Earlier this year, two journalists from Nigeria, Kelechukwu Iruoma and Ruth Olurounbi, teamed up to explore and document the impact of oil contamination on communities in the Niger Delta where millions of barrels of oil had spilled decades ago.
Their investigation revealed that oil spills in the region of Ogoniland, home to more than 850,000 people, continued to have negative and dangerous health effects on the Ogoni people, some of the oldest settlers in the area who rely on farming and fishing for their livelihoods.
Today, their work has led to a commitment by government to provide safe drinking water to the townships affected by oil contamination – which studies have previously linked to cancer, childhood malnutrition and low fertility – resulting in the poisoning of their water.
The journalists visited four communities where wells were contaminated with benzene, a known carcinogen at levels over 900 times above the World Health Organization (WHO) guideline. They engaged local leaders to enlist 50 non-smoking, non-alcohol-drinking residents to give blood samples, which the reporters brought to a lab in Lagos for evaluation. Lab testing conducted by health professionals working with Iruoma and Olurounbi reported that more than half of the residents who gave blood samples had dangerously high levels of an enzyme that is a marker for liver damage.
While the land and water vital to the support systems of those who live there are contaminated by the oil spills, moving elsewhere is not an option for many. “In our culture, land is very important to us. And, if you are left a piece of land […] you are left something very dear. You are left a legacy and you don’t move away from that,” says Olurounbi. “But every year harvesting there is less and less to harvest because the land will not reproduce.”
This is why restoration of the area is crucial to the lives of those who call Ogoniland home. However, government’s promise to hire contractors to provide potable water has come nearly a decade after a United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report called on the Nigerian government and oil companies to share the cost of extensive restoration of the area.
“The speed of the clean-up has been so slow that the desired results will not be achieved,” an environmental scientist and Ogoniland resident told Iruoma and Olurounbi. “This is what the people have been living with all through their lives. This is suicide.”
Restoration is vital to supporting the betterment of public health in the region which has been devastated by multiple oil spills.
In their investigation, the two journalists leveraged technologies such as drones to show the extent of environmental wreckage in the area, and interviewed residents, leaders and local scientists. Olurounbi and Iruoma received an ICFJ Alumni Reporting Grant which included $7,500 plus hands-on training in using drones, capturing still and video photography of the contaminated areas, and creating infographics. The funds from the grant were used to pay for the blood tests and travel to the region.
“We have pictures and videos that show the contaminated soil and rivers. Rivers where people fish or where they go to take water, even now,” Iruoma says. “We used the drone photos and video to show clearly how the oil spill affected the livelihood of the people.”
Backed by Microsoft’s News Labs, the grants were created to support data journalism and immersive storytelling in ways that promote transparency and understanding.
Applications were open to alumni of previous ICFJ programs. Iruoma participated in ICFJ’s Reporting Fellowship on Migration and Climate for Nigerian Journalists in 2017. Olurounbi is a member of the Nigerian chapter of WanaData, a network of female journalists developed by ICFJ and Code for Africa that is driving digital storytelling across the continent.
This story has been shortlisted in the Excellence in Environmental Journalism category of the Fetisov Journalism awards, the most lucrative journalism awards in history. The winning list will be selected by December 1, 2020.
Over the past year, the pandemic has dramatically changed the way we live and work. Organizations around the world adopted tools like Microsoft Teams to support working-from-home and hybrid work. Today, over 115 million people use Teams every day. And while video conferencing was a key driver for Teams rapid growth and adoption, our customers quickly realized the need to digitally transform beyond meetings to support a new way of work. They want to integrate apps and business processes into where work happens—to better serve customers, streamline work, and improve employee productivity and wellbeing.
Teams is designed to enable this new way of working. It is the only platform that brings together chat, meetings, calling, file collaboration, and apps you need, all in one place. You can easily customize Teams with apps to fit your specific needs—whether that’s adding apps from the Teams app store, or creating custom line of business apps, workflows, or bots to use in Teams.
Today, we’re announcing new Teams apps that will make your everyday work more seamless.
New apps to make your meetings more productive and engaging
While all teams need a place to communicate and collaborate to move work forward, every team does it differently. That’s why you can customize Teams with apps you can bring into for chat, channels, and now, meetings. We are excited to announce the availability of Teams apps for meetings along with nearly 20 new Teams apps for meetings in the Teams app store, such as Asana, HireVue, Monday.com, Slido, and Teamflect, as well as familiar Microsoft apps such as Forms. If you’re a developer, learn more about creating Teams apps for meetings.
For example, many customers use Asana in Teams chat and channels to manage projects and track tasks. Now, you can add the Asana app into your Teams meeting invite so that during a meeting, you can easily create new action items. After the meeting, everyone can see the action items in the project plan and start working through them.
