Recent News – Page 71

Posted on October 20, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

CVP Tom McGuinness: Top takeaways from HLTH 2020

Doctor touching electronic medical record on tablet. DNA. Digital healthcare and network connection on hologram modern virtual screen interface, medical technology and futuristic concept.

It’s always exciting to attend an event like HLTH! A time to come together with other healthcare innovators as a community to connect with peers, share, and learn from each other. It’s an opportunity to get a pulse on what’s trending and how we shape the future of healthcare. It’s an opportunity to get a pulse on what’s trending and how we shape the future of healthcare.  I encourage you to watch HLTH sessions on-demand at HLTH 2020.

But 2020 has been a year of dynamic change—The world after this pandemic will not be the same as the one that came before it. From remote teamwork and telehealth, to supply management and customer service, to critical cloud infrastructure and security—we are working alongside customers every day to help manage through a world of remote everything.

The whole of the healthcare industry has been impacted by COVID-19 in an unprecedented way. It’s had a substantial impact, and in many ways, it has raised the bar on what we need to collectively deliver as an industry.

We all have the potential to deliver a personalized experience for health consumers, empower health team productivity, improve health data accessibility, and find ways to remove the barriers of health equity and affordability. Across the healthcare ecosystem, we’re seeing organizations bring together compute, data, and artificial intelligence (AI) to help accelerate the response to COVID-19. From diagnostic testing to therapeutics and vaccines. Healthcare providers are triaging patients with our Healthcare Bot service, helping more than 40 million people to access critical healthcare information. Biotech organizations are using our machine learning capabilities to decode the immune system response to the virus, and healthcare providers and hospitals around the world are using FHIR technology in Azure to make data available for research, provide more robust treatment assessments, and deliver first-class telehealth experiences to their patients.

Technology has played an important role in helping to battle the pandemic, and Microsoft will continue to lean in to support efforts where technology can make a difference today and beyond.

Leading through COVID-19 response and recovery

During their HLTH keynote, Microsoft’s own Kurt DelBene EVP, Corporate Strategy, and Toni Townes Whitley, President US Regulated Industries, along with Dr. Nicole Fisher, President, Health and Human Rights Strategies, Global Health and Policy Contributor, Forbes, shared their insights and initiatives that are helping Microsoft employees, customers and partners through the pandemic.

In these types of situations, we must be ready to learn together. Over the past several years one of the hallmarks of our culture has been a learning organization. This is incredibly important as we focus on our employees and our customers. We became digital-first responders supporting customers and partners by leaning in, learning and helping organizations adapt to the disruption, and build scalable modalities of care while safeguarding patients, employees, and assets. From remote teamwork and telehealth, to supply chain management and customer service, to critical cloud infrastructure and security, we are working alongside customers every day to help manage through a world of remote everything.

Our commitment has always been to ensure the tools we provide are up to the task of supporting our customers in their time of need. In that same spirit, we announced our first industry-specific cloud offering, Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. The offer brings together existing and future capabilities that deliver automation and efficiency on high-value workflows, as well as deep data analytics for both structured and unstructured data, that enable customers to turn insight into action. A robust partner ecosystem extends the value of the platform with additional solutions to address the most pressing challenges the healthcare industry is facing today. In September, we announced the general availability of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare coming on October 28, 2020. Throughout the public preview, we’ve been working closely with customers and partners across the healthcare ecosystem on key use cases, to facilitate integrations into existing platforms and systems of record, to streamline their workflows, and ultimately deliver better experiences, insights, and care.

At Microsoft, we will continue to focus on helping everyone get back to their places of work or school, and enabling organizations with the speed and agility to adjust to change, build resiliency that help them weather today’s challenges so they can begin to reimagine tomorrow.

Reshaping the future of disease diagnostic

Julie Rubinstein, President of Adaptive Biotechnologies, and Dr. Greg Moore, Microsoft CVP of Health, highlighted the unreleased insights from the growing and largest ImmuneCODE database in their announcement session, “T-cells: The key to SARS-CoV-2 immunity?” ImmuneCODE is one of the largest, most detailed views of the immune response to COVID-19 based on de-identified data generated from thousands of COVID-19 blood samples from patients around the globe. This new data points to T-cells giving us predictive power for early detection and predetermining the body’s immune response.

This is reshaping the future of disease diagnostic with Azure machine learning and AI. Microsoft took the existing partnership with Adaptive and pivoted to use the same technology and antigen mapping and apply it to COVID-19. Recognizing that this approach to the virus is one of a kind, looking at T-cells for the answer for early detection, immune response individual to individual, and for therapeutics and vaccines to determine the best course of action for each patient. Information from ImmuneCODE will continue to accelerate ongoing global efforts to develop better diagnostics, vaccines, and therapeutics for COVID-19. For more information on how to join or get involved in the Adaptive and Microsoft collaboration, check out, ImmuneRace.

Accessibility as a tech opportunity

With the unprecedented shift to a virtual world, it has never been more important to be accessible and inclusive of more than one billion people worldwide with a disability.

October marks the 75th anniversary of the National Disability Employment Awareness Month (NDEAM). Jenny Lay-Flurrie, Chief Accessibility Officer at Microsoft, talked about her own personal journey and gives us a peek into the evolution of accessibility across companies, education, and healthcare.

