these attacks to promote stability and discourage conflict.

The world’s democracies took important steps in 2017 and 2018, led by the United States. With public statements about WannaCry and NotPetya, multiple governments attributed these attacks publicly to the North Korean and Russian governments, respectively. These types of coordinated public attributions have become an important tool to respond to nation-state attacks. The United States followed with stronger deterrent steps to protect the 2018 mid-term elections, and an even more concerted effort to successfully deter foreign tampering with voting in the 2020 Presidential elections.

In the private sector, circumstances have also changed dramatically since the early days in 2016 when we at Microsoft took legal action to thwart Russian cyberattacks on American political campaigns but were reluctant to speak publicly about it. In the years since, companies such as Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Twitter have all acted and spoken directly and publicly when responding to nation-state cyberattacks. Moreover, a coalition of more than 145 global technology companies have signed on to the Cybersecurity Tech Accord – committing themselves to upholding four principles of responsible behavior to promote peace and security online, including opposing cyberattacks against innocent civilians and enterprises.

The coming months will present a critical test, not only for the United States but for other leading democracies and technology companies. The weeks ahead will provide mounting and we believe indisputable evidence about the source of these recent attacks. It will become even clearer that they reflect not just the latest technology applied to traditional espionage, but a reckless and broad endangerment of the digital supply chain and our most important economic, civic and political institutions. It is the type of international assault that requires the type of collective response that shows that serious violations have consequences.

If there is a common lesson from the past few years, it’s the importance of combining ongoing learning with new innovations, greater collaboration, and constant courage. For four centuries, the people of the world have relied on governments to protect them from foreign threats. But digital technology has created a world where governments cannot take effective action alone. The defense of democracy requires that governments and technology companies work together in new and important ways – to share information, strengthen defenses and respond to attacks. As we put 2020 behind us, the new year provides a new opportunity to move forward on all these fronts.

Editor’s note: 12/17/2020, 7:50pm PT

Following news reports about the impact on Microsoft of the SolarWinds issue, the company issued the following statement:

“Like other SolarWinds customers, we have been actively looking for indicators of this actor and can confirm that we detected malicious SolarWinds binaries in our environment, which we isolated and removed. We have not found evidence of access to production services or customer data. Our investigations, which are ongoing, have found absolutely no indications that our systems were used to attack others.”

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20 ways classrooms came together in 2020 with Microsoft Education


This year, we saw millions of classrooms come together in unexpected ways. While it might not have been easy from behind a mask or computer screen, everyone in the Microsoft Education community—from principals and teachers to students and parents—have shown flexibility and resilience this year. The community has worked together to create engaging and inclusive learning environments, support one another, and even have fun. As we reflect on the year, we’re sharing 20 highlights from Microsoft Education in 2020, and the technology that helped us get through it together.

Bringing the online classroom to life for students

  1. It’s important for students to see their teacher and classmates at the same time during remote learning. That’s why Teams expanded to a 7×7 Gallery View, allowing up to 49 students to be visible on video at one time.
  2. Another way to mimic the classroom setting is through Together Mode. An alternative to Gallery View, this feature has brought students out of their individual tiles and transported them into a shared setting—whether that’s a virtual auditorium, conference room, or coffee shop.
  3. A smaller setting can also help foster student participation. Breakout Rooms have helped students work within smaller groups for a discussion or assignment, just like they would in an in-person classroom.
  4. The new Spotlight feature has allowed teachers to control the main video feed that students see during class. This can help students focus on the presenter, rather than on the many faces on the screen.
  5. It has also been critical to provide students with the right devices during remote and hybrid learning. Windows 10 devices have been crucial in giving reliable, secure technology to learn from anywhere.

Staying organized and productive while teaching and learning from home

  1. Education Insights in Microsoft Teams uses at-a-glance data views to catch teachers up on their students’ activity, from turning in assignments to engaging in class conversations. The Insights dashboard can save teachers time in planning, giving feedback to students, and providing help.
  2. Microsoft Lists have made it easy for both teachers and students to stay organized, assign responsibilities, manage their schedules, and more. These virtual to-do lists provide a simple and smart way to make sure everyone meets their deadlines.
  3. Teachers can use the Rubrics tool in Assignments to create customizable, reusable rubrics. These help students understand the criteria they’ll be graded against and enable teachers to better evaluate their students’ work.
  4. Assignment Notifications have allowed teachers to notify students about upcoming assignments, giving teachers more flexibility in how they choose to communicate with students and assign them projects.

Supporting students and developing their social-emotional learning

  1. Technology can play a key part in developing social-emotional learning (SEL) from home. SEL-specific Praise Badges and Stickers have helped teachers recognize student social skills, grow emotional vocabulary, and give valuable recognition to the daily wins in their students’ learning.
  2. It can be difficult to gauge well-being during remote learning, but with tools like Reflect Messaging in Teams, educators can create a quick check-in to get insights on their students and offer support as needed.
  3. To spread positivity and encouragement, teachers can share Kindness Cards with students. Each virtual card has ideas, reminders, or inspiration that teachers can use to model kind behavior.
  4. Many milestone moments for students, like graduation ceremonies and sports finals, were cancelled this spring. Graduation Kits gave students a chance to virtually celebrate their accomplishments at the end of the school year, and Orientation Kits helped students with the return to school through online welcome and information sessions.

Preparing students for the future while still having (virtual) fun

  1. Many summer camps were canceled due to social distancing recommendations, so Microsoft created Passport to Digital Fun, a free virtual summer camp with weeks of interactive workshops. We also created winter camps to keep students engaged and learning during the winter break.
  2. Students from around the world imagined solutions to some of today’s most pressing issues through a virtual coding competition with Minecraft: Education Edition.  
  3. To keep students engaged during online learning in other ways, we hosted multiple events such as Global Learning Week, Hack the Classroom, Hour of Code, Imagine Cup Junior, and Global Read Aloud, each attended by thousands of students and educators from around the world. Teachers have also been empowered to create their own virtual events through Flipgrid, which offers advanced features such as augmented reality and video blogs.
  4. We participated in incredible partnerships to help make online learning fun for students. Learn more about our exciting collaborations with NASA, Wonder Woman 1984, the Smithsonian museums, and Space Jam: A New Legacy.

Building community among educators

  1. We’ve been inspired by educators’ drive to learn and grow amid this year’s challenges, including through Microsoft Innovative Educator (MIE) programs. This community of educators has continued to thrive as teachers shared their experiences and resources.
  2. Throughout the year, we participated in a variety of in-person and virtual events for teachers, including BETT, EDUCAUSE, Education Transformation Summit, and ISTE20 Live. Each of these events helped educators find community, support, and resources during an unpredictable year.
  3. Global connections were perhaps more important in this year than any. Microsoft continued to build connections with educator communities, seeking to empower teachers with training resources through the Microsoft Educator Center and events like the Global Training Partners Summit, where Microsoft-trained educators help others around the world meet their unique challenges.

We will carry each of these highlights with us as we look to 2021, and hope you will too. We are optimistic about what the next year will bring for the Microsoft Education community—and know that we will continue to learn and grow together.

