Tag: Recent News

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Microsoft launches program to enhance privacy, security tools with advances in differential privacy

The invention of differential privacy was ahead of its time. The technology, pioneered by Microsoft researchers 15 years ago, makes it possible to extract useful insights from datasets, while safeguarding the privacy of the individuals included in the data. What was needed to realize its full potential? The marriage of cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI), which allows for the sharing and analysis of huge amounts of data requiring that individual personal privacy is protected.

Over the past year, Microsoft collaborated with the OpenDP Initiative, led by Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) and School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), and together we launched the open-source differential privacy platform, SmartNoise. We’re excited about the results and the learnings we’ve collected to date. My colleague Sarah Bird recently wrote about those learnings and how Microsoft is adopting differential privacy into some of our products. Differential privacy has also become a powerful new tool in Microsoft’s privacy and security ecosystem. Externally, we’re working with partners, exploring how differential privacy applies in real world scenarios, and today we’re launching the SmartNoise Early Adopter Acceleration Program to attract more.

Differential privacy within Microsoft’s security and privacy landscape

Today, data is the fuel that drives innovation. However, legitimate security and privacy concerns restrict the ability to fully unlock the power of data. That’s understandable when you consider that data is often the most valuable asset an organization and an individual has. Microsoft is developing a range of new technologies including Azure Confidential Computing, homomorphic encryption, secure multi-party computation and federated learning to provide stronger protections and eliminate many types of threats. Each of these technologies is a valuable addition to our portfolio because no single technology solves every type of problem. However, by using them together, we are able to build solutions with unprecedented levels of privacy and security.

Encrypting data while at rest and in transit are industry standard now. The addition of Azure Confidential Computing furthers this protecting your data in use – or during computation – in a secure hardware environment. This reduces your risk to vulnerabilities like malware, insider attacks and malicious or negligent administrators.

By adding differential privacy to our suite of security and privacy technologies, Microsoft is providing another step in this journey. Differential privacy ensures that the result of a computation is safe to share or use. When data is released with differential privacy applied, your dataset has the guarantee that any individual in the dataset cannot be reidentified. SmartNoise provides organizations with additional confidence in fields like financial services and health care where both securing highly sensitive data and protecting privacy is a necessity.

With innovations like SmartNoise and Azure Confidential Computing, Microsoft is providing the tools and technology to ensure individuals data is secure and private throughout its life cycle from the beginning all the way through to the intelligence it delivers.

Differential privacy in practice

In addition to Harvard’s IQSS and SEAS, Microsoft is also working with several partners to explore the potential for differential privacy.

One of our thought leaders and partners is Educational Results Partnership (ERP), a nonprofit organization that applies data science to improve student outcomes and career readiness throughout the educational system. ERP has accumulated the largest database in the US on student achievement from kindergarten to students’ entry into the labor market. Their mission is to use actionable data to close equity gaps in education and the labor market by improving academic and workforce outcomes for students in traditionally disenfranchised communities and populations.

Dr. Jim Lanich, ERP’s president and CEO said, “ERP’s data-informed approach relies on collecting data from educational and government institutions throughout the United States. We’re excited to be partnering with Microsoft on the development of a differential privacy application that will allow organizations to look deeper into their data while strengthening privacy protections for students and individuals. The ability to draw more meaningful insights from the data will lead to action that can improve outcomes and close equity gaps.”

Another key partner is Humana, a health care company whose goal is to improve the health of their millions of members by delivering simple and easy health care experiences that lead to differentiated health outcomes. To achieve their goal, Humana is investing in data, analytics and digital health technologies to share data across all parties delivering care.

Slawek Kierner, Humana’s SVP of Enterprise Data and Analytics said, “Collaboration is key in tackling the challenges in health care. Having tools that can protect the privacy of individuals while preserving the underlying information is key. At Humana, we are exploring how differential privacy can enable us to share data with partners like researchers, community organizations, and academics to better serve our members while protecting their privacy.”

In addition, Microsoft is partnering with the Open Data Institute on an Education Open Data Challenge to generate innovative solutions to close the digital divide and improve learning outcomes in K-12 education. Among other resources, participants in the challenge will receive access to Microsoft’s US broadband usage data with differential privacy applied to protect individuals’ privacy. This dataset was initially created to help the FCC and policymakers bridge the digital divide. By opening up the data further via Differential Privacy we are enabling a whole new use case to help solve some of the world’s educational challenges. We encourage those interested to register. You can find more information here.

SmartNoise Early Adopter Acceleration Program

We’re excited about the progress we’ve made in just a little over a year through our collaboration with Harvard and the OpenDP initiative. Our partners levering SmartNoise and differential privacy have taught us a great deal about how SmartNoise can advance the sharing of data and insights. But there is more work to be done, and we are looking for additional partners to help with this effort.

We are introducing the SmartNoise Early Adopter Acceleration Program to support usage and adoption of SmartNoise and OpenDP. This collaboration program with the SmartNoise team aims to accelerate the adoption of differential privacy in solutions today that will open data and offer insights to benefit society.

If you have a project that would benefit from using differential privacy, we invite you to apply. We will accept applications through February 1, 2021. Selected applicants will be notified by March 1, 2021.