At Microsoft, we’re making accessibility a core part of our culture and how we design and build our products. People with disabilities have been the catalyst for innovations that have been critical during these times. Live Captions in Teams saw 30X growth in April versus February, Immersive Reader had a 560 percent increase in use, and upcoming wellbeing features in Teams responded to the growing importance of mental health.

Disability is a strength. All these technologies have been powered by insight from employees with disabilities. It’s one of the many reasons why our workforce must reflect the diversity of everyone who uses our technology. You might be surprised what is included as a disability, the majority of disabilities are invisible and include non-apparent conditions such as Cancer, Dyslexia, Autism, Depression, Anxiety, Diabetes, Asthma, and Lupus.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of those technologies that can help employers eliminate barriers to employment and it can help people with disabilities develop professional skills and influence workplace culture. Microsoft is an advocate of people with disabilities, committed to influencing the future of technology to ensure global independence and inclusion in society in three areas of focus: employment, daily life, communication, and connection. Read more about AI for Accessibility or our AI for Accessibility grants.

Ethical approaches to AI

Given the global scale of the pandemic, technology will play a critical role in nearly every facet of addressing COVID-19, from using AI to crunch massive datasets to analyzing disease vectors and identifying treatment impacts. We continue to collaborate with nonprofits, governments, and academic researchers on solutions, and bring our experience to the table, providing access to Microsoft AI, technical experts, data scientists, and other resources.

During the early days of the pandemic, a heightened public concern along with a readily transmissible respiratory pathogen necessitated that health systems adjust their underlying processes for screening and triage. Providence, a large multi-state multi-hospital health system with a significant presence in the greater Seattle region, applied an artificial intelligence (AI)-based chatbot technology, developed by Microsoft, to address the rising patient concerns about the virus.

By asking a series of questions based on the latest Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines, the chatbot screened patients for COVID-19 symptoms and/or exposures. Patients with symptoms and/or exposures were subsequently directed to Providence’s telehealth portal for clinical evaluation and possible testing. The bot was facilitating successful and efficient population-level care coordination. This enabled high-risk and/or symptomatic patients to receive a timely remote clinical evaluation, without increasing the risk of virus transmission to other patients or extending the wait-times for those with symptoms.

Since then, Microsoft has delivered the same chatbot technology for hospitals and governments across the globe. Today, more than 45 million people globally have been using this AI-enabled bot technology.

We all know every person is unique, and so are their illnesses. AI enables an entirely new level of personalized treatment by taking into consideration what makes a patient unique, from their genetics to their lifestyle. Precision medicine has the potential to radically improve health and longevity for every patient. This is an inflection point where the healthcare industry has an opportunity to improve the quality and delivery of care by taking a people-centered approach to the research, development, and deployment of AI. To achieve this, as an industry we need to embrace diverse perspectives, continuous learning, and agile responsiveness as AI technology and precision medicine continue to evolve.

But it’s also important healthcare organizations cultivate a responsible AI-ready culture throughout their businesses and put principles into place from implementation to governance with practices, tools, and technologies built on multidisciplinary research, shared learning, and leading innovation. Learn more about Microsoft’s commitment to responsible AI.

It’s a pivotal time to be working in healthcare and HLTH proved it. If you didn’t attend any of the live sessions, I’d encourage you to watch HLTH sessions on-demand at HLTH 2020. And I look forward to seeing all of you at the HLTH 2021 event, where we are sure to gain a whole new set of insights and inspirations for a bold path forward.

Visit Microsoft for Healthcare to learn about our perspective for healthcare organizations and the opportunity to see more information about the new Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare solution.

Posted on October 20, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

New COVID-19 at home testing kit has potential to help beyond pandemic

A population-level disease monitoring system that employs at-home self-swab kits is being expanded today, at no cost to participants, as part of an infection prevalence study in the San Francisco Bay Area. The system could have broader impact on testing not only for COVID-19, but for other diseases as well.

The service uses the Vera Cloud Testing Platform which continuously aggregates test results and data about symptoms submitted by volunteers to study COVID-19 prevalence in real-time across the region. The system is the result of collaboration by Stanford University with the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Gates Ventures, the University of Washington, Microsoft Research and other private and public institutions.

Vera is a scalable and low-cost “testing-as-a-service” platform that could also be used by public health departments and employers. With its sample self-collection kit and population health monitoring system, it can also be used on a broader scale to help with back-to-school COVID-19 testing for students and staff at schools and universities, an option not readily available today.

A man leans over smiling — “We’re hoping that this can address inequities in testing by reaching underserved populations who are often at the highest risk,” says Stephen Quake, co-president of the Chan-Zukerberg Biohub.

Its impact could extend to other types of testing in the future, such as for other viruses, new strains of flu, or to help monitor diseases, says Stephen Quake, Ph.D., the Lee Otterson Professor of Bioengineering and Professor of Applied Physics at Stanford University, and co-president of the Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub.

“What we’ve learned through this pandemic is that there’s a real mismatch between testing capacity and testing need. Certain parts of the country have more than enough testing capacity, and others do not,” Quake says.

Vera helps address that problem by providing a way for people to collect their own sample at home then mail them for testing to labs that can be based anywhere, he says.

To initially test the platform, Stanford Medicine has been conducting a pilot study known as CATCH – Community Alliance to Test Coronavirus at Home – for the past few weeks, and now is officially launching the full study to monitor the spread of COVID-19 in all 12 counties of the greater Bay Area, with the hope of securing up to 100,000 participants during the course of the flu season.

