Recent News – Page 62

Posted on December 8, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

SharePoint tops 200M monthly active users in the cloud as accolades continue

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Back in 2006, I joined Microsoft to be part of the SharePoint team. I knew the product was going places, but I never could have imagined how impactful it would become. Today, SharePoint powers a growing number of experiences across Microsoft 365. From files, lists, and videos to engaging sites, custom apps, and knowledge solutions—on the desktop, web, mobile, and increasingly, inside Microsoft Teams, SharePoint is the most flexible content collaboration platform in the industry. And for the fourth year running, Microsoft has been recognized as a Leader in the Gartner Content Services Platforms Magic Quadrant for 2020. We are humbled by our customers’ and partners’ enthusiasm and the SharePoint ecosystem is growing faster than ever, passing a new milestone with more than 200 million monthly active users in the cloud. Innovative companies like Mott Mac D onald, Arla Foods, Gap Inc., and TransAlta are driving this growth, and we are proud to share their stories.

Let’s look in more detail.

Leading in the Gartner Content Services Platforms Magic Quadrant

Today, we are honored that for the fourth year in a row Gartner has recognized Microsoft as a Leader in the Content Services Platforms Magic Quadrant for 2020. Once again, Microsoft placed highest in Ability to Execute and is placed higher on both Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute than any other company in the Leaders’ quadrant.

The Gartner team has projected some emerging trends in the content services arena which are fueling our innovation in SharePoint across Microsoft 365.

“The inclusion of tightly integrated intelligent services starting to provide real differentiation between products in the market. This has surfaced in a number of ways; in classification (content intelligence), in productivity (productivity intelligence) and in content protection (security intelligence).”

You can learn more by downloading a copy of Gartner’s report.

Powering innovative experiences across Microsoft 365

We are investing more than ever to bring our customers innovative content collaboration and protection capabilities—increasingly powered by Microsoft AI.

SharePoint powers content collaboration across Microsoft 365. It underpins the document sharing scenarios in OneDrive with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and 320 other file types. It drives our new Microsoft Lists experiences. It enables end-users to create beautiful pages and portals with video from Microsoft Stream and conversations from Yammer to engage employees as Arla Foods has done for their 20,000 employees. It powers Teams Meeting Recordings and soon, stream videos. Finally, SharePoint enables millions of developers to create solutions with our latest SharePoint Framework (“SPFx”) and Power Platform. All of this is available in both standalone SharePoint sites and hosted in Microsoft Teams. Customers like Gap Inc. use SharePoint and OneDrive to power a unified digital workplace with cloud-based file sharing.

SharePoint delivers unparalleled solutions for document management and content protection. Our user experience offers easy and powerful tools to manage file sharing, versions, templates, copy or move, automation, alerts, and labeling. With more than 100 global datacenters and Microsoft’s global network edge—along with compliance standards, including ISO 27001, FISMA, and EU Model Clauses, the newly announced ability to comply with SEC 17a4, and security tools like information governance for automated retention and Records Management, data loss protection (DLP), eDiscovery, and Microsoft Information Protection-based encryption—we offer customers trusted compliance and security. We’re proud to be able to work with partners like VersaFile to help TransAlta consolidate legacy critical content platforms into Microsoft 365.

Our latest investment is bringing content intelligence to you with Microsoft Search, SharePoint Syntex and Project Cortex Topics. SharePoint is a core part of Microsoft Search, using our Graph-based content connectors to index data in over 130 remote locations, such as file shares, SQL, or ServiceNow. We just released SharePoint Syntex, which uses advanced AI and machine teaching to amplify human expertise, automate content processing, and transform content into knowledge. We’ve also modernized our taxonomy services (managed metadata) with synonyms, machine translation, import functionality, analytics, and five times our previous scale.

Project Cortex, also based on SharePoint, delivers knowledge and expertise in the apps you use every day to harness collective knowledge and to empower people and teams to learn, upskill, and innovate faster. Learn more about how the global engineering firm Mott Macdonald uses Project Cortex to transform knowledge sharing and discovery.

Growing faster than ever and investing for the future

We have had a bold vision for content collaboration from day one in SharePoint and brought that to many more customers and partners with the broad availability of Microsoft cloud services in 2011. Your feedback and support over the last decade has enabled us to invest in the most flexible cloud content services platform—built on Microsoft Azure and the Microsoft Graph—and deliver many new experiences. In the last year, as the world has pivoted to remote work, organizations of all sizes accelerated their adoption of Microsoft 365 and all of our SharePoint powered experiences to skyrocket—SharePoint sites, Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, Office, custom PowerApps and SPFx apps, and more.

We are privileged to support our customers in this period and humbled to announce SharePoint usage doubled in the last year and passed a new milestone of 200 million monthly active users in the cloud.

And we are not done. Far from it. Over the last few years, we have invested in a new SharePoint storage, platform, and experience architecture deployed across more than 60 regional data centers supporting millions of requests per second and exabytes of data. This new platform is enabling us to deliver innovations to you faster and you will see us bring to market many new SharePoint-powered experiences in collaboration, media, protection, intelligence, custom solutions, and more in 2021.

Learn more

You can see our latest customer stories, announcements, demos, white papers, and more at our Content Services Resource Center. Also, you can learn more about the Microsoft Content Services Partner Program and our Preferred Partners who help customers succeed with their content in Microsoft 365.

Want to learn more? Join us on December 16, 2020, at 9:00 AM Pacific Time for our Project Cortex Office Hours. Our product team will be celebrating and discussing today’s announcements while we review our innovations and plans for SharePoint and Microsoft 365 Content Services.

Thank you again to all our customers and partners. We look forward to delivering more to you in 2021 and beyond.

Microsoft defines monthly active users (MAU) as the count of unique users performing an intentional action with SharePoint -hosted content or experiences in a one month period in SharePoint, or connected applications, such as Excel, OneDrive or Microsoft Teams for any clients—desktop, mobile, or web. Intentional actions include saving or editing a file, viewing a page, running a search, or opening a file from SharePoint or OneDrive library. Our MAU numbers are de-duped, meaning we only count each user once.

Gartner Magic Quadrant for Content Services Platforms, Michael Woodbridge, Marko Sillanpaa, Lane Severson, 17 November 2020

This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Microsoft.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product, or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Posted on December 8, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Azure Digital Twins now generally available: Create IoT solutions that model the real world

Today, organizations are showing a growing appetite for solutions that provide a deeper understanding of not just assets, but also the complex interactions across environments. This shift is driven by the need to be more agile and respond to real-time changes in the world, and it involves moving beyond tracking individual assets or devices to focusing on everything within a rich environment—from people, places, processes, and things to their very relationships.

To really understand these intricate environments, companies are creating digital replicas of their physical world also known as digital twins. With Microsoft Azure Digital Twins now generally available, this Internet of Things (IoT) platform provides the capabilities to fuse together both physical and digital worlds, allowing you to transform your business and create breakthrough customer experiences.

According to the IoT Signals report, the vast majority of companies with a digital twin strategy see it as an integral part of their IoT solution. Yet the reality is that modeling entire environments can be complicated. It involves bringing together the many elements that make up a digital twin to capture actionable insights. However, siloed data across these experiences makes it challenging to build digital twin solutions that bring those models to life, and doing so in a scalable, secure way is often time-consuming.