Selected teams can engage in technical and conceptual considerations incorporating SmartNoise and differential privacy into their solutions. These collaboration activities include:

  • SmartNoise and OpenDP technical assistance and guidance
  • Differential privacy methodology reviews
  • Guidance and feedback on privacy budgets, setting parameters and managing epsilon
  • Design and architecture reviews and consultation

 And, since there is more work to do, there will be more progress and learnings to share. Microsoft is proud to be part of this first-of-its-kind open-source differential privacy platform with Harvard IQSS and SEAS and OpenDP community and we are committed to engaging with developers, researchers and companies as this project moves forward. If you already incorporate differential privacy into your work, we welcome your thoughts or feedback about SmartNoise on GitHub.

Tags: , , , , ,

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Microsoft Global Human Rights Statement addresses COVID-19, racial injustice

Human Rights Day, December 10, both honors the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on this day in 1948, and challenges all of us to live up to its highest aspirations. To help mark Human Rights Day 2020, we are pleased to release an update to the Microsoft Global Human Rights Statement, which we are publishing in 18 languages and dialects. First publicly released in 2012, and last updated in 2016, our Global Human Rights Statement is the main expression of how we understand and approach our human rights responsibilities.

At Microsoft, we’re guided by a simple but foundational belief: When your technology changes the world, you bear a responsibility to help address the world you have helped create. Over the past few decades, digital technology has brought sweeping changes to the ways that we work and live. Our company has been at the forefront of these changes, and we continue to push forward in our mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Let me offer just two examples.

Global pandemic: Covid-19 has made this year unusually challenging for human rights worldwide. The Universal Declaration enshrines the rights to life, medical care, work and education. Millions of people have lost access to these rights and more because of the Covid-19 pandemic. We are saddened by all of the losses this year has brought. We have also been inspired to see that, thanks to advances in digital technology, more children can learn, more patients can receive adequate medical care, and more people can continue working than would have been imaginable even a decade ago.

Racial injustice: This past summer, global attention was directed to discrimination against Black and African American people in the US criminal legal system, including in policing, prosecution, sentencing and corrections. This results in many adverse human rights impacts, including the rights to equality; non-discrimination; life, liberty and security of person; freedom from cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment; equal protection of the law; and freedom of peaceful assembly and association. Worldwide, the issues of race, racism and criminal justice demonstrate how societies and the institutions intended to protect the rights of everyone can be fragile, and how they can be turned against vulnerable populations. Overall, this emphasizes the need for everyone, including leaders, businesses and individuals, to uphold behaviors and principles that protect and preserve the rights and freedoms of everyone in all societies. At Microsoft we are committed to advancing racial justice through public policy, by bringing to related challenges the power of data and digital technology in ways that increase transparency and accountability, and by focusing on diversity and inclusion in all our business practices and activities.

As part of Microsoft’s celebrations to mark the 75th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations, in September Brad Smith, Microsoft’s President, once again had the chance to speak with the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet. During their conversation, they discussed Covid-19’s impact on human rights, multilateralism, gender equality, climate change and the importance of digital connectivity. That conversation illustrates how the human rights framework can help everyone, including Microsoft, to navigate the complex challenges we face today and in the months and years ahead.

So, I invite you to read our new Global Human Rights Statement. Given the importance that we ascribe to respect for human rights in everything we do at Microsoft, we think it’s important to share with our customers and partners how we meet our commitment to respect human rights by engaging, learning from, and working with stakeholders, by advocating for rights-respecting public policies, and by demonstrating respect for human rights in our products, services and business practices.

May we emerge from this pandemic and confront the challenges ahead with an even greater respect for – and emphasis on – the value of human rights. And, as always, we welcome feedback as to how we at Microsoft can best live up to the aspirations that we have embraced.

Tags: , , ,

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Now generally available, Azure Stack HCI delivers world-class hyperconverged infrastructure

As a new normal has been defined by a worldwide pandemic and economic changes this year, businesses have sought new ways to optimize the delivery of their goods and services and better IT cost efficiency in an increasingly remote work environment.

The technology that lays the foundation for remote work, hyperconverged infrastructure, has long been an ideal way for organizations to deliver key workloads such as virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), IT for remote offices and branch offices (ROBO) and for companies to drive datacenter modernization. Azure Stack HCI delivers on these customer needs with the innovation of Azure integration. With our cloud-native approach, our goal is to help customers realize higher value HCI through quick deployment and integration that leverages familiar management and tools with flexible Azure subscription pricing.

Customers and partners benefit from Azure Stack HCI innovations today

With the general availability of Azure Stack HCI today, we’ve taken the great feedback customers provided in preview to deliver a full-featured offering that includes centralized management, stretch clustering, built in hybrid capabilities, and Azure Arc integration. Our approach is resonating with customers and partners alike, including integrated system partners DataON, Dell Technologies, and Lenovo. Customers across many verticals, including Benenden Schools, Bradley Legal, the Cherokee County School District, Florida State Medical College of Medicine, and Hendrick Motorsports have already seen success with Azure Stack HCI through participation in preview and have achieved business value from Azure Stack HCI in driving early production deployment for multiple use cases including ROBO, database workloads, and datacenter modernization in general. Read the customer experience blog.

#21167

Do more with the new Azure Stack HCI and integrated systems

The innovations delivered by Azure Stack HCI open a wide range of customer scenarios. For example, simplifying hybrid with native Azure integration provides visibility of the clusters in the Azure Portal for hybrid management. Another key innovation is the newly built-in stretched clustering capabilities to easily enhance a customer disaster recovery strategy. See this technical video to learn more.