Another great tool that customers can use in their meetings is Slido, With Slido, you can use to plan and conduct live polls, quizzes, and Q&As in the Teams meetings experience without having to toggle back and forth between the app and the meeting.
These new apps for meetings join the more than 700 Teams apps already available in the Teams App Store that our customers use every day. For example, DevOps teams use apps like Jira Cloud and GitHub to build, test and release software directly in Teams. HR and Finance teams use market leading apps like Workday and Adobe Sign to streamline common workflows in Teams. And customer service and support teams use ServiceNow to respond to and manage support requests in Teams.
In fact, this month the Now Virtual Agent app by ServiceNow will feature new capabilities that will help improve employee productivity with seamless self-service and faster case resolution, allowing employees to submit support requests, view open ticket approvals, take action on notifications, chat with virtual agents for automated assistance, and streamline communication between agents and employees—all while staying in the flow of work in Teams.
Build and integrate custom apps into your digital workspace
Adding apps from the Teams App Store is just one way to customize how you work, but every organization has processes and ways of working that are unique to them, and often require custom solutions.
Teams is an extensible platform with a broad set of capabilities and entry points, so you can also easily create custom apps to fit your organization’s needs. For example, EPIC Systems, a global healthcare software company, recently built a connector that will allow clinicians and patients to schedule and launch virtual visits in Teams from within patient and provider portals – increasing access to vital services during a challenging time.
To build these custom apps, partners and developers use our professional grade developer tools like the Microsoft Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code, which provide developers everything they need to jump start Teams app development. We’ve made great advancements in these toolkits since their debut at Build earlier this year and will continue doing so, ensuring developers have a frictionless experience building Teams apps. Learn how to get started with these tools.
Thousands of organizations rely on enterprise apps built on SharePoint, so we’ve made significant strides in integrating Teams app development with the SharePoint Framework (SPFx), our largest and fastest growing UX extensibility model in Microsoft 365. By building Teams apps using SPFx, IT can save costs on hosting infrastructure and simplify the deployment and operation process – while SharePoint developers can expand the breadth and use of their apps using the framework they know and love. Learn how to get started building Teams apps with SPFx.
Drive agility with low code apps, workflows, and chatbots in Teams
Many of our customers are looking to digitally transform the workplace, but do not have enough developer capacity or time to build fully custom apps. For these customers, we’ve brought together the Microsoft Power Platform and Teams. Microsoft Power Platform provides low code tools to build apps, workflows, and chatbots, as well as deploy and manage them—all without leaving Teams.
We are excited to announce that the new Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents apps for Teams are now generally available.
Power Apps forTeams allows users to build and manage low code apps right within Teams. With an approachable user experience, anyone can now build apps to simplify work.
Power Automate app for Teams contains a simplified workflow designer and a number of templates to help anyone get started automating routine tasks.
Power Virtual Agents app for Teams makes it easy to build and deploy bots to support a range of scenarios, like IT helpdesk, operations FAQs, and HR issue resolution.
And with Microsoft Dataverse for Teams, a low code data platform that is also generally available today, you now have what is needed to easily build and deploy apps and chatbots in Teams. Dataverse will also improve application lifecycle management and allow greater control over the data you use to build your apps, bots, and workflows in Teams.
Teams customers are using Power Platform to create low-code solutions to simplify work. For example, Lumen Technologies used Power Apps in Teams to build apps that improve HR processes and help file technicians respond to outages faster. Office Depot built Power Apps with Teams to help improve payroll management for their store associates and is building a community of apps and workflows to further improve business processes and keep employees in the flow of work.
As you can see, Teams makes it easy to customize your workspace – whether that’s adding SaaS apps from the Teams app store, or creating custom apps, workflows, or bots to use in Teams.
We are humbled by the fact that Teams is used by millions of people around the world every day. Teams enables a new way of work, and our Teams apps integrations make work even easier.
Using supercomputing and new tools for understanding quantum algorithms in advance of scaled hardware gives us a view of what may be possible in a future with scaled quantum computing. Microsoft’s new Quantum Intermediate Representation (QIR), designed to bridge different languages and different target quantum computation platforms, is bringing us closer to that goal. Several Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratories are using this Microsoft technology in their research at the new National Quantum Initiative (NQI) quantum research centers.
As quantum computing capabilities mature, we expect most large-scale quantum applications will take full advantage of both classical and quantum computing resources working together. QIR provides a vital bridge between these two worlds by providing full capabilities for describing rich classical computation fully integrated with quantum computation.