Azure Digital Twins now ready for enterprise-grade deployments

Azure Digital Twins is an industry-first solution. It breaks down silos within intelligent environments by fusing data from previously disparate devices and business systems. It means you can track both past and present events, simulate possibilities, and help predict future events for those environments.

With Azure Digital Twins now generally available, it offers ready-to-use building blocks that can simplify the creation of detailed, comprehensive digital models that bring solutions to life. This trusted enterprise-grade platform brings the scale, reliability, security, and broad market availability that enables customers to build production-ready solutions.

Customer insights and partner solutions with Azure Digital Twins

Intelligent environments come in all shapes and sizes, and their attributes and outcomes are as varied as the industries in which they are used. As such, the possibilities for digital twins are endless—it can be used to model industries and environments that include factories, buildings, stadiums, and even entire cities. Today, we are working with customers and partners who are creating digital twins to model everything from facilities and spaces such as, smart buildings to manufactured products and the very processes within their supply chains.

One company pushing the boundaries of renewable energy production and efficiency is Korea-based Doosan Heavy Industries and Construction. Doosan worked with Microsoft and Bentley Systems to develop a digital twin of its wind farms, which allows operators to remotely monitor equipment performance and predict energy generation based on weather conditions.

“To maintain our competitive edge and increase energy efficiency, we need to optimize turbine operations through data analysis and gather feedback to develop and test advances in wind turbine development. We created solutions with Azure Digital Twins, Azure IoT Hub, and Bentley iTwin to make that possible by combining data from multiple sources into actionable insights.”—Seiyoung Jang, General Manager, Strategy and Innovation, Doosan

The solution uses Azure Digital Twins to combine real-time and historical IoT, weather, and other operational data with physics and machine learning-based models to accurately predict production output for each turbine in the farm. Based on the simulated models, Doosan can proactively adjust the pitch and performance of individual turbines, maximize energy production, and generate insights that will improve the future design of its next-generation wind turbines.

The innovation and productivity that Azure Digital Twins enables doesn’t stop there:

Johnson Controls is collaborating with Microsoft to digitally transform how buildings and spaces are conceived, built, and managed. At the center of this collaboration is a holistic integration between their platform, OpenBlue Digital Twin, and Azure Digital Twins. This partnership helps enable integrated building management, and the platform serves as the foundation for energy and space optimization, predictive maintenance, and remote operations.
Ansys, a market leader in simulation software, now offers native integration of simulation-based digital twins via Ansys Twin Builder for customers using Azure Digital Twins. This lets engineers quickly deliver real-time, physics-based simulation models for operational use. Doing so helps make it possible to efficiently integrate the simulation-based twins into a broader IoT solution.
Brookfield Properties, one of the world’s largest commercial office landlords, partnered with Willow to create a digital replica of their One Manhattan West (OMW) property using Willow’s Azure Digital Twins-based product. Dedicated to creating a “live, work, play” ecosystem, this lays the groundwork for a digital-first future while unlocking cost savings, energy optimizations, and value-added services today. This solution leverages premade, open source models by RealEstateCore that can be used to help accelerate development across industries.

Azure Digital Twins platform capabilities

The Azure Digital Twins platform was built to simplify and accelerate the creation of IoT connected solutions. With a comprehensive set of capabilities, companies can develop customized, connected solutions with ease. And with the ability to layer your vertical domain specialization—such as 3D or 4D visualizations, physics-based simulation, and AI—on top of Azure Digital Twins, it’s easier than ever to focus on driving results for your customers.

This also includes new developer experiences with broad language support for SDKs, Digital Twins Definition Language (DTDL) modeling and validation tools, and the Azure Digital Twins explorer sample which helps visualize the graph representing your environment. Other capabilities at the core of the Azure Digital Twins platform allow you to:

Use an open modeling language, DTDL, to easily create custom models of intelligent environments. In addition, premade models and converter tools for vertical standards help accelerate development when getting started with use cases across industries.
Bring digital twins to life with a live execution environment that is scalable and secure and uses data from IoT and other sources. Using a robust event system, you can build dynamic business logic that helps keep business apps fresh and always up to date. You can also extract insights in the context of the modeled world by querying data on a wide range of conditions and relationships.
Break down silos using input from IoT and business systems by easily connecting assets such as IoT and Azure IoT Edge devices via Azure IoT Hub, as well as existing business systems such as ERP and CRM to Azure Digital Twins to extract relevant insights across the entire environment.
Output to storage and analytics by integrating Azure Digital Twins with other Azure services. This includes the ability to send data to Azure Data Lake for long-term storage or to data analytics services such as Azure Synapse Analytics to apply machine learning. Another important use case is time series data integration and historian analytics with Azure Time Series Insights.

Digital Twins Consortium: Advancing technology with open partnerships and ecosystems

Built upon open partnerships and open ecosystems, Microsoft co-founded the Digital Twins Consortium in May 2020 in collaboration with other companies. Together, we are contributing to best practices and shared digital twin models. We are committed to helping create an industry standard and bringing digital twins—including DTDL—as well as all the different vertical specializations of digital twins across industries into an open ecosystem.

There are now more than 170 members that span companies, government agencies, and academia to drive consistency in the vocabulary, architecture, security, and compatibility of digital twin technology as it’s used across industries. This means that everyone across the ecosystem can benefit from a collective pool of industry standardized models so you can accelerate your digital twin journey.

Get started with Azure Digital Twins

As Microsoft Azure partners and businesses who are already using Azure Digital Twins have shown, it offers a robust platform for building enterprise grade IoT connected solutions with the scale, compliance, security, and privacy benefits that customers can bet their business on. Learn more about Azure Digital Twins and how to get started building digital replicas of your own intelligent business environment.

Additional resources

•    Learn more about Azure Digital Twins.
•    Get started with Azure Digital Twins technical resources.
•    Watch Azure Digital Twins demo video.
•    Read Azure Digital Twins customer stories.
•    Watch the Azure Digital Twins technical deep dive video featuring the WillowTwin solution.
•    Learn how IoT and Azure Digital Twins can help connect urban environments.
•    Learn more about Microsoft and Johnson Controls digital twin collaboration.

Posted on December 8, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Gears 5: Hivebusters expansion available Dec. 15 with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate

Summary

The Gears 5: Hivebusters Expansion is available Tuesday, December 15, 2020 at 6:00am PT and is available with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate on Console, PC and Android devices the same day as global release.
The Gears 5: Hivebusters Expansion ($19.99) is available separately for pre-purchase or included with the Gears 5: Game of the Year Edition ($59.99) beginning December 15.
The expansion adds 16 New Achievements for a total of 210 available Gamerscore.

In the past month, Gears 5 released the Xbox Series X|S update, which relaunched the game with next-gen technical optimizations for new consoles and new campaign features, and followed up with the largest multiplayer update ever, Operation 5: Hollow Storm. Today, to cap off this holiday’s re-release, we’re announcing the Gears 5: Hivebusters campaign expansion, coming Tuesday, December 15, 2020 to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate or available for $19.99 pre-purchase from the Microsoft digital store.

Gears 5: Hivebusters Expansion

In the new expansion, play as Lahni, Keegan and Mac – the heroes introduced in Gears 5’s Escape mode – in their first mission as part of the secretive Hivebuster program. Thrown together and dubbed “Scorpio Squad,” their suicide mission to destroy a Swarm hive may hold the key to saving Sera and their own redemption.