As customers are looking to minimize their time to value when deploying new infrastructure, Microsoft has worked with its partners to deliver a new integrated system experience for Azure Stack HCI as one of the form factors available. These integrated systems are shipping as pre-racked, with software, hardware, and firmware pre-installed and a simple deployment GUI. The new Azure Stack HCI full stack updates feature is integrated with each of the partner systems, bringing one click orchestration when new features or security updates need to be applied to the cluster. The system administrator is always in control, and always gets the latest features and validated full-stack updates.

Partner ecosystem

Today’s general availability also marks multiple integrated systems from our trusted partners such as DataON, Dell Technologies, and Lenovo. These Azure Stack HCI integrated systems have been co-engineered for enterprise-ready reliability and simplicity.

“As a partner that made the “Microsoft choice” we are bullish about the new simplicity and ease of use that Azure Stack HCI integrated systems bring to our customers. We have worked hand in hand with Microsoft to deliver a seamless experience on our new DataON AZS product line with DataON MUST Pro for Windows Admin Center. MUST Pro simplifies deployment and updating on Azure Stack HCI with minimal disruption to your hybrid cloud infrastructure. We believe that all industry verticals can benefit from the innovation delivered by such a system.”  —Howard Lo, Vice President, Sales & Marketing, DataON

“With a long-standing history of bringing products to market with Microsoft, we are introducing the Dell EMC Integrated System for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI built on trusted Dell EMC PowerEdge server technology. As part of our industry leading hyperconverged portfolio, this all-in-one, jointly engineered system delivers an Azure hybrid cloud consumption experience for customers with integrated deployment and full-stack automated lifecycle management.” —Jon Siegal, Vice President of Product Marketing, Dell Technologies

“Lenovo is looking forward to bringing Microsoft Azure Stack HCI integrated form factor to Lenovo’s most popular servers and Edge server lineup. Our joint partnership with Microsoft delivers a new hyperconverged infrastructure solution that helps our mutual customers accelerate their cloud journey. The hybrid capabilities and seamless integration with Azure is a perfect complement to the Lenovo ThinkAgile MX product line.” —Kamran Amini, Vice President and General Manager, Server, Storage, and Software Defined Infrastructure, Lenovo Data Center Group

Another great way to deploy Azure Stack HCI is using the Intel Select Solution offerings that deliver lots of flexibility.

“Azure Stack HCI reimagines hybrid cloud for enterprises with newfound simplicity in how IT can access Azure services based on what makes sense for their business, whether that is onpremises or in the cloud. The Intel Select Solutions for Azure Stack HCI are market-ready solutions delivered by a breadth of partners, extensively tested and performance verified to further simplify deployment while giving customers the scale and efficiency needed for a modern infrastructure to advance their business.” —Jason Grebe, Corporate Vice President, General Manager, Cloud Enterprise Solutions Group at Intel.

In addition, today’s general availability also brings new Independent Software Vendor support for Azure Stack HCI with Commvault, DataDog, Veeam and Veritas—now all fully operable with Azure Stack HCI to give our customers an even broader choice of tools.

Next steps

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Microsoft launches anti-corruption technology to help governments

Today marks the 15th anniversary of the United Nations’ International Anti-Corruption Day. On this day, Microsoft is proud to join with others from around the world to use our voice in support of International Anti-Corruption Day and to commit to take steps to reduce corruption.

In recognition of this important day, we are launching Microsoft Anti-Corruption Technology and Solutions (ACTS) to help empower governments and other stakeholders in their corruption fight. With this initiative, we hope to bend the curve of corruption by helping governments innovate with technology, expertise, and other resources.

The UN’s Anti-Corruption Day is observed each year to educate the public on the issue of corruption, to mobilize organizations and governments to work together to help eradicate it, and to highlight successful anti-corruption efforts and initiatives. As noted by the UN, corruption is a complex political, social, and economic phenomenon that is not unique to any single country or government. It undermines democratic institutions, slows economic growth, and contributes to governmental instability. And it is not a new problem. History is rife with examples across the centuries – just this last month, archeologists decoded an inscription by the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus to the people of the ancient city of Nicopolis ad Istrum suggesting gratitude and appreciation for a bribe.

The UN reports that the cost of corruption is more than $3.6 trillion dollars a year. This means that trillions of dollars every year are diverted from needed investments in education, health care, and critical infrastructure around the world. The impact of this is profound: Well-intentioned governments are thwarted in their ability to invest in basic humanitarian causes, and the deceptions caused by corruption subvert honest endeavors to foster inclusive and sustainable growth. Tragically, the people who end up suffering most are exactly the people who can afford it least.

The global events of this year have created a world particularly vulnerable to corruption. As noted by the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, “Corruption … is even more damaging in times of crisis – as the world is experiencing now with the Covid-19 pandemic. The response to the virus is creating new opportunities to exploit weak oversight and inadequate transparency, diverting funds away from people in their hour of greatest need.” Governments around the world are scrambling to address the Covid-19 pandemic – speeding to implement measures to address the health emergency and to provide resources for those hardest hit by the resulting economic downturn. These unprecedented investments, however, have exposed vulnerabilities in supply chains, procurement processes, and corruption controls.

This year’s Anti-Corruption Day theme, Recover with Integrity, serves as an important reminder of the critical importance of ensuring that pandemic resources reach their intended recipients. Unless we reduce corruption by exposing it through greater transparency and address it through more effective controls, recovery will be jeopardized.