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A breakthrough year for passwordless technology

As 2020 draws to a close, most of us are looking forward to putting this year in the rearview mirror. Since we depend even more on getting online for everything in our lives, we’re more than ready to be done with passwords. Passwords are a hassle to use, and they present security risks for users and organizations of all sizes, with an average of one in every 250 corporate accounts compromised each month. According to the Gartner Group, 20 to 50 percent of all help desk calls are for password resets. The World Economic Forum (WEF) estimates that cybercrime costs the global economy $2.9 million every minute, with roughly 80 percent of those attacks directed at passwords.

In November 2019 at Microsoft Ignite, we shared that more than 100 million people were already using Microsoft’s passwordless sign-in each month. In May of 2020, just in time for World Password Day, that number had already grown to more than 150 million people, and the use of biometrics to access work accounts is now almost double what it was then. We’ve drawn strength from our customers’ determination this year and are set to make passwordless access a reality for all our customers in 2021.

2020: A banner year for passwordless technology

Infograph describing the passwordless technology achievements in 2020

February: We announced a preview of Azure Active Directory support for FIDO2 security keys in hybrid environments. The Fast Identity Online (FIDO) Alliance is a “cross-industry consortia providing standards, certifications, and market adoption programs to replace passwords with simpler, stronger authentication.” Following the latest FIDO spec, FIDO2, we enabled users with security keys to access their Hybrid Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) Windows 10 devices with seamless sign-in, providing secure access to on-premises and cloud resources using a strong hardware-backed public and private-key credential. This expansion of Microsoft’s passwordless capabilities followed 2019’s preview of FIDO2 support for Azure Active Directory joined devices and browser sign-ins.

June: I gave a keynote speech at Identiverse Virtual 2020 where I got to talk about how Microsoft’s FIDO2 implementation highlights the importance of industry standards in implementing Zero Trust security and is crucial to enabling secure ongoing remote work across industries. Nitika Gupta, Principal Program Manager of Identity Security in our team, showed how Zero Trust is more important than ever for securing data and resources and provided actionable steps that organizations can take to start their Zero Trust journey.

September: At Microsoft Ignite, the company revealed the new passwordless wizard available through the Microsoft 365 Admin Center. Delivering a streamlined user sign-in experience in Windows 10, Windows Hello for Business replaces passwords by combining strong MFA for an enrolled device with a PIN or user biometric (fingerprint or facial recognition). This approach gives you, our customers, the ability to deliver great user experiences for your employees, customers, and partners without compromising your security posture.

November: Authenticate 2020, “the first conference dedicated to who, what, why and how of user authentication,” featured my boss, Joy Chik, CVP of Identity at Microsoft, as the keynote speaker. Joy talked about how FIDO2 is a critical part of Microsoft’s passwordless vision, and the importance of the whole industry working toward great user experiences, interoperability, and having apps everywhere support passwordless authentication. November also saw Microsoft once again recognized by Gartner as a “Leader” in identity and access management (IAM).

MISA members lead the way

The Microsoft Intelligent Security Association (MISA) is an ecosystem of security partners who have integrated their solutions with Microsoft to better defend against increasingly sophisticated cyber threats. Four MISA members—YubiKey, HID Global, Trustkey, and AuthenTrend—stood out this year for their efforts in driving passwordless technology adoption across industries.

Yubico created the passwordless YubiKey hardware to help businesses achieve the highest level of security at scale.

“We’re providing users with a convenient, simple, authentication solution for Azure Active Directory.”—Derek Hanson, VP of Solutions Architecture and Alliances, Yubico

HID Global engineered the HID Crescendo family of FIDO-enabled smart cards and USB keys to streamline access for IT and physical workspaces—enabling passwordless authentication anywhere.

“Organizations can now secure access to laptops and cloud apps with the same credentials employees use to open the door to their office.”—Julian Lovelock, VP of Global Business Segment Identity and Access Management Solutions, HID

TrustKey provides FIDO2 hardware and software solutions for enterprises who want to deploy passwordless authentication with Azure Active Directory because: “Users often find innovative ways to circumvent difficult policies,” comments Andrew Jun, VP of Product Development at TrustKey, “which inadvertently creates security holes.”

AuthenTrend applied fingerprint-authentication technology to the FIDO2 security key and aspires to replace all passwords with biometrics to help people take back ownership of their credentials.

Next steps for passwordless in 2021

Our team has been working hard this year to join these partners in making passwords a thing of the past. Along with new UX and APIs for managing FIDO2 security keys enabling customers to develop custom solutions and tools, we plan to release a converged registration portal in 2021, where all users can seamlessly manage passwordless credentials via the My Apps portal.

We’re excited about the metrics we tracked in 2020, which show a growing acceptance of passwordless among organizations and users:

  • Passwordless usage in Azure Active Directory is up by more than 50 percent for Windows Hello for Business, passwordless phone sign-in with Microsoft Authenticator, and FIDO2 security keys.
  • More than 150 million total passwordless users across Azure Active Directory and Microsoft consumer accounts.
  • The number of consumers using Windows Hello to sign in to Windows 10 devices instead of a password grew to 84.7 percent from 69.4 percent in 2019.

We’re all hoping the coming year will bring a return to normal and that passwordless access will at least make our online lives a little easier.

Learn more about Microsoft’s passwordless story. 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.

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‘Xbox: Beyond Generations’ filmed experiment launches

Perhaps one of the greatest struggles older people face today is a lack of human connection; whether it’s due to living far apart from family members, or even a lack of close family and friends at all, loneliness among our older generation is a growing problem world-wide. While it’s no surprise that the virtual worlds of gaming have become places where gamers can build and maintain real-world relationships, these worlds can also provide a vital connection between older and younger family members. In gaming we believe in the power of play to bring people together.

“Games are a source of joy, inspiration, and social connection,” says Head of Xbox Phil Spencer. “They have the power to bring us together, create empathy, and strengthen our social fabric.”

With Xbox: Beyond Generations, our aim is to highlight the relationship-building potential of modern games, and to encourage younger people to start gaming with older family members.

For older people, loneliness has become a serious problem — one that has a knock-on effect on their physical health. According to Age UK, almost 2 million older people in the UK are expecting to feel lonely this holiday. And it is a global issue; a sense of isolation is something many older people all over the world face daily.

Xbox: Beyond Generations aims to bridge that generational divide in families. The initiative launches with a short documentary film, “Howard & Dhillon’s Story,” which follows the story of a real family on their journey towards re-connecting with each other via gaming. Grandfather Howard and his grandson Dhillon, who live nearly three hours’ driving distance apart, used to have a close relationship when both were younger. But as Howard became less physically able to do activities with Dhillon, they drifted apart. 

“My grandad, with his knee injury, can’t run around with us in the garden anymore. We stopped doing the things that kept us really close,” says Dhillon.

Over the course of four weeks, we witness the rekindling of the relationship they once had. Howard and Dhillon’s ability to go on virtual road trips in Forza or sail on virtual ships together in Sea of Thieves—shared activities that are no longer possible for them to do in real life—becomes the catalyst for opening up to each other about their lives and forming a deeper bond, something hard to replicate via regular calls.

To help ignite this spark of connection within families, Xbox is partnering with multiple charities around the globe dedicated to supporting the needs of older people. In the UK, Xbox will support Age UK, and their work internationally through Age International. Donations are being made to enable our charity partners to carry out vital work for older people and their communities providing emotional, social and practical support.