Enjoy a new, 3-hour campaign set on the volcanic Galangi islands. The island lava flows and sandy beaches are crawling with Swarm and a deadly new predator.
Use and upgrade Ultimate Abilities in a campaign story setting for the first time.
Up to 3-player co-op, split-screen or online.
16 new achievements to unlock for 210 Gamerscore
The expansion supports Gears 5 Xbox Series X|S optimizations, including reduced load times, quick resume, variable refresh rates and 4K HDR Ultra visuals on Series X.

Gears 5: Hivebusters was written by Kurtis Wiebe, creator of the Rat Queens comic book series, and author of the Gears of War: Hivebusters comics on which the expansions characters are based. Gears of War: Hivebusters, which originally appeared as a five-part series in 2019, is now available for print purchase as a single collected volume and includes the Mechanic Mac Character Skin and the Hivebusters Comic Cover Banner as bonus digital items for immediate use in multiplayer.

Availability

Gears 5: Hivebusters is the first Xbox Game Studios campaign expansion to join Xbox Game Pass Ultimate day-and-date with release. Xbox Game Pass Ultimate members can play as a part of their existing membership when the expansion is live on December 15. Simply update the game and launch the expansion from the Gears 5 main menu.

Other players can pre-purchase the expansion for $19.99 starting today via the Microsoft digital store or the Steam store.

New Achievements

Gears 5: Hivebusters is complete with a new set of Achievements worth 210 Gamerscore.

Name	Description	Gamerscore
Designation: Scorpio	Unlock during the DLC Campaign	5
Out of the Frying Pan	Unlock during the DLC Campaign	5
New Island, New Mission	Unlock during the DLC Campaign	5
A Breath of Fresh Air	Unlock during the DLC Campaign	5
The Spirit Walk	Unlock during the DLC Campaign	5
Face the Creature	Unlock during the DLC Campaign	5
The Awakening	Activate Keegan, Lahni and Mac’s Abilities in the Hivebuster Campaign Expansion	5
Electroblade	Kill 50 enemies using Lahni’s Electroblade Ability as Lahni in the Hivebuster Campaign Expansion	5
Ready to Frontline	Kill 50 enemies as Mac through your Barrier Ability in the Hivebuster Campaign Expansion	5
Supplies for the Effort	As Keegan, activate Resupply ability 25 times in the Hivebuster Campaign Expansion	5
Enter Hivebusters	Complete all Chapters of the Hivebusters DLC (any difficulty)	5
Rite of passage	Complete all Chapters of the Hivebusters DLC on Insane	15
Renewed, not consumed	Find all Character Ability upgrades in the Hivebusters DLC	5
Operation: Ride the Snatcher	Complete the Hivebusters DLC in 3-Player Co-Op (Scorpio squad, dupes not allowed)	10
Searching for answers	Collect all Campaign Collectibles in the Hivebusters DLC	5
Class Act	Reach level five on any one Assault, one Tank and one Support	5
The Centaur Set	Max out each of the Anchor, Gunner, Pilot, Veteran, Brawler classes	10
A Gear of many talents	Complete a Versus match in each of Regency, River, Nexus, Clocktower, and Gridlock	5

Hivebusters Graphic Novel

For more background and lore around the Lahni, Keegan and Mac, check out the Gears of War: Hivebusters graphic novel, also written by Kurtis Wiebe. It’s available now and includes the Mechanic Mac character skin and Hivebusters banner for use in Gears 5 multiplayer.

Gears 5: Game of the Year Edition
Also available next week is the Gears 5: Game of the Year Edition, which includes the Hivebusters campaign expansion, Halo: Reach Character Pack, plus 30 days of boost, and is available as a digital exclusive from the Microsoft digital store ($59.99) or included on day one with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate.

Cloud Gaming (Beta) Support
Additionally, the Gears 5: Hivebusters campaign expansion will be available to play via cloud gaming (beta) with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate upon launch on December 15. The expansion joins Gears 5 and over 100 other titles now available to play from Android mobile devices.

For the latest on Gears 5, including the multiplayer relaunch as part of Operation 5 and our latest team up with WWE Superstars The New Day, stay tuned to Xbox Wire and Gears5.com.

Posted on December 7, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Enhancing mission resiliency for government

As we approach the end of one of the most tumultuous years in recent memory marked by the COVID-19 pandemic, we have an opportunity to take stock of how the challenges faced by governments, businesses and individuals have tested us collectively, and how we have responded. While this pandemic has taught us that no one is 100 percent resilient, government agencies focused on the notion of mission resiliency, including agile infrastructure, ongoing digital transformation and topline security, have proven more capable of quickly pivoting and adapting in the face of a crisis. We saw government customers embracing innovation at an accelerated rate and expect this to continue – as leaders shift their mindsets and operations to be more agile, anticipating the needs of citizens and government workers.

This pandemic has been tragic and devastating to so many citizens, across the U.S. and globally. As a result of the increasing reliance on technology to support remote “everything,” this period has demonstrated the most accelerated shift to digital transformation in decades. At our third annual Government Leaders Summit, Microsoft’s premier event for U.S. federal government officials, we showcased examples of government customers who have reimagined new ways of working, as they navigate the changing landscape. These stories include:

Digital transformation at the Department of Veterans Affairs – Our teams helped the VA deploy AI-based chatbots, so veterans have 24/7 access to COVID-19 testing, scheduling telehealth visits, refilling prescriptions and even assistance payments. We also helped the VA implement cloud-based dashboards, powered by Microsoft’s Power BI, Bing Maps Platform and Azure App Service to help the agency have near real-time information on bed utilization and even open access to civilians as local hospitals reached capacity with COVID-19 patients.

Rapid shift to remote work for the Department of Defense – In less than a month, the DOD and Microsoft created a Commercial Virtual Remote (CVR) work environment built on Azure Government, Microsoft 365 Government and Microsoft Teams. CVR delivers secure chat, meetings, calls, collaboration and other telework functionality for 3.2 million DOD employees to ensure seamless continuity of operations.

Implementing zero-trust solutions at the Small Business Administration –To help securely manage the nearly 20,000 newly remote workers, the SBA leveraged Microsoft’s cloud security capabilities to enable dynamic security access controls based off of user risk scores, location, user behavior, device, identity and other data. This zero trust-like approach, developed under challenging circumstances, allowed the SBA to operate and meet critical needs like distributing pandemic-related funding while ensuring security and trust in its systems.

Facilitating mission resiliency for government

Microsoft is committed to helping agencies adapt to new ways of work and serve the public and facilitating the goals of mission resiliency. As part of this effort, today we announced a number of advances to our government cloud offerings, including:

Delivering enhanced capabilities for Azure Government – We offer broadest range of commercial innovation for mission at all data classifications, and today my colleague Tom Keane, corporate vice president of Azure engineering, shared an update on new capabilities. We’ve recently completed the buildout of our Azure Government Top Secret regions and we’re working with the U.S. government on accreditation. We’re also expanding the rugged edge portfolio to bring cloud intelligence and compute anywhere you need. And to further mission resiliency, we are offering two additional modules for the Azure Modular Datacenter (MDC): Network High Availability module and the High Availability power module, both add-on feature options for the MDC.

Microsoft 365 Government committed to support U.S. government data requirements – As part of our commitment to supporting federal government agencies, the defense industrial base, and the DOD, we are committed to delivery of Microsoft 365 Government to support U.S. secret and top-secret data. We’ll have more details to share in the new year.