The opportunity

At Microsoft, we believe corruption is an urgent global issue that can and must be solved. It will require a focused and comprehensive solution, and it will require governments, civil society, and the private sector all working together to promote transparency, create effective controls, and drive accountability. It is a daunting task, but never before has the world had the kinds of tools to fight corruption that exist today. We know, for instance, that data can illuminate hidden patterns and relationships to provide governments with better tools to ensure public moneys go to their intended purposes. Technology resources such as cloud computing, data visualization, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning provide powerful tools for governments and corporations to aggregate and analyze their enormous and complex datasets in the cloud, ferreting out corruption from the shadows where it lives, and even preventing corruption before it happens.

Our commitment

In the next decade, Microsoft ACTS will leverage the company’s investments in cloud computing, data visualization, AI, machine learning, and other emerging technologies to enhance transparency and to detect and deter corruption. We will endeavor to bring the most promising solutions to the broadest possible audience, using our partner networks, programs, and global employee base to scale solutions through careful consideration of their priorities, technical infrastructure, and capabilities.

Over the last six months, we have already begun to make investments in support of the Microsoft ACTS initiative, including a partnership with the Inter-American Development Bank to advance anti-corruption, transparency, and integrity objectives in Latin America and the Caribbean. Announced in July 2020, we are partnering with the IDB Transparency Fund to help bring greater transparency to the use of Covid-19 economic stimulus funds, building on the Mapa Inversiones platform developed by the IDB with Microsoft support and already adopted by many countries in the region. In the coming months and years, we look forward to additional partnerships, learning as we go, and empowering the work of others.

Microsoft is excited not only by the potential for technology to make positive changes on a long-standing societal problem that burdens the lives of citizens, distorts economic development, and erodes trust in public institutions, but also by the opportunity to partner with the international community in this fight.

We stand with the United Nations and the initiatives undertaken by governments around the world to stamp out corruption, and we look forward to working with governments, civil society, and others in the private sector to help us all recover with integrity.

Tags: , , , , ,

Posted on by — Leave a comment

This is bigger than all of us: Why Microsoft is signing The Climate Pledge

Nearly a year ago, Microsoft announced an ambitious commitment: to become carbon negative by 2030 and remove more carbon than we directly emitted since our founding from the environment by 2050. Since then, we’ve continued to build on our sustainability work by adding commitments to become water positive, zero waste, and to protect more land than we use by 2030. 

As a technology company we feel a particular sense of responsibility because we know that one of the biggest opportunities for organizations of all kinds to reduce their environmental impacts will be the adoption of digital innovations. At Microsoft we want to be the trusted technology partner to help these organizations solve their sustainability challenges. But for that to happen it is critical that the entire private sector makes the climate crisis a priority.

That’s why, today, Microsoft is signing The Climate Pledge – a commitment to meet Paris Agreement targets 10 years early, by 2040, through comprehensive and measurable interventions on emissions. The pledge fits within Microsoft’s own bold commitments. We’re adding our voice to encourage others to make their own climate commitments, and in doing so, demonstrating that companies from diverse sectors, including direct competitors, can collaborate in tackling climate change. 

Because it will take multiple solutions to solve the climate crisis, Microsoft is working with many organizations on environmental issues. By combining our voice with The Climate Pledge member companies and our partners in the WeMeanBusiness coalition, we can spur broader engagement on climate action.

We also want to enable businesses to go from setting commitments to achieving them, enabled through our work with the Transform to Net Zero coalition, a group of leading companies committed to helping organizations achieve a net-zero carbon future through the production of templates and roadmaps that companies can follow to drive carbon to zero. As a contribution to that coalition, Microsoft, in partnership with PwC, published a framework of the Building Blocks for Net Zero Transformation. The first step? Make sustainability a priority and create climate commitments that are aligned with the high level of ambition our future requires.

The good news is that many companies have done just that. Since we announced our carbon negative commitment, the number of companies worldwide setting net-zero targets has nearly doubled. But most companies have yet to make net-zero commitments, and time is running out to significantly grow the number of corporate climate commitments.

What’s needed is for everybody to work together to build the enabling conditions for climate solutions. Driving change must be an inclusive undertaking. That means as many companies as possible creating a plan and committing to actions needed to hit net zero. The Climate Pledge provides a framework and will help companies around the world take that first step to scale up their climate commitments.

With today’s pledge, we are striving to make a difference at pace and at scale. We will continue to innovate, to invest in green technology, and to build on our climate ambition. And we will continue to work with organizations of all kinds to advance this work, because no one can do it alone. 

Published By

Posted on by — Leave a comment

New features on Xbox Family Settings App help manage children’s gaming

Gaming has long been a significant source of joy, inspiration, and social connection for players around the world, and social distancing has made this truer now than ever before. With the holiday break on the horizon, many parents and caregivers may be looking for ways to help balance screen time and family time. We know achieving this balance is important to families. That is why earlier this fall, we launched the Xbox Family Settings app for free on iOS and Android. Today, we are taking the next step on our journey to support families by introducing two new app features for child accounts on Xbox Live.

Pause Screen Time

The ability to pause screen time has been our number-one requested feature from parents and caregivers. Today, we are happy to add the Pause Screen Time feature to the app, which empowers parents to temporarily pause screen time for their children’s accounts – even if they have more screen time available for the day.