QIR is central to a new collaboration between Microsoft and DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) born out of NQI’s Quantum Science Center (QSC) led by DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). The goal of the PNNL project is to measure the impact of noisy qubits on the accuracy of quantum algorithms, specifically the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE). In order to run it in simulation on the supercomputer, they needed a language to write the algorithm, and another representation to map it to run on the supercomputer. PNNL used Microsoft’s Q# language to write the VQE algorithm and then QIR provides the bridge, allowing easy translation and mapping to the supercomputer for the simulation.
Q# and QIR are also helping to advance research at ORNL, which is accelerating progress by enabling the use of the Q# language for all QSC members, including four national labs, three industry partners, and nine universities. ORNL is integrating Q# and QIR into its existing quantum computing framework, so ORNL researchers can run Q# code on a wide variety of targets including both supercomputer-based simulators and actual hardware devices. Supporting Q# is important to ORNL’s efforts to encourage experimentation with quantum programming in high-level languages.
The ORNL team is using QIR to develop quantum optimizations that work for multiple quantum programming languages. Having a shared intermediate representation allows the team to write optimizations and transformations that are independent of the original programming language. ORNL chose to use QIR because, being based on the popular LLVM suite, it integrates seamlessly with ORNL’s existing platform and provides a common platform that can support all of the different quantum and hybrid quantum/classical programming paradigms.
Since QIR is based on the open source LLVM intermediate language, it will enable the development of a broad ecosystem of software tools around the Q# language. The community can use QIR to experiment and develop optimizations and code transformations that will be crucial for unlocking quantum computing.
Microsoft technology is playing a crucial role in DOE’s NQI initiative connecting experts in industry, national labs, and academia to accelerate our nation’s progress towards a future with scaled quantum computing.
Learn more about the latest developments in quantum computing from Microsoft and our QSC national lab partner PNNL in these virtual SC20 conference sessions.
Complex quantum programs will require programming frameworks with many of the same features as classical software development, including tools to visualize the behavior of programs and diagnose issues. The Microsoft Quantum team presents new visualization tools being added to the Microsoft Quantum Development Kit (QDK) for visualizing the execution flow of a quantum program at each step during its execution. These tools are valuable for experienced developers and researchers as well as students and newcomers to the field who want to explore and understand quantum algorithms interactively.
Dr. Krysta Svore, Microsoft’s General Manager of Quantum Systems and Software, is on this year’s exotic system panel. The SC20 panel will discuss predictions from past year sessions, what actually happened, and predict what will be available for computing systems in 2025, 2030 and 2035.
As quantum computers evolve, simulations of quantum programs on classical computers will be essential in validating quantum algorithms, understanding the effect of system noise and designing applications for future quantum computers. In this paper, PNNL researchers first propose a new multi-GPU programming methodology which constructs a virtual BSP machine on top of modern multi-GPU platforms, and apply this methodology to build a multi-GPU density matrix quantum simulator. Their simulator is more than 10x faster than a corresponding state-vector quantum simulator on various platforms.
Enjoy game night online Puzzles. Word games. Card games. Board games. Games of all types are a hallmark of the holidays. Since gathering the whole group around a living or dining room table may be out of the question this year, it’s time to get creative. Discover new ideas with some of the best online games to play remotely like Sea of Thieves, Roblox, and Minecraft.
Kick off an adventure with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate Board games are fun, but maybe video games are more your style. You can get together with family or friends across distances using Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. Play directly on your PC, console, and Android mobile devices from the cloud (beta), and hunt for lost treasure, defend against alien invasions, race supercars, and more. There are hundreds of games waiting to be played and more are added all the time.
And if you need to make sure “one more hour” of Minecraft really means one more hour, you can set screen time limits that work across devices, apps, and games with Microsoft Family Safety.
Watch a movie together
Holiday movie classics. Comedies. Action adventures. Sometimes the fun of watching a movie is talking about it with your friends afterwards. You might not be going to movie theaters this holiday, but you can still enjoy a movie together using the new Teleparty (formerly Netflix Party) extension on Microsoft Edge.
This extension works with your favorite streaming services including Hulu, Amazon Prime, HBO GO, Disney+, Netflix, and more. Use it to sync video playback with your group so you can discuss and react together in a chat—no matter how far away they live.
And, through our partnership with Netflix, Microsoft Edge is currently the only browser that delivers 4K UHD video streaming. Teleparty is available on the Microsoft Edge add-ons site. Download and install Teleparty now to host your next virtual viewing party.
Build your own laptop
Yes, you read that correctly. Keep your child(ren) busy by having them build their own powerful computer.