Dynamics 365 and Power Platform update – To support the DOD’s goals of moving mission-critical applications to the cloud, Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform have received an IL4 Provisional Authority. This is an important step in our ability to serve defense agencies as it allows them to transfer previously supported datacenters to Microsoft’s managed cloud.

Re-imagining the future together

We’re incredibly excited about this progress and our continued partnership to provide the federal government with the platform it needs to deliver on its diverse and complex missions, whether it’s a rapid shift to remote work or supporting COVID-19 vaccine distribution. Agencies operating with the necessary courage, culture and capabilities have been able to accelerate in the face of adversity. At Microsoft, we are committed to supporting our government customers with trusted technology solutions and people-centric partnerships, which help advance continuity of services and the highest mission resiliency as we build into the future together. For more details about our work, please visit the Microsoft Government page here.

Posted on December 7, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Reinforcement learning helps bring a new class of AI solutions to customers

Someone looking to book a vacation online today might have very different preferences than they did before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Instead of flying to an exotic beach, they might feel more comfortable driving locally. With limited options for dining out, having a full kitchen might be essential. Motel rooms or cabins might be more appealing than hotels with shared lobbies.

Countless companies use online recommendation engines to show customers products and experiences that match their interests. And yet, traditional machine learning models that predict what people might prefer are often based on data from past experience. That means they aren’t necessarily able to pick up on quickly changing consumer preferences unless they are retrained with new data.

Personalizer, which is part of Azure Cognitive Services within the Azure AI platform, uses a more cutting-edge approach to machine learning called reinforcement learning, in which AI agents can interact and learn from their environment in real time.

The technique used to be primarily used in research labs. But now, it’s making its way into more Microsoft products and services — from Azure Cognitive Services that developers can plug into apps and websites to autonomous systems that engineers can use to refine manufacturing processes. Azure Machine Learning is also previewing cloud-based reinforcement learning offerings for data scientists and machine learning professionals.

“We’ve come a long way in the last two years when we had a lot of proof of concept projects within Microsoft and deployments with a couple of customers,” said Rafah Hosn, senior director at Microsoft Research’s New York lab. “Now we are really progressing nicely into things that can be packaged and shrink wrapped and pointed to a particular set of problems.”

Rafah Hosn standing outside — Rafah Hosn, senior director at Microsoft Research Lab – New York City. Photo courtesy of Microsoft.

Z-Tech, the technology hub of Anheuser-Busch InBev, is using Personalizer to deliver tailored recommendations in an online marketplace to better serve small grocery stores across Mexico. Other Microsoft customers and partners are employing reinforcement learning to detect production anomalies and develop robots that can adjust to unpredictable real-world conditions — with models that can learn from environmental cues, expert feedback or customer behavior in real time.

Once Microsoft began using Personalizer on its homepage to contextually personalize the products displayed to each visitor, the company saw a 19-fold increase in engagement with the products that Personalizer chose. The company has also used Personalizer internally to select the right offers, products and content across Windows, Edge browser and Xbox. These scenarios are giving up to a 60% lift in engagement across billions of personalizations each month.

Teams has also used reinforcement learning to find the optimal jitter buffer for a video meeting, which trades off millisecond-scale information delays to provide better connection continuity, while Azure is exploring reinforcement learning-based optimization to help determine when to reboot or remediate virtual machines.

Because reinforcement learning models learn from instantaneous feedback, they can quickly adapt to changing or unpredictable circumstances. Once the COVID-19 pandemic hit, some companies had no idea what to expect as people’s purchasing and travel behaviors changed overnight, said Jeff Mendenhall, a Microsoft principal program manager for Personalizer.

“All of their historic modeling and expert knowledge went out the window,” Mendenhall said. “But with reinforcement learning, Personalizer can update the model every minute if needed to learn and respond to what actual user behaviors are right now.”

In reinforcement learning, an AI agent learns largely by trial and error. It tests out different actions in either a real or simulated world and gets a reward when the actions achieve a desired result — whether that’s a customer hitting the button to book a vacation reservation or a robot successfully unloading an unwieldy bag of coins.

Training an AI agent through reinforcement learning is similar to teaching a puppy to do a trick, Hosn said. It gets a treat when it makes decisions that yield a desired result and learns to repeat the actions that get the most treats. But in complicated real-world scenarios, exploring the vast universe of potential actions and finding an optimal sequence of decisions can be far more complicated.

At the 34th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2020) this week, Microsoft researchers presented 17 research papers that mark significant progress in addressing some of the field’s biggest challenges. By investing in reinforcement learning teams across its network of Microsoft Research labs, the company says it is developing a portfolio of approaches to tackle different problems and exploring multiple paths to potential breakthroughs.

John Langford sits in an office — John Langford, partner research manager at Microsoft Research Lab – New York City. Photo by John Brecher.

Those teams have focused on developing a robust understanding of reinforcement learning’s foundational elements and creating practical solutions for customers — not just novelty demonstrations, researchers say.

They’ve spent a lot of time figuring out which scenarios reinforcement learning is well-suited to solve, as well as probing the technical underpinnings to understand why something works and how to repeat it, said John Langford, a partner research manager at Microsoft Research Lab – New York.

“Right now there’s a big gap between one-off applications where you can get PhDs to grind really hard and figure out a way to make it work as opposed to developing a routinely useful system that can be used over and over again,” Langford said.

“All of our reinforcement learning research at Microsoft really falls into two big buckets — how can we solve challenges that customers are bringing to us and what are the foundations we can use to build replicable, reliable solutions?” he said.

A different approach to machine learning

Reinforcement learning uses a fundamentally different approach than supervised learning, a more common machine learning technique in which models learn to make predictions from training examples they’ve been fed.

If a person is trying to learn French, exposing themselves to French text, grammar rules and vocabulary is closer to a supervised learning approach, said Raluca Georgescu, a research software engineer working on Project Paidia in the Microsoft Research Cambridge UK lab.

With a reinforcement learning approach, they would go to France and learn by talking to people. They’d be penalized with puzzled looks if they say the wrong thing and they’d get rewarded with a croissant if they order it correctly, she said.

A reinforcement learning agent learns from interacting with its environment, either in the real world or in a simulated environment that allows it to safely explore different options. It takes an action and waits to see if it results in a positive or negative outcome, based on a reward system that’s been established. Once that feedback is received, the model learns whether that decision was good or bad and updates itself accordingly.

It’s a really simple form of learning that’s endemic in the natural world, said Langford.

“Even worms can do reinforcement learning — they can learn to go towards things and avoid things based on some feedback,” Langford said. “That ability to learn at a very basic level from your environment is something that is super natural for us but in machine learning it’s a bit more tricky and delicate and requires more thought than supervised learning.”

The new papers presented at NeurIPS this week offer significant contributions in three key research areas: batch reinforcement learning, strategic exploration given rich observations and representation learning. Taken together, researchers say, these breakthroughs aim to boost the efficiency of models and expand the scope of problems that reinforcement learning can solve.

Posted on December 7, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

New datacenter region in Denmark to accelerate country’s green, digital transformation

The investment includes a sustainable datacenter region, powered by 100 percent renewable energy, the ability to store data in Denmark, and a plan to bring digital upskilling to 200,000 Danes by 2024

COPENHAGEN, Denmark – December 7, 2020 – Microsoft Corp. today announced the most significant investment in its 30-year history in Denmark, introducing Denmark as the location for its next sustainable datacenter region and a comprehensive skilling commitment for an estimated 200,000 Danes by 2024. Powered by 100 percent renewable energy, the datacenter region will provide Danish customers of all sizes faster access to the Microsoft Cloud, world-class security and the ability to store data at rest in the country.