“We’re hoping that this can help address inequities in testing by reaching underserved populations who are often at the highest risk – people who work in essential occupations and may have difficulty accessing health care facility-based testing,” says Quake. Testing is free to those participating in the CATCH study.

Yvonne Maldonado, M.D., a professor of pediatric infectious diseases and of health research and policy at the Stanford School of Medicine, also a leader of the CATCH study and an advisor to the Vera team, says the platform’s compatibility with any type of COVID-19 test means it has the potential to be adopted by a range of organizations, well beyond the initial CATCH study.

A woman smiles with greenery in the background — Yvonne Maldonado, M.D., Stanford School of Medicine professor of pediatric infectious diseases and of health research and policy, is one of the leaders of the CATCH study.

“While the CATCH study uses the Stanford laboratory’s RT-PCT assay, you could use an Abbott test, or any other lab or test you want. The software platform allows you to link test results and monitor how infections are spreading through the overall population,” she says.

All Vera participant information and test results are securely protected, Maldonado says, although COVID-19 results are reported to public health departments as required by law. Vera – derived from the Latin word for “truth” – includes a customizable enrollment and testing system, a self-swabbing kit, and a secure participant portal for obtaining results and any other medical follow-up that may be needed.

Microsoft technology, including the Microsoft Healthcare Bot, Azure, Power BI, and Power Platform, was used to help create Vera and CATCH, which adhere to Microsoft’s policies on data and privacy, including during the COVID-19 pandemic. Microsoft’s commercial software engineering team helped scale SCAN’s epidemiology testing platform that Vera is based on. The Healthcare Bot is used by the Centers for Disease Control, as well as thousands of hospitals around the world, to help screen people for potential COVID-19 infection and treatment. Microsoft’s AI for Good program has been supporting the project team as they have scaled up their efforts.

“What’s exciting about Vera is the ability to track this pandemic in real-time to the degree possible, and give people who might not otherwise be reached access to testing,” Maldonado says. This real-time system also enables health care providers and public health agencies to implement more complex testing algorithms, including increasing testing rates as symptoms are reported, as well as programmatic epidemiological sampling plans, tailored to local exposures, demographics and other characteristics over time.

The researchers say the inspiration for Vera was work done earlier this year by the greater Seattle Coronavirus Assessment Network (SCAN), a program that receives funding from Gates Ventures and technical assistance from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and public health authorities.

SCAN uses an at-home kit that allows participants to collect their own sample with a simple swab within the front of each nostril — a far more gentle and less-invasive process than other COVID-19 tests which require a nasal swab to be placed all the way to the back of the throat. The CATCH study uses a similar self-swab method as SCAN.

SCAN grew out of the Seattle Flu Study, which in February detected one of the first documented U.S. cases of community transmission of COVID-19.

A hand holds a blue envelope — Vera and CATCH offer “the ability to better understand the disease spread in a given community, which is really very valuable,” says Vikram Dendi, general manager for Microsoft Health NExT. Photo credit: Stanford University.

From SCAN, CATCH shares “the broader population-level epidemiological understanding of the disease,” says Vikram Dendi, general manager of Microsoft Health NExT. “Where is it breaking now? How is it spreading? How many people are symptomatic?

“Being able to do that by sending kits to your home is a very powerful way of ensuring that you can actually have a much better understanding of the pandemic, and also do it in a much more equitable way,” says Dendi.

COVID-19 disproportionately affects people of color as well as those in low-income neighborhoods. But it’s often these communities that have the least access to health care and the greatest barriers to testing. “The design of CATCH as a study intends to try to overcome those kinds of inequities and really develop a very clear and comprehensive picture of how things are evolving,” he says.

From a research and science perspective, Dendi says that Vera and CATCH offer “the ability to better understand the disease spread in a given community, which is really very valuable, and we were very happy to help.”

“It really has quite a bit of potential for not only now, but down the road,” he says. “The promise of return to school, and to have that happen not just for one school, but beyond, is certainly something that we will celebrate as and when that happens.”

Top image: The Stanford Clinical Virology Laboratory will provide testing for a pilot use of Vera with the CATCH study. Photo credit: Steve Fisch.

Posted on October 19, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

CTA selects Microsoft as tech partner for CES 2021, the organization’s first-ever, all-digital event, happening Jan. 11-14

Today is a big day for events at Microsoft. The Consumer Technology Association (CTA) announced that Microsoft will be the technology partner for CES 2021, the organization’s first-ever, all-digital event, happening Jan. 11-14.

It is an extreme honor for Microsoft to be selected as CTA’s technology partner for CES, the world’s most influential technology event. It won’t surprise you to hear we’re bringing Microsoft Cloud solutions, including Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Power Platform, together with partner solutions to create the technology platform for the all-digital event that will bring together the entire global tech community and be the CES 2021 experience.

We are thrilled to be able to work side by side with the team from CTA. What I’m even more excited about personally, though, is the opportunity this will give us to share all that we’ve learned about digital events over the past many months as world circumstances have necessitated that we rethink everything we thought we knew about how to host a major event.