Everyone can bring about change. There are a number of ways in which you can help play a part.  Age UK and Age International are in need of donations to fund their vital work, so if you’re able, please donate today. Or consider becoming an Age UK Digital Buddy – someone who helps older people get familiar with technology and use it to connect with friends, family, and get the support they most need.

“At Age UK and Age International our mission is simple – we support older people who need us the most, especially those who have no one else to turn to,” says Age UK Fundraising Director Laurie Boult. “Technology can really help us all connect, but sometimes the most vulnerable older people need more than that. That’s where we come in. We help provide emotional, social, and practical support to older people in more than 25 countries, with programmes ranging from emergency humanitarian aid, to access income and pensions, healthcare, advocacy and influencing governments to consider the needs of older people.”

Perhaps one of the simplest things many of you can do to make a difference is to see the value and potential in older people, quite literally. This holiday season—a time when many will be booting up a new console- rather than leave an old console to gather dust, consider giving it to an older family member. And maybe challenge them to a game or two. It could be the thing that sparks a whole new chapter in your relationship.

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Microsoft commits more than $110M in additional support for nonprofits, workers and schools in Washington state

There’s no doubt that most of us across the Puget Sound region are anxious to put the difficulties of 2020 behind us. As we approach the end of December, we look forward to the new year with a mixture of optimism and concern – optimism about spreading vaccines and concerns about the serious challenges that will unfortunately follow us into the first months of 2021. Covid-19 cases are on the rise and we feel it in our hospitals, our homes and in the local economy. Schools remain closed across most of Washington state, and despite the heroic work of educators, research tells us that distance learning can’t replace in-person instruction. This is creating a troubling learning loss. While these challenges are daunting, every day at Microsoft we see successes around the world that give us hope. We believe that our region can and should continue to pull together, support our neighbors and pursue a path that restarts the activities that fuel our economy, develop our children and enrich our daily lives.

As our community heads into the 10th month of Covid-related shutdowns and restrictions, we must move swiftly to reignite the local economy and ensure the safety of those who are key to the region’s recovery. As part of Microsoft’s continued commitment to the community that we call home, today we are announcing an additional commitment of more than $110 million towards our region’s recovery and, when the current Covid surge is under control, the safe reopening of its schools.

Here’s what we’re pledging today:

We will continue to support our hourly workers impacted by Covid-19. In March, we announced that we would continue to pay the hourly service providers on our campuses their regular pay even while their full services were not needed. Since that time, Microsoft has spent more than $110 million in Washington state to pay these wages.

As we head into the holidays, we want these workers and their families to know that we will continue to stand by their side. Today, we commit that we will continue to pay all our onsite vendor hourly service providers their regular pay until they can return to our campuses. In Puget Sound, this includes individuals who staff our lobbies, run our cafes, drive our shuttles, and support our on-site tech and audio-visual needs. We estimate that between Dec. 1, 2020 and Mar. 31, 2021, this will provide locally more than $50 million of additional wages.

We currently expect that it will take until early July 2021 for our campuses to return to a full presence. Regardless of the exact date, we will provide these onsite hourly workers their full wages until the date of their return.

We will continue to provide expanded support for nonprofits in Washington state. Even in the best of times, non-profit organizations play an indispensable role in supporting the social safety net and every other aspect of local communities in our state. The Covid crisis has made the role of these organizations even more critical. So far this year, Microsoft has provided more than $98 million of assistance to nonprofits in Washington state, including roughly $67 million in cash and $31 million in technology, in-kind support, special discounts and our Covid-19 response school lunch program.

We commit today that we will sustain this high level of support for nonprofits in our state. This will include ongoing cash grants and in-kind support. We currently project that we will provide roughly $60 million of additional support for local nonprofits between Dec. 1, 2020 and Jul. 15, 2021.

We will provide technology and in-kind support to help safely reopen the local schools in 2021. As the Covid crisis reaches into its 10th month, the toll on our state’s students far exceeds what most people anticipated when schools went to remote learning in April. The learning loss for students is substantial and now well-documented, with some groups losing a significant portion of a year’s progress in reading and math. School-based relationships promote the social and emotional well-being that are key to learning. The challenges for younger and lower-income students are especially pronounced.

As serious as the impact on students is the effect on many other parts of our communities. Covid-19 has provided a powerful reminder of the importance of our state’s teachers and the indispensable role that our schools play as central community institutions. They are essential in meeting family support, nutrition and childcare needs. The continuing closure of schools increasingly threatens the ability of working parents – especially mothers – to remain in the workforce.

At the same time these impacts have grown more dire, advances in understanding the science of Covid-19 have shown that it is possible, with the right precautions, to reopen schools safely, especially for the youngest learners. While this week with high infection rates is clearly not the right moment to restart in -person learning, the science now tells us that it is the right time to accelerate the planning for kindergarten through 5th Grade classes to reopen in February, if the correct safety measures are put in place. This requires a concerted effort across the community, and we will take new steps to help:

  • Microsoft will provide a technology solution that will enable Washington state schools to better track and report Covid-19 related testing data within their district boundaries. This solution will be free and made available to all Washington state schools districts. This will ensure that schools can report to parents and teachers alike current information about testing and infections, thereby providing the transparency needed for the community to remain well-informed about critical health information.

    This solution builds on an application we created for the state of Washington to track PPE and beds for all 104 hospitals across the state. It also builds on our work with the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the second largest school district in the country with approximately 700,000 students.

    While we help schools to reopen, we will also continue to support classes that interact online. We’re committed to providing the best possible products and support to help teachers engage with students remotely, including support and products that are available to all schools in Washington state.

  • Microsoft will donate PPE and cleaning supplies to schools that need additional resources to reopen safely. It is critical that we reopen our schools in line with state guidelines. This will complement the state’s newly announced $3 million set-aside funds to implement health and safety protocols. Microsoft is prepared to donate PPE and cleaning supplies to help any school district in our state that needs additional supplies to re-open. These will be distributed through the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI).
  • We support the Washington Department of Health’s updated Covid-19 guidelines for in-person learning announced by Governor Inslee on Dec. 16. These updated Covid-19 health standards for reopening schools keep pace with advances in the scientific understanding on case numbers, hospitalization rates and capacity, and Covid-19 case positivity test rates. We are also pleased to see the test positivity goals are now in line with the recommendations of the World Health Organization (WHO). These new goals also build on the learning from research at the Institute of Disease Modeling that show that schools can reopen safely, especially at the K-5 level, even when there are more positive tests in a community, if they follow the right precautions.
  • We support prioritizing vaccines for teachers. We recognize that Governor Inslee and the leaders at the Department of Health will need to make the critical decisions about the precise order of who can be vaccinated and when. It remains vital to prioritize critical healthcare workers and other people who are especially vulnerable as the state distributes the first 400,000 vaccine doses in December. But we believe that if teachers, school administrators and staff in higher risk categories at the K-5 level were eligible to get a Covid vaccine in January, it would help these schools take a critical step towards reopening more quickly.

Today’s commitments bring Microsoft’s hourly worker commitment and local nonprofit support amounts to approximately $250 million in regional support – part of a decades-long commitment to our region that will continue. We know we are not alone in these efforts and we acknowledge the hard work and difficult choices made by parents and teachers, school administrators, and public health and other government officials.