These announcements are part of #DigitalLeapDenmark, a commitment to the country’s green digital future. This plan represents the next step in Microsoft’s longstanding commitment to help the country accelerate public sector digitization, fuel digital innovation to support growth of Danish enterprises, and apply technology to help create a greener future. Today, Microsoft employs more than a thousand people in the country and has recently invested in a quantum computing research lab in collaboration with the University of Copenhagen and the Technical University of Denmark.

“This is a proud day for Microsoft in Denmark,” said Brad Smith, President, Microsoft. “Building a hyper-scale datacenter in Denmark means we’ll store Danish data in Denmark, make computing more accessible at even faster speeds, secure data with our world-class security, protect data with Danish privacy laws, and do more to provide to the people of Denmark our best digital skills training. This investment reflects our deep appreciation of Denmark’s green and digital leadership globally and our commitment to its future.”

“The Government’s ambition is for Denmark to emerge from COVID-19 even greener, stronger and more socially just. We have initiated a green recovery of the Danish economy and launched a new strategy for green public procurement, contributing towards our ambitious climate targets. Today, datacenters and IT solutions represent a considerable part of carbon emissions from public procurement in Denmark, so we see a big potential to reduce our climate footprint. I’m pleased to see that businesses are embracing the government’s climate ambitions and taking responsibility for creating a green, digital future. This underlines Denmark’s leading position in both the green and digital transition,” said Nicolai Wammen, Danish Minister of Finance.

Investing in Denmark to accelerate growth and innovation

The Microsoft Cloud enables innovation through the latest technology advancements including: Microsoft Azure, an ever-expanding set of cloud services that offers computing, networking, databases, analytics, AI and Internet of Things (IoT) services; Microsoft 365, the world’s productivity cloud that delivers best-of-breed productivity apps and security solutions; and Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, which enable organizations to rapidly build and manage critical enterprise business solutions at scale with intelligent business applications. The Danish datacenter region will provide customers with access to low-latency, enterprise-grade cloud services with world-class data security and compliance. In addition, the new region will deliver Azure Availability Zones, to provide additional tolerance and high availability for applications.

Hundreds of Danish enterprises and public organizations such as Arla Foods, Carlsberg, Coop, Danfoss, Energinet, Grundfos, Pandora, Maersk, Saxo Bank, Simcorp, and The Danish Ministry of Taxation already rely on the Microsoft Cloud to power critical business applications, new customer experiences and innovative data solutions.

“Microsoft is a strategic business partner and the establishment of a Danish data center region creates the basis for us to be able to use solutions based on cloud to an even greater extent. Our business is based on stable, secure and compliant operation to the financial sector, and JN Data’s task is to connect the existing systems with cloud solutions so that JN Data’s community can take full advantage of cloud. By doing so our customers achieve a higher speed of development, which they can benefit from when developing solutions for their customers and ultimately for the banks’ customers,” said Søren Lindgaard, CEO, JN Data.

The Danish datacenter region also provides new opportunities for the partner ecosystem, that build innovative solutions on the Microsoft Cloud. Microsoft in Denmark works with more than 2000 partners, including Accenture, Atea, KMD, Netcompany, NNIT, Proactive, Systematic, and Venzo, to help danish customers accelerate their digital transformation. According to IDC, $1 of Microsoft cloud revenue in Denmark will generate $7.23 (USD) in revenue for Microsoft’s Danish partners over the next four years*.

Innovating for a sustainable future

With 100 percent renewable energy, the datacenter region will enable Danish customers to reduce their own carbon footprint associated with computing while accelerating digitization. According to The Footprint Firm**, the total emissions from on-premises servers in Denmark amount to an estimated 355,000 tons of CO2 per year. A report from WSP*** shows that Microsoft Cloud services can be up to 93 percent more energy efficient than traditional enterprise datacenters.

Microsoft is working with Energinet to explore future ways of tracking and matching renewable energy on an hourly basis. Building on Energinet’s pioneering work and open-source data approach with Azure, Microsoft intends to support the launch of a new renewable energy supply option, which provides customers more transparency about carbon mitigation from clean energy.

Digital upskilling for Denmark’s workforce

As part of the investment, Microsoft also pledges to bring digital upskilling to 200,000 Danes of all ages and skill levels, by 2024. It includes in-depth training programs and Azure certification for partners and customers, digital education opportunities for children and youth, and through LinkedIn Learning, free access to learning paths, job-seeking tools, and low-cost technical certifications for jobseekers and the unemployed.

“With this investment, we’re taking the next step in our longstanding commitment to provide Danish society and businesses with the digital tools, skills and infrastructure needed to drive sustainable growth, innovation, and job creation. We’re investing in Denmark’s digital leap into the future – all in a way that supports the country’s ambitious climate goals and economic recovery,” said Nana Bule, General Manager, Microsoft Denmark.

Speaking at today’s event, Jean-Philippe Courtois, Executive Vice President and President, Microsoft Global Sales, Marketing and Operations, said, “Today’s announcement is the next big step in our commitment to Denmark, which started over 30 years ago. The cloud plays a critical role, supported by passionate people, to help create a sustainable and inclusive economic recovery. As the world becomes more digital, it’s essential that citizens at all levels have the necessary skills to participate in the digital economy and society. This is why we’re committing to help upskill 200,000 Danes by 2024, contributing to the digital transformation of both public sector and industry in Denmark.”

Posted on December 7, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Announcing Azure Government Top Secret regions

Today, we are announcing the expansion of our mission-critical cloud for US Governmentwith new capabilities in Azure Government, the expansion of Azure Government Secret, and the announcement of a new cloud to serve customers with Top Secret classified data—Azure Government Top Secret.

Announcing Azure Government Top Secret

We have recently completed the buildout of new Azure Government Top Secret regions, and we are working with the US Government on accreditation. As part of our ongoing commitment to commercial parity as driven by government mission requirements, Azure Government Top Secret regions are designed to provide the same capabilities as Azure (commercial), Azure Government, and Azure Government Secret, enabling a continuum of compute from mission cloud to tactical edge.

The broad range of services will meet the demand for greater agility in the classified space, including the need to gain deeper insights from data sourced from any location as well as the need to enable the rapid expansion of remote work. Additionally, mission owners will benefit from greater choice in modernizing legacy systems, with a secure cloud platform that works on open standards and open frameworks with tools that work across a wide range of skill levels, from business analysts to developers to data scientists.

Azure Government Secret new functionality

Azure Government Secret continues to help mission owners unlock new insights, enable secure innovation, achieve greater agility, and further the mission. Customers including those in the US DoD, law enforcement, and other agencies are using Azure Government Secret today. Azure Government Secret is authorized by both Department of Defense Impact Level 6 (IL6) and Intelligence Community Directive (ICD) 503.

“Microsoft is focused on mission enablement. Missions are enabled with workloads. Workloads live within enclaves that house varied levels of data. Microsoft is enabling seamless, secure, cost-contained agility across mission workloads at scale.

The consistency between Azure (commercial), Azure Government, and Azure Government Secret is also starting to change the game as software development may happen from anywhere, while the code itself can be promoted to enclaves with higher classification levels. There it can interact with data of higher classification levels. At the end of the day, this means doing more for the mission at a lower overall cost.” —Carroll Moon, CTO of CloudFit Software.