The Kano PC comes disassembled with a set of simple instructions, so your kids can learn to build it themselves. You’ll inspire them to learn how computers work, plus they’ll come away with a powerful 2-in-1 laptop they can use for class or for fun. Along the way, they’ll also gain skills in coding, design, 3D modeling, and more.
Learn something new
If you’ve been meaning to learn a new skill, another language, or how to play an instrument, go ahead and make that happen now. Just choose what you want to learn from home with these handy apps.
If you have a Microsoft 365 subscription or have been meaning to get one, don’t forget to make use of the great additional benefits from our partners that are available with your subscription, such as:
CreativeLive: Want to learn how to play guitar, take great family photos, or learn skills you can add to your résumé? Explore over 300 hours of classes ranging from photography and music to business, design and more.
Blinkist: Learn anytime, anywhere with fast 15-minute audio bits from over 4,000 top nonfiction titles.
While you might not be able to gather with everyone you want in person this year, you can still stay connected through online games, video games, and virtual movie nights. And if you want more “me time,” you can choose to use the time to learn new skills or listen to an acclaimed nonfiction book. Whatever mindfulness or connection you seek, there are many creative ways to find it this holiday season.
Online fraud, hate speech, discrimination and other divisive online risks are on the rise globally, according to results of a new Microsoft study. We’re releasing these findings in conjunction with World Kindness Day in an effort to turn that tide and encourage safer, more empathetic and tolerant online interactions among all people.
Some 31% of respondents in 32 countries1 say they’ve been exposed to hoaxes, scams and fraud online, up two percentage points from last year, and up three percentage points since the fraud risk was first included in this study in 2017. Meanwhile, one in five respondents (20%) say they’ve been the target of hate speech online, and 15% say they’ve experienced discrimination. These latter two risks are up four and five percentage points, respectively, since the survey began in 2016. All three risks are at their highest levels on record for this research.
Strangers and people whom respondents say they know online only continue to be the primary sources of digital risk – a theme that has prevailed since 2016. In fact, anonymous bullying-type behaviors jumped in this latest poll. Among those respondents who said they had been subjected to bullying, harassment or mean and cruel treatment online – 33%, 47% and 37%, respectively – said those behaviors were exhibited by strangers. Still, risks from those identified as “friends” have been inching steadily higher, as well. This year, 22% of respondents said risks were perpetrated by friends, compared to 13% four years ago when 14 countries were included in the research.
The findings are from Microsoft’s latest research into aspects of digital civility – encouraging safer, healthier and more respectful online interactions. The study, Civility, Safety and Interaction Online – 2020, surveyed teens ages 13-17 and adults ages 18-74 about their exposure to 212 different online risks. This latest research builds on similar studies undertaken each year since 2016. Previous years’ projects polled the same demographics in 14, 22, 23, and 25 countries, respectively. In total, 16,051 individuals participated in this latest installment, and we’ve polled more than 58,000 people over the last five years. Complete results will be made available in conjunction with international Safer Internet Day on February 9.
At that time, we’ll also release the latest Microsoft Digital Civility Index, a gauge that looks at the state of online civility in each individual geography, as well as in all 32 combined. The index, which stood at 70 last year, is an indication of the perceived level of civility in that country. The index works like a golf score: A lower reading equates to a higher level of perceived civility among respondents in that country. The 2019 worldwide Digital Civility Index reading was the highest on record thus far for this research and reflects responses from survey participants in 25 countries. (Read more about the 2019 worldwide index and survey here.)
Take the Digital Civility Challenge
As done since the start of this research, we’re encouraging people around the world to take our Digital Civility Challenge and pledge to live by four basic tenets for life online:
Live the Golden Rule and treat others as you would want to be treated
Respect differences of all types, including those of thought and opinion
Pause before replying to something you may disagree with, and
If it’s safe and prudent to do so, stand up for yourself and others online who may be the target of abuse or cruel treatment.
Results from the latest survey show both teens and adults appear to be championing these actions. Indeed, 58% of adults and 57% of teens report having taken at least one challenge action in response to online risks. “Standing up for myself” was the most common challenge action this year, with 34% of respondents saying they defended themselves online. “Pausing before replying” was noted by 25% of those surveyed.
The Digital Civility Challenge isn’t meant to be a panacea, but rather a starting place to encourage good digital citizenship and active, engaged online communities. We’re not trying to thwart online debate or disagreement. On the contrary, we encourage it, while guarding against heated discussions that quickly devolve to name-calling and abuse.
So, step up to the Digital Civility Challenge this World Kindness Day, and tell us you’ve done so on social media using the hashtag #Im4digitalcivility. To learn more about online safety issues and digital civility generally, visit our website and webpage.