In addition to continued action from our state’s elected officials, Congress needs to do its part. We will continue to advocate for a robust federal stimulus funding bill that includes initiatives such as wage relief and help for small businesses.

Washington state was one of the first to be impacted by Covid-19, and we acted quickly and decisively to respond. We now need to come together once again to chart a clear and unified recovery path that advances the shared economic opportunity and future of our region. We stand ready to partner with government leaders, school districts and the business community to start the new year with a clear plan of what we can do together.

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Finding purpose and unlocking potential at Envision virtual event

This week, I was thrilled to take part in Envision, our brand-new digital series for senior business leaders, which we’re co-producing with our close partners Accenture and Avanade.

Hosted by Stephanie Mehta, editor-in-chief of Fast Company magazine, our first episode featured dynamic speakers and a conversation that centered on thought leadership topics such as digital resilience, the future of work, and how individuals and organizations alike can find purpose and drive momentum.

We also aired localized versions of the program, which allowed leaders to discuss business news and topics relevant to their region, such as the impact of COVID-19 on local industries.

To kick things off, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella talked with Stephanie about the evolution of the workplace, what it takes to create a resilient and agile business culture, and Microsoft’s embrace of “stakeholder capitalism” to serve not just shareholders but a broad community of stakeholders.

Satya was followed by Accenture CEO Julie Sweet and Microsoft Executive Vice President Judson Althoff, who shared the five questions that organizations need to think carefully about to transform in a post-pandemic world. I had the privilege of interviewing Christophe Beck, President and Chief Operating Officer of Ecolab, to learn how his company is bringing together technology and people to address the world’s biggest sustainability challenges.

In addition, Mitra Azizirad, Corporate Vice President of AI and Innovation Marketing at Microsoft, described why successful organizations make innovation a top priority and how to treat innovation as a platform. Finally, Avanade CEO Pamela Maynard spoke with psychologist Dr. Michael Gervais and Microsoft Chief Diversity Officer Lindsay-Rae McIntyre about the mindset required to succeed and how to use purpose to change things for the better.

Visit the Envision website to see our highlight video or register for the series to watch the complete episode or individual segments.

I hope you’ll join us for Episode 2 on Feb. 16, when we’ll look at five areas in which global challenges are driving exciting innovation. Speakers will include Microsoft Executive Vice President Jean-Philippe Courtois; Caroline Fanning, Chief Human Resources Officer of Avanade; our Chief Environmental Officer Lucas Joppa; Accenture Chief Leadership and Human Resources Officer Ellyn Shook; and Julia White, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Azure.

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Research at Microsoft 2020: addressing the present while looking to the future

Microsoft researchers pursue the big questions about what the world will be like in the future and the role technology will play. Not only do they take on the responsibility of exploring the long-term vision of their research, but they must also be ready to react to the immediate needs of the present. This year in particular, they were asked to use their roles as futurists to address pressing societal challenges.

In early 2020, as countries began responding to COVID-19 with stay-at-home orders and business operations moved from offices into homes, researchers sprang into action to identify ways their skills and projects could help while also making personal and professional adjustments of their own. In some cases, they pivoted to directly address the pandemic. A team from Microsoft Research Asia developed the COVID Insights website to promote scientific analysis and understanding of the disease, while the Socially Intelligent Meetings program expanded its work in telepresence technologies to include the Meetings During COVID-19 project. From responses provided by employee volunteers, these researchers are piecing together the effects of taking meetings almost entirely via screens.

Researchers also turned to the wider research community in their pursuit of solutions that would allow people to persevere in these challenging times and prosper beyond them with academic collaboration around topics related to pandemic preparedness and—in August—the New Future of Work symposium. A series of reports conducted by Microsoft considers a variety of information, including research from throughout the company, in studying worker productivity and well-being. The insights are leading to enhancements in Microsoft productivity tools that are available now and in the near future, such as Together mode, virtual commutes, and meditation experiences in Teams (the latter two features roll out next year).

“When a major crisis strikes the world, science and technology research is almost always of paramount importance in response, rehabilitation, and—ultimately—creating resilience for the future. Today, the people of Microsoft Research are proving to be critical in dealing with climate calamities, such as famines and major wildfires; global health threats, such as that posed by the COVID-19 pandemic; the weakening of democratic institutions posed by misinformation and insecure voting infrastructure; wildlife extinction caused by pollution and illegal poaching; and more. While our main mission continues to be grounded in fundamental, long-term research, contributing to societal resilience is also a growing element in how we ensure a good future for all.”

Peter Lee, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Research & Incubations

Meanwhile, research started before the pandemic feels increasingly significant. In April, two papers with implications on workplace well-being and hybrid scenarios, respectively, were presented on the conference circuit. Researchers from the productivity group developed models that leverage digital activities and other data to suggest appropriate times for workers to switch tasks and take breaks, while researchers in the United Kingdom and Canada built a two-way telepresence system to enhance collaboration among remote and local individuals. In December, Eyal Ofek shared how advances in virtual reality could be used to maximize our workspaces—wherever they may be—during a Microsoft Research webinar.

And while a lot has been said about work in these unprecedented times, research into the dynamics of epidemics themselves moved forward. In September, it was announced that Microsoft Premonition, a system leveraging robotics and genomics to track pathogens responsible for widespread disease, is being made available to additional partners.

Microsoft Premonition researchers worked to create scalable monitoring solutions for early disease detection. In a trial in Houston, Texas, they used smart traps to capture and monitor mosquitoes, and then data was analyzed in the cloud with a goal of spotting new transmission patterns. To learn more, explore the news article.

While research relevant to the pandemic has been of the highest importance this year, Microsoft researchers took their research in a broad range of directions—progress in AI, healthcare technology, and security advanced rapidly. Below is a selection of highlights that came out of Microsoft Research in 2020.

Scaling AI for better performance and real-world applications

This year saw significant breakthroughs for creating AI that is substantially more powerful, scalable, and readily integrated into Microsoft products. The AI at Scale initiative, born from a cornucopia of work in the area in 2020, combines large-scale models, AI supercomputing, and teams of researchers and product engineers working together to implement AI in a variety of Microsoft products and infrastructure.

The Microsoft Turing team’s natural language generation and natural language representation models went from being announced in February to implementation into products like Microsoft Word and Bing, ultimately with one model setting a record on the Xtreme benchmark for cross-lingual transfer learning in October.

Listen to the full interview with Rangan Majumder on the Microsoft Research Podcast.

Helping to power large AI models, the DeepSpeed library with Zero Redundancy Optimizer (ZeRO) also underwent major transformations since its introduction in February. The library initially included support for training models up to 100 billion parameters in size, but by the end of the year, the library was capable of training models up to 1 trillion parameters while also introducing new methods to train models with lower resource costs. On the testing side of natural language generation and understanding, researchers released XGLUE, a benchmark dataset for gauging models’ zero-shot cross-lingual transfer capabilities across 19 different languages.

In the realm of vision and language pretraining (VLP), Microsoft researchers released OSCAR (Object-Semantics Aligned Pretraining) in May, leading to a novel framework with state-of-the-art performance on six different vision-and-language tasks. In October, researchers collaborating with Azure Cognitive Services created VIVO (Visual Vocabulary Pretraining), which resulted in a framework for novel object captioning that achieved state of the art and even surpassed human performance on the novel object captioning (nocaps) benchmark.