Today, we are announcing several new services in Azure Government Secret; for application developers, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and Azure Container Instances help you deploy and manage containerized applications more easily. Intelligent security analytics services Azure Sentinel and Azure Security Center are also now available in Azure Government Secret, enabling unified security across your digital estate and integrated, proactive threat management. Together with Azure Monitor, these services help you collect, analyze, and act on telemetry data from your Azure and on-premises environments.

Azure Government Availability Zones, Windows Virtual Desktop availability, and expanded compliance

Events over the past year have highlighted the importance of securely maintaining critical government operations. We have designed and built our cloud platforms for high availability and resilience, and today, we are announcing Availability Zones in Azure Government, providing high availability for your most demanding mission-critical applications and data. Availability Zones are tolerant to datacenter failures through redundancy and logical isolation of services, assuring that critical customer services and workloads are available, anytime, and anywhere.

In addition to responding to unprecedented events, government agencies are rapidly responding to today’s imperative of remote work, and we’ve seen high demand for solutions that allow teams to work from anywhere while keeping relevant data within a securely managed environment. We recently announced the availability of Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) in Azure Government with FedRAMP High accreditation, enabling agencies to adopt WVD for mission-critical workloads and empowering more secure and productive work-from-anywhere scenarios.

As new services are brought into each of our government-only cloud regions, we are working with our accreditors to ensure these services are authorized at the right level for your workloads. We now offer 137 Azure Government services at FedRAMP High and 97 services at Department of Defense Impact Level 5 (IL5) across all Azure Government regions.¹ Visit our documentation page for a full list of services by audit scope.

Total flexibility at the tactical edge

Today, we are announcing updates to our tactical edge portfolio for US Government customers. Together, these new first-party edge devices help you to do more for the mission, whether that is pre-processing data for low latency response times, bringing AI and machine learning (ML) to the far edge, or harnessing satellite data more rapidly to enable decision-making in disconnected environments.

Modular Datacenter generally available at Impact Level 5 and 6 with high availability options

The recently announced Azure Modular Datacenter (MDC) provides datacenter scale compute and storage resources for areas in which adverse conditions, disrupted network availability, and limited access to specialized infrastructure would typically prohibit cloud computing. The MDC can run separate security enclaves, allowing mission users to operate workloads across multiple data classifications at the same time in a single unit, and like the other ruggedized devices, can operate in fully connected, occasionally connected, or fully disconnected scenarios. The MDC allows government customers to deploy a single piece of critical infrastructure to meet the needs of a wide variety of mission workloads at various levels of classification, all in a self-contained footprint that reduces logistics overhead.

Today we are announcing:

The network high availability (HA) module for the MDC that provides network resiliency through multiple satellite communication partners in different orbits. Network resiliency is delivered via SATCOM links through our continuously growing ecosystem of SATCOM partners like SpaceX and SES, for continuity of operations (COOP) during fiber failover.
The high availability power module, which adds resiliency where customers need it, providing an on-demand way to add additional power stability resources in a form factor that is as transportable as the MDC. For deployments with intermittent or unreliable power, transitioning between multiple power sources will keep MDC workloads up and running.

Azure Stack Hub Ruggedized

Azure Stack Hub Ruggedized from Microsoft is an Azure Hardware and Software solution that brings a cloud-consistent approach to operating environments while addressing limited or no network connectivity, harsh conditions requiring military specifications, and high security requirements with optional connectivity to any Azure cloud. Azure Stack Hub Ruggedized is now generally available for customers in Azure Government and Azure Government Secret.

Azure Stack Edge Pro R and Mini R

The Azure Stack Edge appliances Azure Stack Edge Pro R and Azure Stack Edge Mini R enable you to run applications and leverage hardware-accelerated AI and ML solutions to analyze, transform, and filter data at the edge, right where data is created and collected. You can then aggregate data in Azure for further analytics, with common app logic across both. The appliances also act as a cloud storage gateway, enabling eyes-off data transfers to Azure while retaining local access to files. Azure Stack Edge Pro R and Mini R are generally available for customers in Azure Government and Azure Government Secret.

Learn more

Designed and built for your mission requirements, these rugged edge devices enable scenarios from disaster response to modern fleet management to perimeter security and dangerous object detection. US Government customers and their partners² can use Azure commercial, Azure Government, and Azure Government Secret to advance their missions, depending on their compliance requirements. Providing a broad range of commercial innovation for government across IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS and the most comprehensive compliance, these cloud platforms are designed to help you modernize mission systems and stay in the lead, today and tomorrow.

¹Read the Isolation guidelines for Impact Level 5 workloads.

²Azure Government is available to US federal, state, local, or tribal government entities and their solution providers with eligibility review. Azure Government Secret is available with US Government approval to agencies working with US Government data classified at the Secret level.

Posted on December 4, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

ElectionGuard’s innovative new uses

Last year, we announced ElectionGuard, our free and open-source technology to make elections more secure and, for the first time, to enable people to verify their votes were counted and not altered. Since then, we’ve achieved several important milestones including the release of the ElectionGuard software on GitHub, the announcement of our bug bounty program, and a successful pilot of ElectionGuard in a real election in Wisconsin earlier this year. We believe ElectionGuard has the potential to give people greater confidence in the security, reliability and results of future elections, and we expect to soon have more updates to share about ElectionGuard’s use in traditional voting systems. Today, I’d like to share an update on some projects where ElectionGuard is already being used in a variety of innovative ways.

Risk-limiting audits

We recently worked with VotingWorks, our nonprofit partner in the Wisconsin pilot, to incorporate ElectionGuard into Arlo, VotingWorks’ open-source auditing software. Arlo was used to conduct a risk-limiting audit in Inyo County, California, following the recent 2020 U.S. general election. A risk-limiting audit is a process election officials can use in paper ballot elections to efficiently confirm that, if a full hand count were performed, the same winner would be declared. By using ElectionGuard’s encryption in the audit process, VotingWorks was able to show a direct link between the election results and the audit results without compromising voter privacy.

House Democratic Caucus leadership elections

We were pleased to work with Markup – a technology provider that serves U.S. lawmakers – on a mobile app to facilitate remote voting for leadership of the House Democratic Caucus, chaired by Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY). Using the app, members of the Caucus successfully voted for their Caucus and committee leadership remotely through secret ballots. Votes cast using the app were encrypted with ElectionGuard’s homomorphic encryption, and Caucus officials were able to confirm that votes were correctly tallied. This was a great example of how ElectionGuard can be used in innovative ways to ensure a secure and verifiable voting process.

How did the app work? Caucus members used iPhones – which were issued to them and managed by the House IT staff – on which the app was installed. No personal devices could be used. Members were notified when it was time to vote, and the app took them through the choices one by one. At any time before submitting their vote, members could discard their ballots and start over.

Supporting the security of global elections

We designed ElectionGuard so that it can help provide enhanced security and verifiability across a range of voting solutions. For example, ElectionGuard supports voting systems that use paper ballots as the primary way to vote, as a backup or not at all. It is up to the voting officials responsible for the safety and security of their elections to determine the right voting solution for their jurisdiction and situation. Special circumstances, like the Covid-19 pandemic, create unique challenges for voting officials, and we believe ElectionGuard can support a range of innovative solutions that can address both long-term voter confidence in democratic elections and short-term innovative solutions that enable trustworthy voting – even in the midst of a global health crisis.