1 Geographies polled in 2020: Argentina, Australia*, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Denmark*, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Indonesia*, Ireland, Italy, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, Peru, Philippines*, Poland, Russia, Sweden*, Singapore, Spain*, South Africa, Taiwan*, Thailand*, Turkey, U.K., U.S., Vietnam. * Added (or re-added) to the study in 2020
2 The 21 risks span four broad categories: behavioral, sexual, reputational and personal/intrusive. Specifically:
Reputational – “Doxing” and damage to personal or professional reputations
Behavioral – Being treated meanly; experiencing trolling, online harassment or bullying; encountering hate speech and microaggressions
Sexual – Sending or receiving unwanted sexting messages and making sexual solicitations; receiving unwanted sexual attention and being a victim of sextortion or non-consensual intimate images (aka “revenge porn”), and
Personal/intrusive – Being the target of unwanted contact, experiencing discrimination, swatting, misogyny, exposure to extremist content/recruiting, or falling victim to hoaxes, scams, or fraud
“Kindness comes in many different forms, including patience, forgiveness, and through simple acts that lead to positive connections.” — Christine McKee, Emerging Technology Consultant, Edmonton Catholic Schools, Alberta, Canada
This year, teachers, students, and parents have done an incredible job adapting to remote and hybrid learning. They’ve brought positivity to every interaction, made online learning engaging, found ways to stay connected, and shared acts of kindness throughout rapidly changing situations.
World Kindness Day is November 13, and it’s the perfect time to reflect on and appreciate the positive power of kindness—and recognize the heroes who model it all year round!
As part of our celebration, we are highlighting tips and lessons from teachers, educators, and parents, including you, on what you’ve learned about kindness during remote and hybrid learning. To make this easy and engaging, we’re using Flipgrid to record and display your responses. You can visit the World Kindness Day Flipgrid topic to see them all and add your own! There are already some great messages posted, and we’ve put some of our favorites so far on a one-minute Kindness Sizzle Reel.
Here are some more quick and easy-to-use ways to spread kindness and promote well-being:
New praise badges in Microsoft Teams and sticker packs in OneNote and Whiteboard
Praise badges were released not long ago, and we’re already hearing some great stories of how teachers and students have been using them to build up one another.
Cindy Ramirez, a teacher from the US, was excited to share that her students are celebrating their classmates with praise badges; Patrick O’Callaghan from Ireland said his students really like when he recognizes their hard work with a badge; and students in Sacha van Straten’s class in England surprised him with a badge to thank him for a great lesson.
Donald Gillespie, a teacher in Scotland said, “The pupils really appreciate receiving them and we find they really motivate not just the recipient but others who see the praise being given out.”
Reflect Messaging in Teams
More than ever, it’s important for teachers to understand how students are feeling. It can be hard to gauge well-being during distance learning, but with tools like Reflect Messaging in Teams, educators can create a quick and engaging check-in to get insights on the well-being of their students and classes.
These tools can have a tangible impact on students’ social and emotional health. My eleven-year-old son Max’s school used Microsoft Forms to create a Mood Meter check-in that students use to identify their emotions, and he says it makes him feel better just to be asked how he’s feeling. He also thought it was helpful to take the time to reflect on and better understand his emotions, and that it helped him learn how to navigate them.
As a recent article about social-emotional learning in TechRepublic shared, “At any age, the key to dealing with complexity, ambiguity, and change is emotion. Checking in to ask what emotions someone is experiencing is one of the simplest and kindest things you can do.”
Kindness Cards
Kindness Cards are available in many different languages, and each card has ideas, reminders, or inspiration teachers can use to model kind behaviors. Teachers can keep them handy to share with students or a colleague!
As educators, teachers, and students continue to model empathy and spread kindness around their classrooms and around the world, we’re working to support their incredible work with easy-to-use and personalized resources that amplify their voices. For more information, as well as support and guidance on the best tools to use for social and emotional learning, take a look at the social and emotional learning resource page.
As Brian H. Smith, Ph.D, a member of the Born This Way Foundation’s Research Advisory Board says, “When kindness is a norm, a strong value we hold, it can help guide how we approach the rest of the world.”
I sincerely hope that every small and large act expands the reach of positivity, and brings people of all ages together.
Remember: one kind word (or Praise badge) can change someone’s entire day. Wishing everyone around the globe a Happy World Kindness Day!
The Custom Translator journey to be on the leading edge of machine translation technology continues.
In early August 2020, we started our Custom Translator upgrade from Long Short-Term Memory (aka LSTM) based neural machine translation architecture (or V1) to our Microsoft Translator’s state-of-the-art Transformer based architecture (or V2). V2 is the same translation architecture which powers the standard uncustomized Translator API, as well as translation in Microsoft Office 365, Speech, Bing.com/translator, Edge, and more.