Technologies like Microsoft Floating Point, used in the Project Brainwave architecture, are helping to lower the cost of deep neural network (DNN) inference. Improvements like this allow Microsoft to power large AI models on the scale needed to empower Microsoft users around the world. Head over to the AI at Scale page to learn about some of the many other projects undertaken at Microsoft Research to advance large-scale AI this year.

Building AI responsibly by pursuing safety, fairness, interpretability, and accessibility

As AI techniques have made leaps and bounds, researchers are undertaking the crucial task of examining responsible practices in AI, which include accessibility, fairness, and interpretability. Methods for understanding and explaining what AI does, as well as assessing fairness at all stages of development, are big trends in this area.

“Building and fielding AI responsibly is a challenging, cross-disciplinary research area. Our progress over the last year builds on insights from previous years with an emphasis on applying our research and learnings to developing usable methods and tools that can help engineers design and develop trustworthy AI systems. We’ve made strong progress, but our journey is far from over.”

Eric Horvitz, Technical Fellow and Chief Scientific Officer

In January, researchers shared their insights into how societal bias in historical data used to train algorithmic decision-making systems could be reinforced by future data and explored two interventions that could help to correct this bias. Meanwhile, another team of researchers developed a framework and open-source library for generating explanations that individuals adversely impacted by system decisions—such as those who’ve been denied a loan or insurance—can use to work toward a positive determination. These counterfactual explanations can also be used for system evaluation, becoming a tool for practitioners. Builders of AI tech are at the center of two papers recognized at CHI 2020. Hanna Wallach, Jennifer Wortman Vaughan, and their co-authors sought to empower the group with an actionable checklist—co-designed with practitioners—for discussing and addressing fairness throughout the AI life cycle and an examination into the effectiveness of available interpretability tools based on an interview study and survey with practitioners. Wortman Vaughan explored understanding AI systems in a January webinar.

Collaboration with and inclusion of those closest to the tech was also happening on the accessibility front, where advances in computer vision and natural language processing (NLP) are allowing researchers to improve AI for alt text generation and object identification. Researchers worked with people who are blind or have low vision to understand how to improve the alt text generated by automated systems and to develop a dataset for personalized object recognition. In a March webinar, Dr. Danna Gurari and Dr. Ed Cutrell discussed developing impactful vision systems and the role dataset challenges play. Meanwhile, a partnership with people living with and affected by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) laid the groundwork for Expressive Pixels, a platform for creating LED-display animations that simultaneously offers opportunities for creating, learning, and communicating in new ways.

Responsible AI requires that the talent, knowledge, and experiences of those developing it are as diverse as the people using it. Microsoft is committed to clearing a path into the industry for underrepresented groups, including sponsoring and participating in events like the Black in AI, Queer in AI, and Women in Machine Learning NeurIPS workshops and creating professional and academic opportunities through Microsoft Research. To have your work supported or to join the Microsoft Research team, see our Academic Programs—such as the Dissertation Grant for PhD students from underrepresented groups (proposals will start to be accepted in February)—and open research positions and internships.

Practical and theoretical advances in cryptography and security

As technology becomes more embedded in and essential to people’s lives, creating new technologies for 2020 and beyond demands deeper consideration of people’s privacy, security of the web and internet-connected devices, and safeguards on human rights. This year, researchers introduced ElectionGuard, a system that applies homomorphic encryption to both secure people’s votes—so that no one else can see how they voted—and allow voters to verify their votes are properly counted. The system was piloted in Fulton, Wisconsin, in February, where election officials tested machines running ElectionGuard; the final tally was gathered through traditional paper ballot methods. The code for ElectionGuard was made open source, and Josh Benaloh presented on the technology in a webinar in April.

Cryptography was also explored from a post-quantum angle. Future quantum computers could decipher even the most secure current cryptographic techniques, so researchers in this space have begun to investigate new methods for making the cryptography of the future equal to the task of protecting people’s privacy and information in a world where quantum computers far exceed the power of supercomputers now. These methods can also keep information more secure in the present computing landscape. To learn more about the world of post-quantum cryptography, check out webinars from Craig Costello and Christian Paquin below.

Researchers and engineers released resources and technologies to uncover security vulnerabilities and identify potential attacks. In March, Patrice Godefroid made a case for developers adding fuzzing to their toolkit to detect vulnerabilities in software through automated testing, and in November, a team introduced RESTler, “the first stateful REST API fuzzing tool for automatically testing and finding security and reliability bugs in cloud/web services through their REST APIs.” Researchers also released Project Freta, a service for Linux systems that detects evidence of OS and sensor sabotage by analyzing a memory snapshot to find rootkits and other malware.

Improving healthcare through technology

The importance of healthcare technology came into especially strong focus as this year progressed. In many instances, projects already underway were particularly timely, as was the case with investigations into making online mental health interventions more effective through data analysis, the potential for personalizing those mental health interventions via subtyping, improving mental health helpline technology, and using chat apps to help facilitate patient care in hospitals.

In late August, researchers announced a method for biomedical NLP pretraining that could enable researchers to stay up to date with the continually increasing amount of new scientific knowledge in the field by using NLP to quickly identify and cross-reference important findings. Their model, PubMedBERT, obtained state-of-the-art results in several biomedical applications.

Dr Raj Jena using InnerEye software

As medical and mental health professionals adapt how they provide care for people in the 21st century, researchers intend to continue to create technology that complements experts’ skills.

Bringing reinforcement learning into the real world

Reinforcement learning—a framework in which ML systems learn via interactions with their environment—has long been an active area at Microsoft Research, and the drive to advance RL has increased thanks to the approach’s success in Microsoft products and services. Researchers are tackling RL both empirically and theoretically, and their enthusiasm and efforts were on full display in 17 NeurIPS-accepted papers that pursued a variety of promising avenues.

Two papers designed methods for leveraging existing logged datasets in an area of RL that uses past experience to give agents a leg up prior to deployment, while separate work brought strategic exploration to the popular gradient decent–based approaches for RL. Other work highlighted a trend in learning good representations for agents’ observations. In their respective papers, Akshay Krishnamurthy, Devon Hjelm, and their coauthors incorporated auxiliary prediction problems to discover representations that simplify downstream learning tasks. Earlier in the year, researchers deployed Transformers in several ways to develop Working Memory Graph, an RL agent capable of more efficient learning when advanced reasoning is involved, such as future planning in the game Sokoban.

Games make great arenas in which to train agents for use in gaming or in more general applications. In August, Sam Devlin and Katja Hofmann shared work done as part of a new collaboration with game developer Ninja Theory around enhancing gaming with RL agents capable of teamwork with human counterparts. Also during the summer, researchers kicked off the second iteration of MineRL, a sample-efficient RL challenge based on the platform Project Malmo, which uses Minecraft as a playground for AI experimentation.

For an overview of RL, check out Hofmann’s webinar, and to learn about one RL framework in particular, multi-armed bandits, read this introductory text on the subject. And if you can hardly wait to learn more, fret not—you can start the new year off strong with Reinforcement Learning Day 2021 in January. Until then, check out content, including videos, from last year’s event.