It is more challenging to secure systems that enable general-purpose voting entirely over the internet. The use of ElectionGuard in a system like this can help address some, but by no means all, of the security issues presented. There are, however, many issues a jurisdiction may choose to consider in adopting an election solution, and some democratic governments might conclude that internet voting is preferred because, for example, it enables a much greater percentage of the population to vote.

Neuvote, a Canadian company, has developed a hybrid mobile voting system in which voters connect to a remote ballot-marking device that enables them to cast and confirm a paper ballot from a smartphone or tablet while watching the process on their device. Each paper ballot cast is accompanied by an electronic vote record that Neuvote secured with ElectionGuard. Their system is designed so that the paper ballot can be tracked, audited and matched with the electronic tally. It was user tested at the recent “Future of Elections” conference in Brazil on November 15. At this event, Brazilian voters tested and provided feedback on online voting options that could potentially be deployed in future elections. How the voters and the Brazilian government react to these tests will be interesting to watch.

To note, InfernoRed has been an important partner on ElectionGuard projects, and has worked with Microsoft to support the work we’ve done with Markup and Neuvote.

The security and end-to-end verifiability of ElectionGuard presents an opportunity to provide voters with new confidence in the trustworthiness of all elections. ElectionGuard uses strong encryption to secure people’s votes and allows voters to confirm their votes were counted correctly. It also enables third parties like news organizations, political parties and third-party watchdogs to run verifiers to confirm results were accurately tabulated – all without revealing any individual’s vote. We look forward to announcing, soon, additional ways in which the voters in the US and other democracies will be provided with the voting confidence that ElectionGuard can ensure.

Posted on December 3, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Researchers explore using consumer cameras for contact-free physiological measurement in telehealth and beyond

a man sitting at a table using a laptop — Our research is enabling robust and scalable measurement of physiology. Cameras on everyday devices can be used to detect subtle changes in light reflected from the body caused by physiological processes. Machine learning algorithms are then used to process the camera images and recover the underlying pulse and respiration signals that can then be used for health and wellness tracking.

According to the CDC WONDER Online Database, heart disease is currently the leading cause of death for both men and women in the United States. However, most deaths due to cardiovascular diseases could be prevented with suitable interventions. Early detection of changes in health and well-being can have a significant impact on the success of these interventions and boost the chances of positive outcomes. Atrial fibrillation (AFib) is an example of a symptom that can indicate increased risk of heart disease, and when detected early, it can inform interventions that help to reduce risk of stroke.

Physiological sensing plays an important role in helping people track their health and detect the onset of symptoms. However, there are barriers to conducting physiological sensing that act as a disincentive, such as access to medical devices and the inconvenience of performing regular measurements. Making physiological sensing more accessible and less obtrusive can reduce the burden on people to perform physiological assessments of this kind and help catch early warning signs of symptoms like AFib.

Over the past decade, researchers have discovered that increasingly available webcams and cellphone cameras combined with AI algorithms can be used as effective health sensors. These methods involve measurement of very subtle changes in the appearance of the body across time, in many cases changes imperceptible to the unaided human eye, to recover physiological information. In essence, as ambient light in a room hits your body, some is absorbed and some is reflected. Physiological processes such as blood flow and breathing change the appearance of the body very subtly over time.

A smartphone camera can pick up this reflected light, and the changes in pixel intensities over time can be used to recover the underlying sources of these variations (namely a person’s pulse and respiration). Using optical models grounded in our knowledge of these physiological processes, a video of a person can be processed to determine their pulse rate, respiration, and even the concentration of oxygen in their blood.

EVENT Microsoft at NeurIPS 2020 Check out Microsoft’s presence at NeurIPS 2020, including links to all of our NeurIPS publications, the Microsoft session schedule, and links to open career opportunities.

Building on previous work, our team of researchers from Microsoft Research, University of Washington, and OctoML have collaborated to create an innovative video-based on-device optical cardiopulmonary vital sign measurement approach. The approach uses everyday camera technology (such as webcams and mobile devices) and a novel convolutional attention network, called MTTS-CAN, to make real-time cardio-pulmonary measurements possible on mobile platforms with state-of-the-art accuracy. Our paper, “Multi-Task Temporal Shift Attention Networks for On-Device Contactless Vitals Measurement,” has been accepted at the 34th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2020) and will be presented in a Spotlight talk on Monday, December 7th at 6:15PM- 6:30PM (PT).

Camera-based physiological sensing applications in telehealth

Camera-based physiological sensing has numerous fitness, well-being and clinical applications. For everyday consumers, it could make home monitoring and fitness tracking more convenient. Imagine if your treadmill or smart at-home fitness equipment could continuously track your vitals during your run without you needing to wear a device or sync the data. In clinical contexts, camera-based measurements could enable a cardiologist to more objectively analyze a patient’s heart health over a video call. Contact sensors, necessary for monitoring vitals in intensive care, can damage the skin of infants—remote sensing could provide a more comfortable solution.

Perhaps the most obvious application for camera-based physiological sensing is in telehealth. The SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic is transforming the face of healthcare around the world. One example of this revolution can be seen in the number of medical appointments held via teleconference, which has increased by more than an order of magnitude because of stay-at-home orders and greater burdens on healthcare systems. This is due to the desire to protect healthcare workers and restrictions on travel, but telehealth also benefits patients by saving them time and costs. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention is recommending the “use of telehealth strategies when feasible to provide high-quality patient care and reduce the risk of COVID-19 transmission in healthcare settings.” The COVID-19 virus has been linked to increased risk of myocarditis and other serious cardiac (heart) conditions, and experts are suggesting that particular attention should be given to cardiovascular and pulmonary protection during treatment.

In most telehealth scenarios, however, physicians lack access to objective measurements of a patient’s condition because of the inability to capture signals such as the patient’s vital signs. This concerns many patients because they worry about the quality of the diagnosis and care they can receive without objective measurements. Ubiquitous sensing could help transform how telehealth is conducted, and it could also contribute to establishing telehealth as a mainstream form of healthcare.

It can take many years for new technologies such as these to transition from research discoveries to mature applications. The fields of AI and computer vision, as a whole, are six decades old, yet it is only in the past 10 years that many applications have started to reach fruition. Research on camera-based vital sign monitoring began much more recently—within the past 15 years—so there is still a lot of effort required to help it reach maturity.

Improving accuracy, privacy, and latency for contactless vital sign sensing methods

Contact sensors (electrocardiograms, oximeters) are the current gold standard for measurement of heart and lung function, yet these devices are still not ubiquitously available, especially in low-resource settings. The development of video-based contactless sensing of vital signs presents an opportunity for highly scalable physiological monitoring. Computer vision for remote cardiopulmonary measurement is a growing field, and there is room for improvement in the existing methods.

First, the accuracy of measurements is critical to avoid false alarms or misdiagnoses. The US Federal Drug Administration (FDA) mandates that testing of a new device for cardiac monitoring should show “substantial equivalence” in accuracy with a legal predicate device (for example, a contact sensor). This standard has not been obtained in non-contact approaches. Second, designing models that run on-device helps reduce the need for high-bandwidth internet connections, making telehealth more practical and accessible. Our method, detailed below, works to improve accuracy with a newly designed algorithm (see Figure 1) and runs on-device.