Whether the feature is used to reinforce asks to set the table for dinner or to make sure homework is completed, this feature will block children from their account until parents decide it’s time to play again, or until the block expires at the end of the day. Children will see the standard “Your screen time is up” notification on their screen when parents press pause, and once parents decide play can resume, the preestablished rules for game time will take effect.

Pause your children’s game time by temporarily blocking their screen time. When paused, your child will see the “your screen time is up” message until you decide they can play again.

Ask to Buy

As we head into the holidays, it makes sense that children might want to purchase new games to play.  We saw that our Ask to Buy feature – which is currently available via family settings on Xbox via console and PC – helps parents manage their children’s spending. So, we brought the feature to the Xbox Family Settings App so parents can manage from their phone.

Pause your children’s game time by temporarily blocking their screen time. When paused, your child will see the “your screen time is up” message until you decide they can play again.

If the setting is on, when children choose a game they would like to purchase, a request will be sent to the parent’s phone. This notification will include a link to where they can learn more about the game before approving or declining the purchase. The app will also list approved purchases so parents can keep track of recent purchases.

We hope that this feature helps take one more thing off the plates of busy parents everywhere.

When “Ask to buy” is activated for your children, you can get a notification in the app.

These two features join the existing app’s functionality, which helps to tailor each child’s access to Xbox:

  • Screen time limits – set limits for each day of the week; for example, you can allow for more game time on the weekends or reduce it during the school week. And a new feature available today allows parents to proactively grant additional screen time – a great option if they did well on a test or completed their homework!
  • Content filters – set filters based on the age of each child; for example, an 8-year-old can only access games that are rated E and will be blocked from accessing titles that are intended for more mature players.
  • Play and communication settings – choose the option to block all access to play and communication with other players, limit access to “friends only” or grant permission for older children to play and chat with “everyone.”
  • Friends list – new with the app is the ability to approve or decline friend requests your child has made to add friends; parents can also view their friends list.
  • Activity reports – view daily and weekly activity reports for each child to understand how they are spending their time on Xbox.

Gaming is a great way to keep in touch with friends and family and have fun throughout the year, but it should also be part of a balanced lifestyle. We hope the Xbox Family Settings app will empower parents to have conversations about the right amount of gaming and appropriate content with their children. We’ll continue to update the Xbox Family Settings app to ensure that it meets the needs of today’s families and help everyone to enjoy fun and age-appropriate gaming.

Download the Xbox Family Settings app today for free for iOS and Android to jump in and easily manage your family’s gaming on-the-go.

For more information about the Xbox Family Settings app, visit Xbox.com/family-app.

Microsoft is committed to empowering families to set boundaries and encourage responsible technology use by offering choices on the tools that are right for each family’s unique needs – learn more here.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Microsoft designs a campus with the evolution of work in mind

It goes without saying that the pandemic has upended work life in 2020. But rather than seeing this period of compulsory remote work as a one-off byproduct of COVID-19, it can be understood as an inflection point in a long-coming technology-driven reckoning on the nature of office work.

Will employees be looking for more ways to connect in person after the pandemic? How about in a decade or 20 years, for that matter? It might seem an odd moment to celebrate the opening of Microsoft’s new state-of-the-art 46,000 square meter campus in Herzliya, Israel, except for that fact that questions around different and creative ways of working were already deliberated when the campus was designed – four years ago.

“This was a once-in-a-lifetime project,” said Tel Aviv-based Lead Architect Vered Gindi of Vered Gindi Architects, who designed the campus as a joint venture with the Israeli and French firm, GSArch. “We started with fundamental questions like ‘Why does a person actually want to come into an office?’ and ‘Why do they need an office at all?’ We aimed to create a space that would continue to be relevant for decades; no matter what comes next.”

Microsoft Israel and the design team landed on a few guiding principles for the development of the new campus. The first principle was to lessen the campus’ long-term impact on the environment, making it as sustainable as possible. The second was to aspire to the dynamic creativity of urban environments over the traditional grids or open-floor plans of most office spaces. And the third was to offer a flexible, inclusive workspace that can be endlessly customized to fit employee needs.

A workplace of the future must justify its existence by mitigating its impact on the environment. Michal Braverman-Blumenstyk, CVP and general manager of Microsoft Israel R&D, said, “Microsoft’s sustainability value has been incorporated into every aspect of the campus, and a great deal of thought was put into every detail, from convenient transportation, through accessibility and integration of diverse populations, to wellbeing in food, fitness and leisure.”

We aimed to create a space that would continue to be relevant for decades; no matter what comes next.

In a location that registers temperatures around 27 C (80 F) for some seven months out of the year with almost no precipitation, there is also a concerted effort to reduce energy and water consumption. The Herzliya campus is the first LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) V4 Building Design and Construction Gold certified building in Israel, making it one of the most sustainable building in the country.

The campus uses atmospheric generators that pull moisture from the air to produce drinking water. The system will create some 237,000 liters of fresh water per year. The air filtration system not only cleans indoor air, including inside of the elevators, but it also collects and repurposes condensed water. Rosenbaum said, “All of the air conditioning condensate water is reused for irrigation and to reduce energy needs for cooling. This is an additional estimated saving of over 3 million liters of water per year.”