Optimizing AI

On the winding road of this year in technology research, it’s only fitting that we loop back to AI, which researchers sought to optimize from multiple perspectives. One perspective considered how AI has evolved alongside the game of chess. In the last few decades, AI has advanced to a point where it can spar with and succeed against the best players in the world. This led researchers to shift their focus from how to make AI better at chess to how chess-playing AI can be refined to better match human playing styles and skill levels. As a result, researchers created Maia, a Leela Chess Zero–based engine that matches human play more closely than previously achieved.

To ramp up neural architecture search (NAS) research, ARCHAI was introduced to make work in this area more usable, reproducible, and unified. The framework allows standard NAS algorithms to be executed with a single command line, making it easy to experiment with and add new algorithms and datasets. Researchers also proposed an autoML approach to compare any two classification datasets, even if their labels aren’t directly comparable, called Optimal Transport Dataset Distance. If you’re interested in learning more about autoML, check out the Directions in ML Speaker Series, which kicked off in July.

The Semantic Machines research team introduced a new framework for conversational AI in which dialogues represented as dataflow graphs make AI more flexible in its ability to adapt to the natural flow of conversation. Along with this, they released the largest, most complex task-oriented dialogue dataset to help advance conversational AI research more broadly.

Computer vision moved forward on many fronts in 2020. Researchers created a visual question answering (VQA) evaluation score in their work to understand the connection between visual understanding and neuro-symbolic reasoning. The score betters prior evaluation methods by isolating reasoning from perception in VQA models with a differentiable first-order logic framework. Researchers also investigated how two concepts integral to human reasoning, locality and compositionality, can help to enhance zero-shot representation learning.

Researchers out of Microsoft Research Asia developed methods to improve visual recognition with HRNet and boost photo enhancement with two AI techniques—one that transfers high-resolution texture information to low-resolution images and another that uses variational autoencoders (VAEs) to restore old photos. Other advances in deep generative networks by included Optimus, FQ-GAN, and Prevalent, while researchers also found ways to extend adversarial robustness and training, concepts closely associated with GANs, to transfer learning and causal inference.

Finally, researchers are looking at a future AI landscape that is increasingly multimodal and interactive. However, engineering AI that uses multimodal streaming data in real time is time consuming because programming infrastructures in this area are lacking. Researchers built Platform for Situated Intelligence to provide an open-source framework for experimentation, development, and research in this area.

Continuing a tradition of research with real-world impact

The above research represents a small portion of the great work that was enthusiastically pursued by dedicated researchers at Microsoft Research in 2020, and even if we were to consider all the work produced this year, it would still tell only part of a bigger research story at Microsoft.

In a new series of posts this year, we began connecting the dots to provide an overview of how the individual contributions of researchers and their collaborators are coming together to have a profound impact on customers and society at large. Our collection on responsible AI shows how researchers are upholding and advancing the Microsoft commitment to AI grounded in principles that put people first and benefit society, while our collection on reinforcement learning recounts the history of work in the field and its application to Microsoft products and services. Visit our collections archive for more.

2020 has been a year like no other, underscoring the importance of the relationship between research and resilience. As we look to the future, researchers are an important part of answering the big questions that will shape the direction of society. We have been inspired by the research community’s continued commitment to technological advancements—those in direct response to these unprecedented times and those keeping research on all fronts moving forward. We wish you and yours a safe and healthy new year.

To stay up to date on all things research at Microsoft, follow our blog and subscribe to our newsletter and the Microsoft Research Podcast. You can also follow us on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram.

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A different kind of diversity program is inspiring people to be better allies – and be OK with making mistakes

Sara Lerner was fired up and ready to jump into the fray on an imaginary bus.

The Microsoft senior program manager was exploring diversity and inclusion and chatting with her peers about a hypothetical scenario: What they would do if a bus rider made a cruel comment to a passenger who was transgender. Lerner started envisioning how she might confront the fictional bully.

Until a colleague who is transgender weighed in with a surprising twist.

If it happened to them, the person said, they wouldn’t want anyone to angrily defend them, potentially heightening tensions and causing backlash they’d then have to deal with. Instead, they’d wave, smile and ask if the other rider had any questions, trying to provide a positive interaction that wouldn’t shame the agitator but might open a dialogue instead.

A smiling woman leaning against the window of a building
Sara Lerner, a senior program manager for Microsoft (Photo by Dan DeLong)

It was an encounter Lerner was still reflecting on when Microsoft introduced its global allyship program last year. The course was offered to all employees, aiming to broaden Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella’s push toward a more inclusive culture. But amid the global chaos of 2020 — including a pandemic requiring remote work and making relationships more challenging, acts of hate toward those with Asian heritage stemming from false rhetoric about the virus, widespread protests against racial injustice following violence against Black and African American people, and increased political tensions — the company made the introductory sessions virtual, and mandatory.

The goal is to give Microsoft’s 160,000 employees worldwide the language they need to discuss different viewpoints and difficult things in a way that offers empathy and inclusion to all, says Chief Diversity Officer Lindsay-Rae McIntyre. The program merges employees’ increased enthusiasm around advocacy with the well-known “growth mindset” platform Nadella adopted from psychologist Carol Dweck. And it adapts that from the work-performance arena to address the culture of the company, where leaders have been trying to break down silos and address bias, intolerance and discrimination.

“So much around allyship is putting the growth mindset into action, learning how to empathize with and advocate with someone else,” McIntyre says. “I’m not saying advocate for. It’s not a badge or cape. It’s a practice that we’re trying to embed so people can engage in conversation to learn from one another how to support and help one another.”

While many companies have programs to foster diversity and inclusion, Microsoft worked with neuroscientists for two years to develop a new approach.

The Microsoft Allyship Program consists of 10 segments using various media to appeal to different learning styles. Employees can take online, self-paced classes, watch video scenarios with actors portraying and discussing various work situations, and participate in facilitated sessions focused on building skills and practicing behaviors. The program teaches that there’s no limit to who can benefit from a focus on greater inclusion — everyone has an opportunity to be an ally, and everyone needs allyship in some form.

A smiling man leans against a railing
Rich Neal, a senior director at Microsoft

Rich Neal vividly remembers a meeting early on in his career with his manager and other leaders when he was the only African American in the room — not a new thing then, or now, he says — and someone made an inappropriate comment. Three seconds felt like 30 minutes while Neal contemplated what to say, when he suddenly heard his manager ask what the colleague had meant. The meeting turned uncomfortable, but Neal’s shoulders dropped with relief.

“I felt like this person checked in part of their privilege, part of their fraternity, for me,” Neal recalls. “And the next month, when I got there, it was just different. My boss had created a new reality for everyone in that session. That experience taught me that it doesn’t have to be this huge, Herculean effort to show up for other people.”

Years later, as a senior director at Microsoft, Neal was asked to attend an event for LGBTQI+ employees. There he met a woman who talked about her privilege, as someone who was white and Ivy League-educated, and challenged him to extend his privilege to others — a concept he says he’d never considered, having “correlated the word ‘privilege’ to ‘white male.’” Now he mentors and coaches people of all different ages, career stages and disciplines.

A woman looks into the camera
Microsoft Chief Diversity Officer Lindsay-Rae McIntyre

Members of majority communities often are portrayed as either offenders or saviors. But opening the aperture of the conversation to reflect topics such as mental health, age, disability and faith shows how everyone benefits from greater inclusion, McIntyre says.