My team knows how to put on a live event. So, it was devastating when we realized earlier this year in March that the events we had planned for 2020 could not go on – at least not as we had planned them. We’d already put a lot of work and preparation into getting ready for events like Microsoft Build, which in a typical year sees people travel from all over the world to Seattle for several days of expertly produced keynote and breakout sessions. We had already started down the path to make events like that happen, and that path was now going nowhere.

This was going to be hard, but this team was definitely up for the challenge. We lamented the events that wouldn’t be, but then immediately shifted our focus to reinventing those events anew. Every person gave it their all, rolled up their sleeves, and learned everything they could. In a few short months, our team went through what is probably years of transformation and growth.

Since then, we’ve produced a dozen major Microsoft events, including all six of our flagship global conferences. At the same time, Microsoft has been collaborating with customers like the NBA, the NFL and iHeartMedia to help them bring a new level of connection to a world that has, for so many months, felt disconnected.

Through all of it, we’ve been learning a ton! We’ve experimented and piloted ideas and new approaches to creating compelling and highly interactive experiences, and we’ve made significant strides in defining the elements of a successful virtual event.

The most important learning – you cannot translate a live event into a digital format. You must remake the event entirely. If you can fundamentally embrace that notion, you are on the challenging, yet exciting, path to digital transformation.

Our past live events were theatrical, with dynamic speakers on stage commanding a rapt audience. But the all-digital format requires something more cinematic. We now tailor our content to that format, and we have transformed from a live show production team, to a 24/7 television production network, complete with live anchors from around the world. This new direction required collaboration, hard work and a lot of humility.

But the learning has not only been about the making of the shows themselves. We’ve also been surprised by the tremendous impact in terms of global reach and inclusivity.

In 2019, 6,200 people joined us in Seattle for Build; this year, our virtual event had 197,000 attendees.

At last year’s Build conference, 80 percent of attendees were from the United States. This year, 68 percent of attendees were from outside of the United States.

And here’s my favorite: In 2019, 28 developers from the African continent were able to join us for Build. This year, we had 6,044 developers from across Africa join us. Remarkable.

Just two weeks ago, we had 266,000 IT professionals join us from around the world for Microsoft Ignite.

When we look back at the last six months, the opportunities these events have provided for increased learning, inclusivity, connectedness and accessibility for all our customers, partners, enthusiasts and employees around the world are inspiring. There is an immense appetite for these broad-reaching, digital-only events, and an immense potential for them to positively impact customer, partner and even employee relationships. And now, we cannot wait to apply all of our learnings to the creation of the CES 2021 experience.

Being able to be a part of the first-ever, all-digital CES will be an amazing journey, and we’ll definitely learn a lot more as we continue on our path to master this new canvas of communication.

Posted on October 16, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Why privacy is more important than ever in an equitable recovery

What a difficult year this has been. During the past nine months, COVID-19 has disrupted almost every aspect of our lives, our work and our social interactions to a degree most of us never imagined possible. The economic damage may take years to repair.

Here in the United States, the shocking deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor call us to acknowledge and address the systemic racial inequalities that have shaped our nation for too long.

It is a lot to deal with.

But amid all this disruption, we have also experienced an incredible digital transformation. In just a few months, we have jumped forward years in our use of advanced digital tools for interacting with one another, running our businesses, sending our kids to school and understanding what is going on in the world.

Now, as we begin to move from responding to the coronavirus crisis toward recovery, data will play an important role. Data is critical not just in rebuilding our economy but in helping us understand societal inequalities that have contributed to dramatically higher rates of sickness and death among Black communities and other communities of color due to COVID-19. Data can also help us focus resources on rebuilding a more just, fair and equitable economy that benefits all.

Let’s not waste this opportunity. Much of the data needed to make positive progress is personal information – data about our location, our health and our work. To achieve the full benefits that the digital transformation promises, people must trust their information is used responsibly and respectfully.

Trust is fragile, and consumers have plenty of reasons to be wary of how their data is used. This is particularly true in the United States where companies and government are not doing enough to protect the privacy of personal information. Today, it is simply too difficult for people to find out what personal data is collected about them or how it will be used. And there have been more than enough high-profile data breaches and stories about the misuse of personal data in recent years to give people pause about whether companies and government are good stewards of their personal data.

A new study conducted by the international research firm YouGov on behalf of Microsoft makes clear just how tenuous trust is in the United States. In that study, 90% of the people surveyed said they are concerned about sharing their information.¹

The United States has fallen far behind the rest of the world in privacy protection

One reason trust is so tenuous in the United States is the lack of a strong national privacy law. Since the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was adopted just two years ago, many countries, including Brazil, India, Japan, Kenya, South Africa, South Korea and Thailand, have adopted, revised or proposed new frameworks for privacy protection that recognize people own their personal data and have a right to view, correct and delete it. In total, over 130 countries and jurisdictions have enacted privacy laws.

Yet, one country has not done so yet: the United States. Current laws in the United States govern only limited types of information, and all of them are more than two decades old.

The YouGov survey also found that the American public is overwhelmingly in favor of stronger privacy protection law. Seven out of 10 people surveyed said they don’t think government does enough to keep their personal data private, and the same large majority would like to see privacy regulation addressed during the next administration.

As countries around the world pursue new legal frameworks, global standards are being developed without U.S. involvement. In contrast to the role our country has traditionally played on global issues, the U.S. is not leading, or even participating in, the discussion over common privacy norms.