Figure 1: The trade-off between latency (the time it takes to process each frame of video) and error in heart rate estimation. An optimal method would be in the top left corner, meaning we can process video frames at a high rate and with small errors. Our proposed method, MTTS-CAN, has the lowest latency and has accuracy that is well above the baseline we used for our research. The MT-Hybrid-CAN was also developed as part of our research to support devices with bigger computational power, such as PCs.

Camera-based cardiopulmonary measurement is also a highly privacy-sensitive application. This data is personally identifiable, combining videos of a patient’s face with sensitive physiological signals. Therefore, streaming and uploading data to the cloud to perform analysis is not ideal. This motivated our focus to develop methods that run on device—helping keep people’s data under their control.

Finally, the ability to run at a high frame rate enables opportunistic sensing (for example, obtaining measurements each time you look at your phone) and helps capture waveform dynamics that could be used to detect atrial fibrillation, hypertension, and heart rate variability where high-frame rates (at least 100Hz) are a requirement to yield precise measurements of the waveform dynamics.

MTTS-CAN: Using a convolutional neural network to improve non-contact physiological sensing

To help address the gaps in the current research, we developed an algorithm for multi-parameter physiological measurement that can run on a standard mid-range mobile phone, even at high frame rates. The method uses a type of deep learning algorithm called a convolutional neural network and analyzes pixels in a video over time to extract estimates of heart and respiration rates. The algorithm extracts two representations of the face: 1) the motion representation that contains the temporal changes pixel information and 2) the appearance representation that helps guide the network toward the spatial regions of the frame to focus on. Our specific design of this method is called a multi-task temporal shift convolutional attention network (MTTS-CAN). See Figure 2 below for details.

diagram — Figure 2: MTTS-CAN is a new neural network architecture that allows for efficient, multi-parameter physiological measurement from video. The video is analyzed to extract subtle changes in pixel intensities over time and then recover estimates of the underlying pulsatile and respiratory signals.

We introduced several features to help address the challenges of privacy, portability, and precision in contactless physiological measurement. Our end-to-end MTTS-CAN performs efficient temporal modeling and removes sources of noise without any added computational overhead by leveraging temporal shift operations rather than 3D convolutions, which are computationally onerous.

These shift operations allow the model to capture complex temporal dependencies, which are particularly important for recovering the subtle dynamics of the pulse and respiration signals. An attention module improves signal source separation by helping the model learn which regions of the video frame to apply greater importance to, and a multi-task mechanism shares the intermediate representations between pulse and respiration to jointly estimate both simultaneously.

Multi-task learning is effective for two reasons. First, the heart rhythms are correlated with breathing patterns meaning the two signals share some common properties—this is a principle known as Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia (RSA). Second, by sharing many of the preliminary processing steps, we can dramatically reduce the computation required.

By combining these three techniques, our proposed network can run on a mobile CPU and achieve state-of-the-art accuracy and inference speed. Ultimately, these features result in significant improvements for gathering real physiological signals, like heart rate and pulse (see Figure 3).

Figure 3: MTTS-CAN reduces the error in heart rate measurement and considerably improves the pulse signal-to-noise ratio compared to previous methods such as ICA, CHROM, POS, and 2D-CAN on a large benchmark dataset.

One concern with optical measurement of vital signs is whether performance will work equally across people, including all skin types and appearances (for example, those with facial hair, wearing cosmetics, head coverings, or glasses). We have worked on characterizing these differences and helping to reduce them using personalization and data augmentation. Improving sensing technology to create equitable performance is a central focus to this research.

We hope that this work advances the speed at which scalable non-contact sensing can be adopted. Atrial fibrillation (AFib) is just one of most common cardiovascular symptoms that impact millions of people and could be better detected with more accurate, easily deployed non-contact health sensing systems. Our work is a step in this direction. Through our research we are continuing to develop methods for sensing other physiological parameters, such as blood oxygen saturation and pulse transit time.

If you’re interested in learning more about our research in physiological sensing, there are a number of resources available. Our project page is a hub for publications and related content, including links to open-source code. We also recently gave a webinar on contactless camera-based health sensing that further elaborates on this work and dives deeper into how the technology works. Register now to watch the on-demand webinar/Q&A.

Posted on December 3, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Introducing Azure Synapse Analytics and Azure Purview to shape your future with data and analytics

Over the years, we have had a front-row seat to digital transformation occurring across all industries and regions around the world. And in 2020, we’ve seen that digitally transformed organizations have successfully adapted to sudden disruptions. What lies at the heart of digital transformation is also the underpinning of organizations who’ve proven most resilient during turbulent times—and that is data. Data is what enables both analytical power—analyzing the past and gaining new insights, and predictive power—predicting the future and planning ahead.

To harness the power of data, first we need to break down data silos. While not a new concept, achieving this has been a constant challenge in the history of data and analytics as its ecosystem continues to be complex and heterogeneous. We must expand beyond the traditional view that data silos are the core of the problem. The truth is, too many businesses also have silos of skills and silos of technologies, not just silos of data. And, this must be addressed holistically.

For decades, specialized technologies like data warehouses and data lakes have helped us collect and analyze data of all sizes and formats. But in doing so, they often created niches of expertise and specialized technology in the process. This is the paradox of analytics: the more we apply new technology to integrate and analyze data, the more silos we can create.

To break this cycle, a new approach is needed. Organizations must break down all silos to achieve analytical power and predictive power, in a unified, secure, and compliant manner. Your organizational success over the next decade will increasingly depend on your ability to accomplish this goal.

This is why we stepped back and took a new approach to analytics in Azure. We rearchitected our operational and analytics data stores to take full advantage of a new, cloud-native architecture. This fundamental shift, while maintaining consistent tools and languages, is what enables the long-held silos to be eliminated across skills, technology, and data. At the core of this is Azure Synapse Analytics—a limitless analytics service that brings together data integration, enterprise data warehousing, and Big Data analytics into a single service offering unmatched time to insights. With Azure Synapse, organizations can run the full gamut of analytics projects and put data to work much more quickly, productively, and securely, generating insights from all data sources. And, importantly, Azure Synapse combines capabilities spanning the needs of data engineering, machine learning, and BI without creating silos in processes and tools. Customers such as Walgreens, Myntra, and P&G have achieved tremendous success with Azure Synapse, and today we move to the global generally availability, so every customer can now get access.

But, just breaking down silos is not sufficient. A comprehensive data governance solution is needed to know where all data resides across an organization. An organization that does not know where its data is, does not know what its future will be. To empower this solution, we are proud to deliver Azure Purview—a unified data governance service that helps organizations achieve a complete understanding of their data. Azure Purview helps discover all data across your organization, track lineage of data, and create a business glossary wherever it is stored: on-premises, across clouds, in SaaS applications, and in Microsoft Power BI. It also helps you understand your data exposures by using over 100 AI classifiers that automatically look for personally identifiable information (PII), sensitive data, and pinpoint out-of-compliance data. Azure Purview is integrated with Microsoft Information Protection which means you can apply the same sensitivity labels defined in Microsoft 365 Compliance Center. With Azure Purview, you can view your data estate pivoting on classifications and labeling and drill into assets containing sensitive data across on-premises, multi-cloud, and multi-edge locations.

The combination of Azure Synapse Analytics and Azure Purview empowers organizations to invent with purpose by developing the capabilities to achieve both analytical power and predictive power.

To learn more about Azure Synapse Analytics and Azure Purview, please visit us here.