Rather than shutting people down for offenses, the allyship program encourages employees to learn, grow, make mistakes and get better.

“Allyship isn’t perfect,” she says. “You’re going to fail sometimes. But we hold each other accountable for what we’re aiming for. We show people what good and bad looks like so they actually understand some of the well-intended behavior doesn’t land the way they want it to. And ultimately we’re giving people the skill sets to deepen their connections” — and improve their work performance as a result.

The two are inextricably linked for Steve Chu, an account executive on Microsoft’s state and local government team in Kansas City.

A man stands in front of a tall building
Steve Chu, an account executive on Microsoft’s state and local government team in Kansas City

Chu grew up in Alaska with a mother of German descent and father of Chinese lineage. He says he experienced “a lot of harsh racism” as a child and denounced the Asian-American half of his heritage, at one point telling his parents he wanted to change his last name. But while taking the Microsoft course last year, Chu began exploring ways to be more authentic to his whole self. He ended up having the most successful year of his career.

“That really changed everything for me, to embrace both sides of my heritage,” Chu says. “It’s freed me up. I don’t expend energy anymore on covering the Chinese aspects of my personality, so I can focus that energy on more meaningful efforts.”

Research backs up Chu’s experience and has shown that companies with greater employee diversity are more innovative and profitable. But diversity and inclusion require intention.

“If we want to make sure our products are created for people around the world, we need to make sure those varied perspectives are represented, heard and acted upon,” says Diana Navas-Rosette, who leads strategy and innovation on Microsoft’s Global Diversity & Inclusion team. “So we need to have the space and the right behaviors in place for people to be able to speak up and to respectfully challenge each other and have conversations about different perspectives, views and values.”

A woman leans against a wall and looks into the camera
Diana Navas-Rosette, who leads strategy and innovation on Microsoft’s Global Diversity & Inclusion team

Recognizing that Microsoft’s data-driven workforce would respond best to a science-based approach to allyship, Navas-Rosette’s team worked with New York University’s Center for Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging and with the NeuroLeadership Institute to identify what prevents people from acting as allies and how to move them from fearful bystanding toward empathetic action. The institute partners with doctors, neuroscientists, researchers and educators who help create a scientific yet practical way to improve leadership effectiveness, sometimes hooking people up to various scans to watch where the blood flows in their brains and to measure cortisol and heartrates as they’re put into different situations.

Discourse about privilege can divide people and make them feel threatened by each other. And the brain processes social threats, such as exclusion and rejection, much the same way it processes physical pain, says Katherine Milan, the institute’s senior vice president of client experience and product.

So the group’s work connects well with Microsoft’s growth-mindset approach by emphasizing collaboration instead of competition, to lower the threat and encourage engagement, Milan says. While many allyship efforts urge people to muster up the courage to confront those who speak or act in a non-inclusive way, Microsoft’s program aims to create a shame-free learning atmosphere for everyone.

A woman looks at the camera
Katherine Milan, the NeuroLeadership Institute’s senior vice president of client experience and product

And Microsoft’s culture seems to be shifting since the first workshop in July 2019, with surveys indicating employees are feeling more safety and comfort in speaking up even when conversations are difficult, Milan says. But it’s a journey, she says.

“You can’t just take one workshop,” Milan says. “It’s a muscle that you stretch and grow and build every day, and you have to practice repeatedly.”

The pandemic has changed personal interactions in many ways, and some displaced teams have even managed to find greater unity by being more deliberate.

“At the office, there can be dozens of short interactions throughout the day, bumping into people in the halls and cafeteria and having quick conversations,” says Parul Manek, a director of program management for Microsoft’s Enterprise Cloud division. “That doesn’t happen now, so you have to be a more intentional ally. Yesterday I observed someone in a meeting who just didn’t seem like themselves, so I reached out afterward and discovered they had issues working from home and were overwhelmed, and I was able to help them with some strategies to cope.”

A smiling woman leans against the column of a building.
Parul Manek, a director of program management for Microsoft’s Enterprise Cloud division (Photo by Dan DeLong)

Manek became acutely aware of how it felt to be excluded when she moved with her parents to England from India. Since her family hadn’t had the privilege of learning English before immigrating, she felt she didn’t belong in her new home. New friends were intentional about helping her fit in, though, and now she’s spent a lifetime similarly on the lookout for anyone who might be struggling and in need of help.

Manek says she’s seen a clear impact in her work from Nadella’s focus on empathy, even though it’s not an obvious element in a company where employees are so focused on excellence. But she’s noticed that empathy encourages humility and understanding without judgment, which promotes personal connections and, accordingly, workplace collaboration.

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Here’s one jolly holiday tradition that cannot be stopped in 2020, courtesy of NORAD

Santa Claus is coming to town.*

*Due to COVID-19, Mr. Kringle is unable to greet children at the Macy’s flagship store in New York City. At some malls, Mr. Kringle must sit behind plexiglass to hear Christmas wishes. Mr. Kringle’s elves are carrying disinfectant wipes. Mr. Kringle’s elves are now called “Santa’s Sanitation Squad.” Mr. Kringle is still consulting virologists as to whether he can consume cookies and milk while in your home.

Like almost every other 2020 holiday, Christmas won’t be quite the same. But there’s one custom we can still count on: Santa and his sleigh will navigate from the North Pole to your rooftop to drop off your gifts (while he wears a face mask).

We know this thanks to the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). Headquartered at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Spring, Colorado, NORAD keeps constant watch over U.S. and Canadian aerospace via global satellite and radar systems. And the same good people have monitored Santa’s journey every Christmas Eve since 1955.

Two U.S. military members in camo uniforms are sitting next to each other at a table while wearing headsets. One of the soldiers is speaking to a caller. The second solider is wearing a Santa hat.
Two U.S. service members field Christmas Eve phone calls from kids at Peterson Air Force Base in 2019. (Photo by Tech. Sgt. Jeff Fitzmorris/DVIDS)

On Dec. 24, NORAD will again offer its beloved Santa Tracker, revealing up-to-the-second whereabouts of Saint Nick and his sky-high reindeer team as they circle the planet. Anyone can follow the route via a special NORAD website that’s maintained by Microsoft engineers and hosted on Microsoft Azure.

The website also features games, holiday music, movies and more. It’s available in eight languages: English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese and Chinese. In addition, NORAD will use its new, Santa-tracking app and its social media channels to post updates throughout the evening.

And for curious kids who need to know more than the ETA of Father Christmas, NORAD on Thursday launched a new chatbot to respond to timely questions, like: “Is there a big drum of hand sanitizer on board the sleigh?” Answer: “Santa is taking all of the necessary precautions to keep everyone safe as he delivers presents.” NORAD deployed the chatbot by using Azure Bot Service.

“It’s been a tough year and everyone’s looking for a bit of good news,” says NORAD spokesman Preston Schlachter. “We realize that. We want to offer a fun experience for everybody and maybe take their minds off what 2020 has been like.”

The soul of NORAD’s Santa Tracker has long been its Christmas Eve call center, a festive hub usually staffed by some 1,500 headset-wearing volunteers – a mix of civilians in holiday sweaters and service members in full camo.

Every Dec. 24 for years, the group has packed into several conference rooms at Peterson Air Force Base, filling two-hour shifts across a 20-hour day. The work is fast. Each volunteer typically fields about one call per minute from a child somewhere in the world anxious for Santa’s approach. Some volunteers know that excitement personally – as kids, they once called NORAD’s tracker hotline.