The August release enabled customers to use the dictionary (phrase or sentence) document type to build custom models on top of the V2 platform for a quick translation quality improvement over the V1 platform.
Today, Custom Translator completed the full V2 platform upgrade to deliver an even bigger translation quality gain than before. Customers can now build custom models with all document types (Training, Testing, Tuning, Phrase Dictionary and Sentence Dictionary) using full text documents, like Office documents, PDFs, HTML and plain text.
With this release, enterprises, small and medium sized businesses, app developers, and language service providers can build advanced custom neural translation systems that respect their defined business terminology and seamlessly integrate those systems into existing or new applications, workflows, and websites to attract customers and grow the business.
We put every new baseline language model through a rigorous human evaluation process to ensure the translation quality continues to meet high standards on generic input across all domains. However, with custom trained specialized translation systems, customers can achieve much higher adherence to the domain-specific terminology and style by training a custom translation system on previously translated, in-domain documents. These previously translated documents allow Custom Translator to learn the preferred translations in context, so Translator can apply these terms and phrases when the context calls for it, and produce a fluent translation in the target language, respecting the context-dependent grammar of the target language.
Benefits of the upgrade
We use BLEU score (a standard way in the research community) to measure the translation quality of a newly trained baseline model. A one or two BLEU point gain is a worthy achievement. The Custom Translator V2 platform upgrade will deliver significant improvements when compared to the previous V1 platform. The bar chart below depicts the translation quality BLEU score improvement for some domains and the impact of training dataset size.
Sample domains translation quality BLEU score when using standard Translator, Custom Translator V1, and Custom Translator V2. Training dataset size in thousands (‘auto-28k’ means 28,000 parallel sentences for the automotive domain)
It is important to note that actual quality improvement is dependent upon customer data quality, training dataset size, and domain coverage.
“We’re hoping that translation through a neural network will not only boost quality and speed, but also offer advances in the evaluation of big data,” said Nikolas Meyer-Aun, Head of Quality and Supplier Management for Languages at Volkswagen AG
Custom Translator will offer FREE upgrade to V2. You can retrain one model per project in a workspace to the V2 platform at no charge. When you view a project, you should see a message if you still have free upgrade credit for that project. The offer starts today and ends on January 31, 2021. After January 31, 2021, normal training charges apply for each retraining.
You can learn more about the upgrade to version 2 in the FAQ below.
FAQ
What are you releasing in V2? We are releasing a Custom Translator platform upgrade (V2) to deliver significant translation quality improvements using Microsoft’s state-of-the-art neural machine translation architecture. The user experience remains the same as in V1. There is nothing new to learn, just better translations. For a quick refresher, please watch this Quick-Start video.
What is the benefit of upgrading a currently deployed model to the V2 platform? Significantly improved translation quality; the Custom Translator V2 platform upgrade will deliver significant improvement over standard Translator and the previous V1 platform. The bar chart above shows the translation quality BLEU scores for some common domains and the impact of training dataset size.
How do I use my FREE upgrade to V2 credit? When you view a project details, a free credit message becomes visible (see images below) and will continue to be visible until you either successfully retrain a model or the offer ends on January 31, 2021.
How do I upgrade my deployed (or undeployed) custom models to the V2 platform? If you have a deployed or undeployed dictionary-only model that was retrained after August 3, 2020, it has already been upgraded to the V2 platform. Otherwise, you should launch a new model training. Once the new model is successfully trained, the “Swap” button will be visible. Click “Swap” to deploy the new model. Note: “Swap” button enables no-downtime deployment. That is, all translation requests will continue to be served by the previous model until the new model is deployed and functional, then the new model will serve new translation requests and the previous model will be undeployed.
Can I continue to re-deploy V1 custom models after the V2 platform upgrade? Yes. We understand there may be reasons customers would want to continue using models trained on the V1 platform. V1 models can run on the V2 platform. In the future, V1 models will not be re-deployable. Note: Once you retrain a V1 model, the new model will be on the V2 platform. The “Model” tab will show all new (V2) and previous (V1) models.
Thanks to you, the launch of Xbox Series X|S is now the most successful debut in our history. While we missed the emotional spark of being together with you in person, it was incredible to celebrate a new generation of gaming with the millions on our celebration livestream and everyone who participated in our global launch across 40 countries.
Your support, and what you accomplished in the first 24 hours of launch, inspire us and demonstrate the connective power of play is more important than ever.