If the U.S. wants to join the global conversation about how to develop robust privacy and data protection laws that will enable innovation through responsible data use, it will need to act fast. If Congress does not act soon, we will see the balance of power on these critical issues shift away from Washington, D.C., and move to Brussels, Berlin, New Delhi and Tokyo.

The good news is that states are stepping in through legislation such as the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which includes provisions that reflect some of the individual rights granted by GDPR. Other states are considering their own proposals. There are also signs of real interest among some members of Congress, who have proposed new privacy legislation that would reestablish American leadership in privacy protection and provide the legal framework essential for consumers’ trust that their data will be handled safely.

Placing the responsibility for privacy where it belongs – on companies

Strong privacy legislation is important. But the simple truth is that the onus to create and maintain trust must fall on the companies that collect, process and store personal data. No matter what the law says, if companies aren’t responsible, transparent and accountable when using personal information, their customers will not trust them and they will fail.

Our recent research bears this out. The YouGov study found that significantly more people believe companies bear the primary responsibility for protecting data privacy – not government.

And yet prevailing practices in this country place the vast bulk of responsibility for privacy protection on individuals. Although this approach complies with current U.S. law, it seems almost perfectly designed to undermine trust. The large number of websites, devices and apps that people rely on to remain connected and engaged – a number that has grown even larger during this health crisis – makes it nearly impossible for individuals to navigate the privacy information overload and make informed decisions about how their data is used. Too often, we deliver that information in notices difficult for lawyers and engineers to understand – much less consumers.

Instead of lobbying Congress or state legislatures to water down or block privacy legislation, it is time for businesses to advocate for stronger privacy laws in this country. In addition to engendering greater trust with their customers, a strong privacy law will provide companies with clear guardrails about how they can use data for responsible innovation with greater assurance.

And whether new laws are passed or not, it is essential that companies develop their own strong privacy standards and assume accountability for how they use customers’ data.

Creating a framework of trust – both for congressional action and corporate accountability – should begin with these four principles:

Transparency about how companies collect, use and share personal information. Consumers are clamoring to understand what data companies have and how they will interact with it
Consumer empowerment that guarantees the right of individuals to access, correct, delete and move personal information
Corporate responsibility that requires companies to be good stewards of consumer information
Strong enforcement through a strong central regulator and vigilant state’s attorneys general offices that have the authority and funding to enforce the laws and take action to hold violators accountable

I’m confident all this is achievable. The imperative to do so has never been more urgent, and the momentum toward progress has never been stronger.

As difficult as the past nine months have been, they have also been filled with signs of great human resilience and ingenuity. You can see it in the heroic work of frontline health-care workers, the rapid progress made toward creating a vaccine, and the commitment of a new generation of young activists to work toward ending systemic racism. Health-care providers are now using telemedicine to treat patients in ways that protect them from exposure to coronavirus and are finding new ways to deliver care to people who would otherwise have difficulty accessing a doctor. Businesses are using powerful new digital capabilities to foster collaboration, engage with customers and reinvent business models in a world facing unprecedented constraints.

This must be just the start. Now is the time to build on these promising steps forward. But to do so, trust is essential. It is time for government and business to work together to pass laws and reinvent practices to recognize the individual right to own and control personal data and to place the responsibility for protecting privacy where it belongs – on companies.

This is the best and only way to create the conditions that will make trust possible. It is also an essential foundation for building a recovery that is robust and sustainable and serves everyone equally.

¹ YouGov Study (2020, October 5). Commissioned study conducted on behalf of Microsoft Corp. by YouGov, an international survey research firm. The poll was conducted between September 28 and October 5, 2020, with a representative sample of 5,000 registered voters nationwide. The margin of error for the poll was +/- 1.5 points.

Posted on October 15, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Students: Register for the 2021 Imagine Cup to use tech to reimagine our world

The 2021 Imagine Cup is where passion meets purpose, and you have the chance to bring your idea to life to help shape our future. Over the past 19 years, more than two million competitors have signed up for our global student technology competition to build something that matters to them, make a difference in their communities, and innovate for impact.

In today’s world, it’s more important than ever to create positive change using new tools. What better place to start than with tech? We’re looking for bold thinkers and big dreamers – we have the resources you need to turn your idea into a purpose-driven application, all you need is the drive to begin. Sign up today to start your journey.

What’s new in the 2021 competition?

An all-digital competition experience to bring together students across the globe.
A Microsoft Learn challenge to empower you to build new tech skills with Azure (plus you can win monthly prize giveaways!).
Four competition categories in Earth, Education, Health, and Lifestyle to support you reimagining the social issues you’re most passionate about and expand your network of likeminded peers.
The top 40 teams will advance to the World Finals and compete for cash prizes plus the ultimate chance to share their innovation on a global stage at the World Championship – where USD75,000 and a mentoring session with CEO Satya Nadella will be awarded.

Why should you compete?

Nurture your curiosity

The Imagine Cup is a chance to make something that matters to you and develop your skills as part of the journey. Whether you’re hoping to accelerate with artificial intelligence, create with cognitive services, invent with intelligent systems, or master machine learning, this competition is an experience for everyone.

2020 World Finalists, Team Syrinx, share why they believe all students should try competing in Imagine Cup.

Realize your passion

Innovate to reimagine technology solutions for some of the world’s biggest challenges. With past competitor projects encompassing mental healthcare, accessibility, environmental sustainability, and so much more, anything is possible when you blend passion and purpose with an inclusive mindset. What could you create next?