The campus has 800 square meters of photovoltaic cells, which will provide 100% of the power needed to run the campus dining facilities and the exterior lighting. The buildings are also equipped with an advanced double-skin curtain wall with integrated automatic interior blinds, which both help deflect sunlight and keep the buildings from overheating in the first place.

As for the decision to model the campus off of an urban environment, Gindi explained, “A city is a place of intersection, it provides private residential moments alongside frequent public moments. You are surrounded by people, activities and culture. You are part of something bigger than yourself. And, in this case, you are not just going to work; you are experiencing a lifestyle.”

Outdoor walkway with greenery

Work and walk outdoors on the campus bridge

The “city” is divided into four hubs: Downtown, the industrial zone; Midtown, the eclectic, playful mainstream area; The Garden, the green outdoor level; and Uptown, which is made to feel like a boutique hotel. “Boulevards” tie together the different zones.

This innovative design helps to bind together the dynamic roles within the campus which range from sales and marketing to the Israel Development Center, Microsoft’s first R&D site outside the United States, established in 1991 and now a major force in cybersecurity and AI.

Meeting room with window view, couch and swing
Casual meeting room

The Herzliya campus utilizes Microsoft’s existing yet nascent concept of team-based “neighborhoods” that are big enough to offer public interaction but small enough to give privacy when needed. Each neighborhood in Herzliya is also equipped with its own “zone room” (also known as “code room”) and every two neighborhoods share a four-person “focus room” that is only available to those teams.

The campus is meant to be part of employees’ social and cultural life. It contains all of the elements of a daily routine, from a café with baristas who can make your coffee just like you desire to a yoga room, dog playground, sports facilities, community gardens and a variety of indoor and outdoor food pavilions.

Download image

1 of 7

Ecological pool (one of five campus gardens)

Download image

2 of 7

Outdoor basketball and volleyball court

Download image

3 of 7

Yoga room

Download image

4 of 7

Gym

Download image

5 of 7

Music room

Download image

6 of 7

Family playroom

Download image

7 of 7

Food court & café breakout area

“This variety allows people to design a routine that works best for them,” said Oren Yerushalmi Rosenbaum, senior portfolio manager for Microsoft Real Estate & Facilities in Israel & Serbia. “This is what it is all about: flexibility and choice. And that extends to equal opportunity for how people access and use their work spaces.”

Inclusivity is not just a concept but is put into practice through hiring. Numerous people who operate the campus are deaf, blind or have mobility or mental disabilities. Upon arrival at the campus, visitors are greeted at sit and stand arrival desks in the lobby, offering abundant options to receive service.

There is Braille throughout the campus, from welcoming pamphlets to descriptions of all artwork from local artists that adorns the public spaces to a tactile floor that supports people with blindness to navigate the buildings. There is also an app to assist those with mobility challenges to use the elevators.

This is what it is all about: flexibility and choice. And that extends to equal opportunity for how people access and use their work spaces.

The campus features accessible parking spaces, automatic doors, gender-inclusive bathroom facilities, as well as special audio systems for those with hearing impairment. Among the features that can be height-adjusted for access are the kitchenettes, touch screens for campus directions, work surfaces and sitting areas.

“While the campus is raising the bar for accessibility in Israel,” Rosenbaum said, “the goal was to think beyond our borders and raise the diversity and inclusion bar globally.”

“The campus brings a new experience to all of Microsoft’s employees in Israel, and I’m happy for this personal and professional union,” said Ronit Atad, general manager, Microsoft Israel. “It will empower us and improve our service to our customers and partners.”

Open workspace with rolling desks and chairs
Neighborhood workplace

Operational flexibility is of the upmost importance. Employees have autonomy over how they work. Desks are on rolling castors and have over 2 meters of cables, so they can be relocated without having to call building services. Rosenbaum said, “Over your 100 square meters, you can have flexibility to organize and personalize your space: put your desks face-to-face or back-to-back, far apart or whatever is right for you. This makes social distancing easier.”

Employees can always find a change of scenery without having to leave the building. All areas offer window views. Acoustic partitions can be added as necessary and shelving systems between groups can be removed so that two teams can combine into one or divide into two sub-teams. This is called the “flexible grid.”

Meeting room with podium, presentation screen and movable chairs
MTC innovation theater: Customer Innovation Center

There are no traditional auditoriums. Instead, there are multipurpose rooms that can hold different sized events or trainings. Many of these rooms are also on the flexible grid and can be reorganized, split and merged to fit the desires of meeting organizers.

“We want to support everyone to have a better, more efficient and more vibrant work life,” said Rosenbaum. “We also have prayer rooms, playrooms and space to shoot hoops both inside and outside the building.”

With all of these approaches, Microsoft aimed to build a campus that is relevant both now and decades into the future. COVID-19 is giving the campus a stress test sooner than expected, but its design has prepared it not only for a pandemic but for a much longer-term changing nature of work.

Birds-eye view of Microsoft Israel common area overlooking stairs

Designed for lifestyle

Coming out of the most recent national lockdown, the Israel campus has slowly started to welcome back employees. There is widespread instructional signage for COVID-19 protocols, 2 meters of social distancing, no sharing of keyboards or mice at common desks and the cleaning team disinfects the spaces every night. “But, in reality, it looks pretty much the same as it would have without COVID-19,” said Rosenbaum. “Due to the thought that went into this campus, we were already most of the way to where we needed to be.”