More new consoles sold than any prior generation, with Xbox Series S adding the highest percentage of new players for any Xbox console at launch
More games played, 3,594 in total, spanning four generations, setting a record for the most games ever played during an Xbox console launch
Next gen means more ways to discover and play, 70 percent of Series X|S consoles are attached to new and existing Xbox Game Pass members
As none of this would be possible without great games to play, we also want to thank our development partners around the world and congratulate them on their own respective launches this week, including delivering more than 40 new and Optimized games like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Destiny 2: Beyond Light, Dirt 5, The Falconeer, Tetris Effect: Connected, Watch Dogs: Legion and Yakuza: Like a Dragon to players on day one, 30 of which support Smart Delivery.
We know that not everyone was able to get an Xbox Series X|S immediately and are working tirelessly with our partners around the world to bring as many new consoles to as many of you as possible over time and encourage you to check in with your local retailers directly for more details on availability in your market.
Your early reaction and excitement for the next generation of Xbox has us feeling grateful and energized to continue building the future of gaming with you. On the behalf of Team Xbox: Thank you.
Two global issues will help shape people’s memories of this time in history – Covid-19 and the increased use of the internet by malign actors to disrupt society. It’s disturbing that these challenges have now merged as cyberattacks are being used to disrupt health care organizations fighting the pandemic. We think these attacks are unconscionable and should be condemned by all civilized society. Today, we’re sharing more about the attacks we’ve seen most recently and are urging governments to act.
In recent months, we’ve detected cyberattacks from three nation-state actors targeting seven prominent companies directly involved in researching vaccines and treatments for Covid-19. The targets include leading pharmaceutical companies and vaccine researchers in Canada, France, India, South Korea and the United States. The attacks came from Strontium, an actor originating from Russia, and two actors originating from North Korea that we call Zinc and Cerium.
Among the targets, the majority are vaccine makers that have Covid-19 vaccines in various stages of clinical trials. One is a clinical research organization involved in trials, and one has developed a Covid-19 test. Multiple organizations targeted have contracts with or investments from government agencies from various democratic countries for Covid-19 related work.
Strontium continues to use password spray and brute force login attempts to steal login credentials. These are attacks that aim to break into people’s accounts using thousands or millions of rapid attempts. Zinc has primarily used spear-phishing lures for credential theft, sending messages with fabricated job descriptions pretending to be recruiters. Cerium engaged in spear-phishing email lures using Covid-19 themes while masquerading as World Health Organization representatives. The majority of these attacks were blocked by security protections built into our products. We’ve notified all organizations targeted, and where attacks have been successful, we’ve offered help.
These are just among the most recent attacks on those combating Covid-19. Cyberattacks targeting the health care sector and taking advantage of the pandemic are not new. Attackers recently used ransomware attacks to target hospitals and healthcare organizations across the United States. Earlier in the pandemic, attacks targeted Brno University Hospital in the Czech Republic, Paris’s hospital system, the computer systems of Spain’s hospitals, hospitals in Thailand, medical clinics in the U.S. state of Texas, a health care agency in the U.S. state of Illinois and even international bodies such as the World Health Organization. In Germany, we recently saw the resulting threat to human health become tragic reality when a woman in Dusseldorf reportedly became the first known death as a result of a cyberattack on a hospital.
Today, Microsoft’s president Brad Smith is participating in the Paris Peace Forum where he will urge governments to do more. Microsoft is calling on the world’s leaders to affirm that international law protects health care facilities and to take action to enforce the law. We believe the law should be enforced not just when attacks originate from government agencies but also when they originate from criminal groups that governments enable to operate – or even facilitate – within their borders. This is criminal activity that cannot be tolerated.
The good news is that we’re not alone. Our voice at Microsoft is just one of many speaking up from the multi-stakeholder coalition that will be needed to make progress. In today’s virtual Paris Peace Forum event addressing an audience of international leaders, Brad will discuss these issues with France’s Minister for Foreign Affairs Jean-Yves le Drian, Ambassador Guilherme de Aguiar Patriota of Brazil and Ambassador Jürg Lauber of Switzerland. Ambassador Patriota is chair of the UN’s Group of Governmental Experts, and Ambassador Lauber is chair of the UN’s Open-Ended Working Group – both important bodies in determining the future of cyberspace.
In the leadup to this year’s Paris Peace Forum, more than 65 health care-related organizations have joined the Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace. They include organizations like Merck working on vaccines, top hospitals like Hospital Metropolitano in Ecuador, and government health institutes like Poland’s National Institute of Public Health. There is no question the attacks we’ve seen in recent months are creating energy for action across the health sector. The Paris Call remains the largest multi-stakeholder coalition addressing these issues, and its first principle is the prevention of malicious cyber activities that threaten indiscriminate or systemic harm to people and critical infrastructure.