2020 World Champions, Team Hollo, share what it means to innovate for the future and how Imagine Cup can help you get started.

Shape our world

Transform your ideas into action with a purpose-driven application. You could win mentorship from Microsoft experts, priceless networking opportunities, the chance to showcase your work on a global stage, and other great prizes.

2020 World Finalists, Team Tremor Vision, share their advice on finding an idea worth pursuing.

Are you ready to get started? Join the journey and register now.

Posted on October 15, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Introducing Microsoft Bing app on Xbox: Search the web, discover trending content right from your console

We’re excited to announce the release of the Microsoft Bing app on Xbox, so you can search the web, discover trending content, and much more right from your console.

This app brings search to the activities you’re already doing on your Xbox, such as if you’re browsing videos or photos with a group of friends and want to view them on a big screen, or are stuck in a game and want to quickly look up hints without leaving the console.

Beyond that, the app helps you discover current, recommended, and trending games, videos, and news. It combines Microsoft Bing data on games with information from Xbox, like your in-game progress and your Xbox friends who are playing a given title, to bring you a full search results experience across your devices.

The app also lets you discover Microsoft Bing images of the day and image search results, and easily set them as your console background.

set-images-as-console-background-with-Microsoft-Bing-Xbox-app.png

We’ve integrated the app with Microsoft Rewards, meaning all the searches you perform on this app earn you points you can redeem for things like gift cards for yourself or donations to causes you care about. We’ve also built new opportunities to earn points right from your console, such as quizzes and polls.

Finally, we built all of the above features as native search experiences that is truly optimized for the console. It’s easy to use the app using your controller or media remote, and to search using your voice if you prefer. No need to try and use your controller as a mouse cursor!

You can see the app and install it onto your console remotely here, or search “Microsoft Bing” in the Store directly on your Xbox. It’s currently live for our users in the US, and we plan to bring it to more markets soon. As always, we appreciate your feedback – you can provide it via the in-app menu. Thanks!

Posted on October 15, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

30 games fully optimized for Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S Nov. 10 launch day

The launch of a new generation of games is the culmination of epic creative and technical endeavors from developers around the globe, all focused on a single goal: delivering immersive new experiences and rich new worlds to explore. The Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S day one lineup reflects this incredible ingenuity – bringing you a creative, diverse and deep collection of iconic, inventive, and critically-acclaimed games from amazing creators around the world.

30 Optimized games on day one that look and play best on Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S

When you power on your Xbox Series X or Xbox Series S on November 10, you will be greeted by the largest launch lineup in Xbox history. Games like Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, Watch Dogs: Legion, Yakuza: Like a Dragon, Gears Tactics, and Tetris Effect: Connected will be some of the much-anticipated next-gen games you can play on day one. The Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S will launch with 30 new games playable day one, 20 of them with Smart Delivery that are upgraded automatically and thousands of backward compatible titles across four generations.

Looking forward to this holiday, there will be more incredible games coming to Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S before the end of the year including Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War launching November 13, Destiny 2: Beyond Light launching November 10 and optimized for Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S on December 8, and Xbox console launch exclusive The Medium on December 10. When Cyberpunk 2077 launches on November 19 it will look and play best on our next gen consoles and take advantage of Smart Delivery technology giving fans the best version for whatever Xbox console you own.

There is truly a game for everyone on Xbox. And we can’t wait to enter the future of console gaming with you.

The list of games available starting on November 10 that look and play best on Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S includes:

Day One Xbox Series X|S Optimized Titles

Posted on October 15, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Highlights from Dynamics 365 release wave 2

Business applications are rapidly evolving to meet the needs of an increasingly digital and complex world. The era of form-based software and simple business logic is history–replaced with data-first, intelligent applications that proactively guide critical business outcomes across the organization.

The 2020 release wave 2 expands our vision to help you unlock the agility, innovation and resilience to adapt and thrive. More than 500 new and updated capabilities join an unparalleled breadth of intelligent, modular and seamlessly-integrated SaaS applications for the front and back-office; all atop the world-leading Power Platform to enable anyone to create apps and business processes.

In this time of unprecedented disruption—from remote workforces to changing customer expectations to supply chain challenges—this release wave extends investments to help your organization quickly adapt to any conditions with speed and agility—to build resilience into the fabric of the DNA of your company.

Connected customer experiences

Managing today’s omnichannel customer journey is no easy feat. Customer engagement requires constant attention at every touch point, whether human-assisted, self-serve, or automatic, and doing so requires visibility and collaboration across marketing, sales, and service. The 2020 release wave 2 updates further our vision to seamlessly connect data and insights across departments—breaking down the siloes that limit innovation and connected, personalized experiences.

Microsoft customer data platform (CDP)

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, the Microsoft CDP and fastest-growing Dynamics 365 application, is a foundation for modern customer engagement, all on a trusted platform with unmatched privacy and security. Updates in the 2020 release wave 2 cement the solution as uniquely able to connect data holistically across departments and teams, with AI-powered insights to drive better outcomes.

Your teams will enjoy the new engagement insights capabilities, which give them a more comprehensive view of customers—easily accessible across teams, and always up to date. Audience insights boost the ability to analyze cross-channel customer interactions from websites, mobile apps, and connected products using engagement insights. And with seamless integration of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Voice, your team can track customer feedback signals across channels to proactively identify insights and drive meaningful engagement when customer sentiment and behaviors change.