Beyond all of the flexibility and sustainability, Microsoft was adamant that people not view the campus as an office building on the far end of a commute but, instead, a place where they connect with others in a meaningful and positive way, Gindi said. “Our ultimate goal was to create a place that people will actually miss when they’re not there.”

Photos by Amit Geron Photography

More Stories

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Satya Nadella in Wired: Want a more equitable future? Empower citizen developers

As the world anticipates a new US Congress and a new administration, we need a strategy to reimagine and rebuild communities, industries, companies, and nations. As we battle cascading disruptions from a global pandemic, economic strain, climate-related crises, and unrest over racial injustice, technology should be part of a solution—but technology alone is not enough.

WIRED OPINION

ABOUT

Satya Nadella is the CEO of Microsoft. Marco Iansiti is a professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School and chairman of Keystone.AI.

To more evenly spread economic opportunity and resilience, we must democratize “tech intensity,” a combination of tech and people skills—including among citizen developers. This so-called intensity is made up of three dimensions: the adoption of technology, the capability of individuals to use it, and their trust in the organizations deploying it. Tools from cloud computing to AI should be in the hands of every knowledge worker, first-line worker, organization, and public-sector agency around the world.

Today’s farmer flies a low-cost drone over agricultural fields, sending data back to the farmhouse, where the intelligent cloud and the intelligent edge can provide instant analysis on where lack of moisture or insects are creating hot spots. The factory floor operator now increasingly relies on next-generation skills to discern the drift of a drill bit to ensure precision manufacturing. Doctors, regardless of where they are located, convene virtually using augmented reality to examine a patient and share images and instantly receive insights from the data.

The next decade of economic performance for every organization will be defined by the speed of its digital transformation, with tech and skills together creating competitive advantages. As such, tech intensity, like electricity, will fade into the background, becoming part and parcel of society.

Research conducted by Microsoft and Keystone points to the critical role of investment not just in tech but in creating an architecture that can enable anyone to access opportunity across divides and barriers, developing the capabilities required to drive the innovation desperately needed to rebuild.

Success in this moment of unprecedented turbulence will require us to think boldly and move beyond traditional approaches. The current crisis demands innovation across both public and private sectors, and across every geographic and social community. This calls not only for developing individual skills, but also for providing an architecture to ensure that the necessary tools, data, and technology are broadly accessible and made available across traditionally isolated groups and geographies. The importance of technology and innovation is hardly a new idea. But it is people’s widespread and intense use of tech and tools that is the crucial ingredient.

For the past several years, the business and technology industries have spoken of empowering citizen developers, defined somewhat narrowly as legions of individuals who are empowered to drive innovation from data, technology, and tools that are easy to create and deploy. These citizen developers don’t replace professional software developers, but rather augment them and build on top of their innovations. Citizen developers are crucial because the potential of data and software-based innovation is enormous in any organization.

Citizen developers amplify the impact of professional software developers, and vice versa. Professional developers built Excel and Visual Studio, but workers of every kind were trained to build on top of these innovations. Overall productivity improved as a result. In today’s cloud era, we again need both. Relying only on traditional technology development resources will never be enough to realize the countless opportunities that exist.

Conducted across more than 130 leading companies, our research shows that those with a more integrated technological and human resource architecture enjoyed more widespread innovation and outperformed the others, in industries as different as manufacturing, health care, retail, and financial services. In fact, companies with high tech intensity have doubled the growth rate on average of those with low tech intensity. In essence, those winning companies broke down traditional barriers, innovated more, and grew faster.

The impact of this approach could scale far beyond the private sector. Dartmouth economist Diego Comin and economist Bart Hobijn developed the Cross-Country Historical Adoption of Technology data set, examining the time frame over which 161 countries adopted 104 different technologies, from steam power to PCs. Based on this analysis, Comin argues that differences between rich and poor nations can largely be explained by the speed at which they adopted industrial technologies. But equally important, he says, is the intensity they used to put those new technologies to work. Even countries that were slow to adopt new technologies could catch up if their people had access to them and were taught to use them to solve the problems they were closest to. Are the technologies just sitting there, or are they available and easy to use for a trained workforce to get the most productivity out of them? The difference is tech intensity.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Cleaning up India’s mountains of e-waste

Singhal’s founding of Karo Sambhav is the result of a lifelong passion for environmental protection. He has a master’s degree from Sweden’s International Institute for Industrial Environmental Economics (IIIEE). He was also trained by Thomas Lindhqvist who coined the principle of “extended producer responsibility” (EPR), which argues that producers must hold responsibility for what happens with products after consumers are done using them.

Singhal finds it fascinating that humans are the only species that generate waste. “We turn elements into compounds, components, and then products. But converting those products back into their elemental form—how do we create the second part of that product system?” He worked on this problem during his stint with Nokia in Finland, Singapore, and later India.

In 2012 the Indian government introduced new e-waste management rules that oblige companies that release products in the market to also collect those products back for recycling. Five years after that policy change, Singhal felt compelled to launch an outfit that could help producer organizations to go about this expectation transparently.

“Until and unless there was good clean implementation, the policy would die down, and the government would not apply the same principle to other product categories,” he says. Several global tech giants—driven both by a need to meet regulations in their own businesses and a desire to bring change at the grassroots in India—supported him, including Mi India, the country’s largest smartphone and smart TV brand.

Mi India partnered with Karo Sambhav to help its customers get their e-waste picked up from their homes or dropped it off at its stores across the country.