Several dozen people answer phone calls from kids on a recent Christmas Eve at the NORAD Tracks Santa operations center. Behind the rows of seated volunteers are two large wall screens showing a depiction of Santa and his reindeer in flight.
Santa-tracking volunteers staff NORAD’s call center on a recent Christmas Eve. This year, on-site volunteers will be fewer and all will be masked. (Photo by Dennis Carlyle/DVIDS)

To maintain safe distances this year, NORAD will host fewer call-center volunteers and wearing a mask will be mandatory, Schlachter says. Callers who can’t reach a live operator via 877-HI-NORAD (877-446-6723) will hear a recorded update on Santa’s location.

But for one long-time volunteer, Christmas won’t be the same unless he’s on the base, answering those urgent calls.

“I absolutely can’t miss it,” says Jim Jenista, a NORAD employee and former Navy pilot and bombardier who has spent nearly 20 Christmas Eves in the call center.

In fact, it has become a Jenista family tradition – and an occasion to dress for the moment.

Since the early 2000s, Jenista, his wife, Karen, and their six children have volunteered for the NORAD phone bank. They arrive in Santa hats and handmade T-shirts, each emblazoned with a specific reindeer. The kids are now grown and live far away. This year, it will just be Jenista and Karen bedecked in their “Cupid” and “Vixen” shirts.

A woman and man in reindeer t-shirts take a selfie.
Jim Jenista, right, and his wife, Karen, prepare for their annual night at NORAD’s Santa tracking operation. (Courtesy of Jim Jenista)

“It is so rewarding. That night embodies the innocence, the expectation and the excitement of the holiday and the giving season,” Jenista says. “It’s also the fastest two hours of your life.”

In many ways, Jenista represents NORAD’s unique duality: sober security meets joyful wonder.

The organization was built during the Cold War to help defend North America against missile strikes. Today, however, many kids know NORAD for its softer side: following and safeguarding Santa’s long ride.

Jenista once flew A-6 Intruders and F-14 Tomcats, was on duty at NORAD on 9/11, and he currently helps coordinate U.S. military training exercises. In his free time, however, he hosts a YouTube channel as “Grandpa Silly,” reading from children’s books in his animated style.

“Our motto at NORAD is, ‘We have the watch,’” Jenista says. “That means while you go about your life, just know that we’re here, ready to deter those who might want to do us harm.

“NORAD Tracks Santa is a unique opportunity to share additional mission information with the people who depend on us,” he adds. “We get to talk about radars and intercepts and infrared and satellites – all the equipment and procedures we have to protect the population.”

In both worlds, Jenista says, NORAD seeks to help people sleep better at night.

A man in a Santa hat speaks on his headset to a child calling the NORAD Santa Tracker on Christmas Eve.
Jenista speaks with another young caller curious about Santa’s arrival time during a recent Christmas Eve. (Courtesy of Jim Jenista)

And there’s one more similarity between the two endeavors: Operating the Santa Tracker is also a year-round mission.

“It’s not something that just gets started and implemented in December,” says Schlachter, who leads NORAD’s preparation. “As soon as the program is over on Christmas, we are talking about lessons learned and how we can make changes for the following year.”

To sustain and continually reinvent its Santa Tracker, NORAD relies on a large roster of volunteers, from tech companies like Microsoft to local businesses in Colorado Springs that provide call center operators with coffee, water, sandwiches and snacks.

“All of our partners have approached NORAD wanting to be a part of the program, and they all provide those services gratis,” Schlachter says. “We could not have this program without their generosity.”

At Microsoft, more than 25 employees worked on the Santa Tracker website and chatbot throughout the year. That includes Azure and Bing engineers, plus engineers from the FastTrack for Azure team, a technical enablement program that helps with rapid design and deployment of cloud solutions.

In 2019, the Santa Tracker website racked up about 15 million pageviews.

The homepage for the NORAD Santa Tracker website.
The NORAD Santa Tracker website.

Earlier this year, many of those same employees were busy helping Microsoft customers and partners shift their companies to remote work. Against that pandemic backdrop, Microsoft engineers continued to collaborate with NORAD to update the website and build the chatbot, says Susan Sullivan, a Microsoft senior program manager in Azure engineering.

“The worry might have been: How does a program like this, not on people’s minds in March, April and May, get the traction it needs when everybody is totally distracted?” Sullivan says.

“But individuals saw the Santa Tracker program and enjoyed taking a deep breath of something fresh. It was a nice respite from all of the craziness going on,” she adds.

Sullivan leads Microsoft’s Santa Tracker efforts. That includes holding weekly meetings on Microsoft Teams with Schlachter and others at NORAD. Amid those months of planning and designing, news of the pandemic infused the team with extra urgency to deliver a website that was both memorable and fully reliable, Sullivan says.

It was as if they were protecting a precious piece of Christmas for kids around the world.

“There is an even bigger spirit behind the work this year,” Sullivan says. “I do imagine kids being more engaged online, more interested in the uplifting aspect of Christmas, and families taking the time to really make it special.

“Everything does feel like it’s more important this year,” she adds. “It feels like there’s a bigger opportunity to bring joy.”

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The perfect Cheeto: How PepsiCo is using Microsoft’s Project Bonsai to raise the (snack) bar

Once the developers had created that simulation framework, the AI algorithm learns through trial and error as well as feedback from operators – a process called reinforcement learning. In the simulation, the AI solution can simulate a day’s run in a mere 30 seconds.

That means the AI solution has easily gone through more simulated runs than an operator could see in many lifetimes. And its computing power means it can come up with the right option far faster. Plus, it learned from the company’s most skilled operators and Cheetos experts, so it’s monitoring the fluctuations in quality and productivity from the highest level of experience.

The AI solution “could encapsulate the knowledge and skill of the best operators, then apply that through other facilities,” says Jayson Stemmler, a technical project manager at Neal Analytics who worked on the PepsiCo pilot project. “This solution reveals interactions and relationships that might not be intuitive to operators but that exist in the data. Without the manual measurement process, PepsiCo’s engineers are able to be more efficient with their time and focus on breakthrough innovation.”

A cross section of a Cheetos puff with the words size, flavor, shape and air

A few bad Cheetos?

After the solution spent some time in its simulation proving ground, it was time to take it to a test plant in PepsiCo’s Plano facility to see how it did with the real thing, which means testing it with some imperfect Cheetos.

“To develop this technology, we need to be able to make product that’s not good, so the AI can learn to take the product back into spec,” says Sean Eichenlaub, a senior principal engineer at PepsiCo.

Personally, I don’t see how any Cheetos could be “not good,” but I understand PepsiCo is going for perfect.

With the computer vision system continually monitoring and sending data to the Project Bonsai solution, any variance from that ideal can be fixed ASAP.

“With faster corrections, we can avoid the potential issues of going out of spec, such as having to discard product, or problems with packaging and waste,” Eichenlaub says.

I, for one, am all for a bag full of perfect Cheetos. And while the company prepares to use this Project Bonsai solution at a production plant, it’s also looking into using it with other Frito-Lay products, including the even-more-complex tortilla chip.

Leah Culler edits Microsoft’s AI Blog for Business & Technology.

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