Marketing

We’re dedicated to delivering solutions that bridge marketing, sales, and service departments, seamlessly connecting ushering customers from first touch to acquisition to exceptional support. The 2020 release wave 2 updates take steps to connect that journey.

Over the next six months, we’re providing marketers with tools to build relationships and interact with customers at scale in this new world. New capabilities will help them orchestrate customer journeys, align sales and marketing, and make informed decisions. In response to increased demand for digital channels, this release integrates Microsoft Teams for digital events, improves social posting, revamps the customer journey designer, and lets teams use natural language to create target segments easily. And enhanced integration with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights helps teams discover segments and use them directly in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing to make campaigns more targeted and effective.

Sales

Customer buying experiences are increasingly digital. In fact, 80 percent of enterprises expect a sustained shift to digital buying and selling methods, where sellers guide and collaborate with customers remotely. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales will help to further streamline the work of sellers and deepen their engagement with customers.

We’re ramping up AI-infused intelligence capabilities to deliver contextual insights that guide sellers to the next best action. Features like sales accelerator, advanced forecasting, and pipeline intelligence help sellers understand the health of the business and make accurately informed strategic decisions. Conversation and relationship intelligence helps sellers focus on activities and interactions that connect with buyers. And sellers can leverage Dynamics 365 Customer Voice to measure sentiment and Net Promoter Score (NPS) metrics to better track and act on customer concerns around sales processes, products, and experiences.

Service

We’ve invested in the critical scenarios that businesses need to optimize support delivery and enhance customer satisfaction, reflected in the expansive scope of features is heading to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Remote Assist.

Dynamics 365 Customer Service introduces a milestone in Microsoft’s first-party service solution. The addition of a native voice channel to existing omnichannel capabilities, built on the Microsoft cloud, empowers service teams with a seamless, end-to-end customer service experience across every channel within a single solution.

Dynamics 365 Field Service updates continue to drive productivity aligned to increasing technical success with first-time fix rates, optimized scheduling, asset tracking, and management. Plus, updates to Dynamics 365 Remote Assist give technicians even more ways to troubleshoot and resolve customer issues including the ability for allowing technicians and external customers to join a mixed reality call; expanded support for non-AR phones and added call analytics to surface challenge areas and opportunities for improvement.

Connected operations

Effectively running a complex organization requires the seamless sharing of data, consistent business processes, and close collaboration across finance and operations departments. That’s why we are dedicated to ensuring cross-app capabilities across Dynamics 365 operations apps. This release wave continues the journey of making finance and operations data and business processes seamlessly available to Dynamics 365 applications, Microsoft Power Platform, and Azure Data Lake.

Finance

For Dynamics 365 Finance, we continue to focus on adding insights and intelligence and automating common processes. Intelligent cash flow forecasting, which previewed in 2020 release wave 1, will be released for general availability along with additional intelligence and automation in vendor invoicing.

We’ll also enhance core financials by adding asset leasing. This helps automate complex processes and eliminate risk, by making sure the system stays compliant with changing accounting regulations.

The Electronic invoicing add-on (preview) expands the invoicing capabilities in Dynamics 365 Finance, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, and Dynamics 365 Project Operations to help organizations save money and reduce risk. The add-on simplifies adherence to the latest electronic invoicing standards, and provides consistent experiences in electronic invoice processing and exchange across different geographies.

For this release wave, Dynamics 365 Business Central investments center on delivering a world-class, comprehensive business management solution for small and midsized organizations.

We are expanding scenarios across Microsoft experiences—which today includes integration with Excel, Outlook, Word, and others—by introducing Microsoft Teams as a way to interact with coworkers and improve productivity, workflow, insights, and results.

A host of additional updates help meet the demands of a rapidly growing customer base, improve the handling of file storage, and address top customer requested features; and service security and performance improvements further safeguard business data and improve application performance.

Supply Chain

The pandemic took a toll on supply chains, from suppliers to consumers. Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is introducing new capabilities to keep the production line running and ease the day-to-day work on the factory floor.

Building on the Cloud and Edge innovation announced at Microsoft Ignite, we’re rolling out a new Engineering Change Management add-in, improving the ability to handle changes throughout the lifecycle of a product and ensure they are produced and released in a controlled manner. The new production floor execution feature provides more flexibility with a modern UI and a touch interface that makes managing complex jobs easier, even under the demanding conditions of the production floor.

New integration with Dynamics 365 Guides gives frontline workers interactive, guided instructions right at their workstation. This helps manufacturers adapt to operational complexity on the factory floor with a new set of features focused on usability, so complexity can be managed in real time.

Service-based operations

Dynamics 365 Project Operations is now generally available—the business application for service-based businesses that operate in a highly competitive market where winning new deals, retaining the best people, and increasing profit margins are significant challenges. Project Operations is designed to transform and modernize the project delivery lifecycle by bringing together cross-functional teams to deliver differentiated customer experiences.

In a single application—seamlessly connected to other Dynamics 365 applications—you can bridge your sales, resourcing, project management, and finance teams to win more deals, accelerate delivery, empower employees, and maximize profitability.