“At Mi India, we believe that our focus should not only be on responsible recycling, but also on awareness generation. Karo Sambhav is creating awareness with schools and bulk consumers of electronic waste through awareness events. They are working very closely with the informal sector and helping them embrace the formal sector and they have succeeded in doing it,” says Prateik Das, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Lead, Mi India.

“But they can’t do it alone. All stakeholders, including the government, brands, customers, dealers, informal sector, recyclers, and producer responsibility organizations (like Karo Sambhav) need to come together and build a self-sustained ecosystem. As per the current rule, the entire liability of collecting and recycling e-waste is on brands only and because of this, the end result is not always so impressive.”

Posted on by — Leave a comment

A practical perspective on quantum computing

There’s a lot of speculation about the potential for quantum computing, but to get a clearer vision of the future impact, we need to disentangle myth from reality. At this week’s virtual Q2B conference, we take a pragmatic perspective to cut through the hype and discuss the practicality of quantum computers, how to future-proof quantum software development, and the real value obtained today through quantum-inspired solutions on classical computers.

Achieving practical quantum advantage

Dr. Matthias Troyer, Distinguished Scientist with Microsoft Quantum, explains what will be needed for quantum computing to be better and faster than classical computing in his talk Disentangling Hype from Reality: Achieving Practical Quantum Advantage. People talk about many potential problems they hope quantum computers can help with, including fighting cancer, forecasting the weather, or countering climate change. Having a pragmatic approach to determining real speedups will enable us to focus the work on the areas that will deliver impact.

For example, quantum computers have limited I/O capability and will thus not be good at big data problems. However, the area where quantum does excel is large compute problems on small data. This includes chemistry and materials science, for game-changing solutions like designing better batteries, new catalysts, quantum materials, or countering climate change. But even for compute-intensive problems, we need to take a closer look. Troyer explains that each operation in a quantum algorithm is slower by more than 10 orders of magnitude compared to a classical computer. This means we need a large speedup advantage in the algorithm to overcome the slowdowns intrinsic to the quantum system; we need superquadratic speedups.

Troyer is optimistic about the potential for quantum computing but brings a realistic perspective to what is needed to get to practical quantum advantage: small data/big compute problems, superquadratic speedup, fault-tolerant quantum computers scaling to millions of qubits and beyond, and the tools and systems to develop the algorithms to run the quantum systems.

Future-proofing quantum development

Developers and researchers want to ensure they invest in languages and tools that will adapt to the capabilities of more powerful quantum systems in the future. Microsoft’s open-source Quantum Intermediate Representation (QIR) and the Q# programming language provide developers with a flexible foundation that protects their development investments.

QIR is a new Microsoft-developed intermediate representation for quantum programs that is hardware and language agnostic, so it can be a common interface between many languages and target quantum computation platforms. Based on the popular open-source LLVM intermediate language, QIR is designed to enable the development of a broad and flexible ecosystem of software tools for quantum development.

As quantum computing capabilities evolve, we expect large-scale quantum applications will take full advantage of both classical and quantum computing resources working together. QIR provides full capabilities for describing rich classical computation fully integrated with quantum computation. It’s a key layer in achieving a scaled quantum system that can be programmed and controlled for general algorithms.

In his presentation at the Q2B conference, Future-Proofing Your Quantum Development with Q# and QIR, Microsoft Senior Software Engineer Stefan Wernli explains to a technical audience why QIR and Q# are practical investments for long-term quantum development. Learn more about QIR in our recent Quantum Blog post.

Quantum-inspired optimization solutions today

At the same time, there are ways to get practical value today through “quantum-inspired” solutions that apply quantum principles for increased speed and accuracy to algorithms running on classical computers.

We are already seeing how quantum-inspired optimization solutions can solve complex transportation and logistics challenges. An example is Microsoft’s collaboration with Trimble Transportation to optimize its transportation supply chain, presented at the Q2B conference in Freight for the Future: Quantum-Inspired Optimization for Transportation by Anita Ramanan, Microsoft Quantum Software Engineer, and Scott Vanselous, VP Digital Supply Chain Solutions at Trimble.

Trimble’s Vanselous explains how today’s increased dependence on e-commerce and shipping has fundamentally raised expectations across the supply chain. However, there was friction in the supply chain because of siloed data between shippers, carriers, and brokers; limited visibility; and a focus on task optimization vs. system optimization. Trimble and Microsoft are designing quantum-inspired load matching algorithms for a platform that enables all supply chain members to increase efficiency, minimize costs, and take advantage of newly visible opportunities. You can learn more about our collaboration in this video:

Many industries—automotive, aerospace, healthcare, government, finance, manufacturing, and energy—have tough optimization problems where these quantum-inspired solutions can save time and money. And these solutions will only get more valuable when scaled quantum hardware becomes available and provides further acceleration.

How to get started

Explore Microsoft’s quantum-inspired optimization solutions, both pre-built Azure Quantum and custom solutions that run on classical and accelerated compute resources.

Learn how to write quantum code with Q# and the Quantum Development Kit. Write your first quantum program without having to worry about the underlying physics or hardware.

Azure Quantum will be available in preview early next year. Join us for our next Azure Quantum Developer Workshop on February 2, 2021, where you can learn more about our expanding partner ecosystem and the solutions available through the Azure Quantum service. Registration opens today.