In May, a 136-strong group of the world’s most prominent international law experts, in what has become known as the Oxford Process, issued a statement making it clear that international law protects medical facilities at all times. In August, the Oxford Process issued a second statement emphasizing that organizations that research, manufacture and distribute of Covid-19 vaccines are also protected.
Earlier this year, the CyberPeace Institute and International Committee of the Red Cross led an effort by 40 international leaders calling on governments to stop the attacks on healthcare. They included former secretary of state Madeline Albright, Archbishop Emeritus of Cape Town Desmond Tutu, former Member of the European Parliament Marietje Schaake and former Secretary-General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon among many others.
Organizations are also taking steps to protect themselves. In April, we announced that we were making AccountGuard, our threat notification service, available to health care and human rights organizations working on Covid-19. Since then 195 of these organizations have enrolled in the service and we now protect 1.7 million email accounts for health care-related groups. Any health care-related organizations that wish to enroll can do so here.
At a time when the world is united in wanting an end to the pandemic and anxiously awaiting the development of a safe and effective vaccine for Covid-19, it is essential for world leaders to unite around the security of our health care institutions and enforce the law against cyberattacks targeting those who endeavor to help us all. You can learn more about what Microsoft is doing to advance cybersecurity here.
Nearly two years ago, we released a Garage project created by a passionate engineer who channeled his classical architecture training and love for drawing into a 360 sketch app. Sketch 360 enables artists to create full, 360-degree, panoramic sketches with ease, using an innovative grid design. Originally released on Windows and designed around Surface Laptop, Surface Go, and the power of the Surface Pen, the app is now available on Android, leveraging the unique, two-screen form factor of the Surface Duo for on-the-go artists, architects, VR game designers–or anyone who wants to capture their imagination in 360 degrees.
“Throughout my career, my passion has been for building and using creative toolsso my imagination comes alive with a dual-screen, pen/touch capable device that folds out from my pocket to the size of my typical journal page.”
–Michael Scherotter, Principal Program Manager and Sketch 360 creator
Bringing Sketch 360 to the Surface Duo
Sketch 360 creator and Principal Program Manager Michael Scherotter outlines his experience re-imagining the UWP app for the Duo in full detail, featured on the Surface Duo Dev Blog. Michael and a team of volunteer hackers brought Sketch 360 from a hack project to a releasable experiment and are extending an invitation to external collaborators by open sourcing the Android application.
“I was up for the challenge of moving my native C# UWP app to a C# Xamarin Forms. When the Microsoft Garage sponsored an internal hackathon to encourage employees to build or adapt apps for the Surface Duo, I jumped at the chance,” shares Michael, who is a multi-year hacking veteran. The largest company hacking event takes place at the Microsoft Hackathon each July, drawing thousands of employees and hack projects, but hacking culture thrives all year round. When Michael entered his prototype into a dedicated Surface Duo hackathon, his project was selected among three winners that would go on to share their prototypes with experts and leaders of the Surface business.
In addition to demoing Sketch 360 adapted for Duo, Michael and the other teams were able to share their experience and feedback about adapting or creating experiences from scratch for Duo. “Xamarin forms made the process of creating a cross-platform mobile creative app straightforward, and with the additional tools in the XamarinEssentials, I was able to make it as functional and performant as a native app. For most of the development, using the Surface Duo Emulator enabled my volunteer team of hackers and me to build the app without having a physical device in-hand.”
A hacking culture enables ideas, diverse perspectives, and organic collaboration, to flow laterally and vertically through an organization to fuel innovation.
Developers can find a detailed outline of Michael’s experience, reimagining the app for Android, on the Surface Duo Dev Blog.
Mobile productivity, powered by two screens
The Microsoft Surface Duo offers a new way to get things done while on the go. Open two screens and discover a better way to get things done. View two apps at once or span one across both screens, drag and drop between screens, and say goodbye to constant app switching.
Room to focus. Open and view different apps on each screen to easily reference and compare content. Say goodbye to constant app switching on your mobile device.
Enhanced apps built for two screens. Dual-screen enhanced apps* respond to you and magically reorient to make best use of both screens.
Create your favorite combos with App Groups. Unique to Surface Duo, pair and launch any two apps at the same time. It’s completely custom to you.
Drag and drop to effortlessly move images, text, files, and more between screens so you can get things done quicker (only available on supported apps)
Learn more about the power of two screens on a Surface Duo.
Try it out or contribute to the open source project
Sketch 360 is now available to download for your Duo device on the Google Play Store. Share your feedback or contribute to the open source project on GitHub.