Human Resources

Dynamics 365 Human Resources provides a comprehensive personnel management solution, including performance, leave and absence, and payroll integration. For the 2020 release wave 2, we’re focused on updates that further help HR professionals empower and engage their workforce, provide modern benefits packages, and stay compliant.

New self-service capabilities include the ability for employees to manage leave and absence directly from Microsoft Teams. Employees can view time-off balances and submit leave requests, and managers or HR will be notified when a request needs attention.

A benefits management workspace will provide administrators with a single experience to view items that require action or to track the enrollment progress for a single employee or groups of employees, including progress and associated actions for new hire enrollment, qualifying life events, and open enrollment.

Other highlights include an enhanced leave and absence workflow experience enhancements and simplified integrations and extensibility, including LinkedIn Talent Hub and Azure Active Directory.

Commerce

We’re heavily investing in innovation for retailers—including updates in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce to further empower retailers to know how best to serve customers’ needs, ramp up digital commerce and contactless shopping, and efficiently run operations across the value chain. Read more about 2020 release wave 2 updates to enhance omnichannel shopping with Dynamics 365 Commerce.

Connected Store

We’re also continuing to evolve Microsoft Dynamics 365 Connected Store to offer benefits to retailers that are traditionally available only to online retailers, and to help bridge the physical and digital divide. For instance, you will be able to define a Power Automate workflow that makes inventory recommendations based on dwell time around a specific product, or make shift changes based on queue-length trends. To assist with social distancing, store managers will be able to understand shopper density and social distancing status in monitored areas, and set up notifications when the appropriate safety conditions are not being maintained. Read more about what’s new and planned for Dynamics 365 Connected Store, as well as updates announced in July.

Fraud Protection

At the point of sale, updates to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection will help protect from purchase and payment fraud, account fraud, and shrinkage fraud while delivering a smooth experiences to online shoppers. Building on the new account protection and loss prevention capabilities announced in July, you’ll find tighter integration with Dynamics 365 Commerce and a new “manual review” capability that allows users to flag transactions for review, and then allow expert human agents to consume and adjudicate those transactions. Read more about what’s new and planned for Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection.

Catch up on the 2020 release wave 2

Review the Dynamics 365 release plans for specific details for each update and additional resources.

Posted on October 15, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Azure and Intel commit to delivering next generation confidential computing

In Azure, your data is your data. Not only is it protected at rest and in transit, but Microsoft Azure extends that protection while in use with confidential computing.

Azure was the first major public cloud to deliver confidential computing which opened up new levels of privacy and innovation for our customers. Today customers in finance, government, healthcare, and telecom use Azure to detect fraud, improve communications privacy, secure blockchain, deliver multi-party machine learning, and enable secure key management.

Azure now has the broadest portfolio of confidential computing options including confidential virtual machines, confidential containers, confidential machine learning, confidential IoT edge devices, and soon confidential capabilities within Azure SQL.

Today, we are announcing that Azure will be an early adopter of the 3^rd generation Intel® Xeon® Platform, code named Ice Lake, which includes full memory encryption and accelerated cryptographic performance for confidential computing with Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX). Available next year, this technology will unlock even more confidential computing scenarios for our customers.

Beyond the hardware security protections, Microsoft Azure Attestation (MAA) further improves security by enabling customers to remotely attest to the authenticity of the SGX enclave at the hardware level, ensures the latest security patches are installed, and the confirms the integrity of the code running within the enclave.

While the roadmap is exciting, many of our customers are gaining business value on the current generation of confidential computing. We encourage you to adopt confidential computing today, as solutions you build now will continue to work in Ice Lake, and even gain additional performance and features. Just a few customer examples include:

University of California San Francisco (UCSF) is building a healthcare platform.

“UCSF’s Center for Digital Health Innovation (CDHI) is pleased to be collaborating with Fortanix, Intel, and Microsoft Azure to establish a confidential computing platform with privacy preserving analytics to accelerate the development and validation of clinical algorithms. The platform will provide a “Zero Trust” environment to protect both the intellectual property of an algorithm and the privacy of healthcare data. Using Fortanix Enclave Manager for orchestration of Intel’s SGX secure enclaves on Azure confidential computing infrastructure with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and CDHI’s proprietary BeeKeeperAI data access, transformation, and orchestration workflows, the platform will reduce the time and cost of developing clinical algorithms.” —Michael Blum, Executive Director, UCSF

MobileCoin is building a fast and secure cryptocurrency.

“MobileCoin partners with Azure because Microsoft has decided to invest in trustworthy systems. Confidential computing rides the edge between what we can imagine and what we can protect. The praxis we’ve experienced with Azure allows us to commit to systems that are integral, high trust, and performant.” —Joshua Goldbard, CEO, MobileCoin

Magnit is building loyalty programs with multi-party data. Magnit is one of the largest retail chains in the world and is using confidential containers to pilot a multi-party confidential data analysis solution through Aggregion’s digital marketing platform. The solution focuses on creating insights captured and computed through secured confidential computing to protect customer and partner data within their loyalty program.

Fireblocks is building a digital asset platform for financial transactions.

“At Fireblocks, our mission is to secure blockchain-based assets and transactions for the financial industry. Once we realized the traditional tech stack was not suitable for this challenge, we turned to Azure confidential computing and Intel SGX to implement our patent-pending technology. Our customers trust Fireblocks to securely store and move their digital assets—over $6.5 billion of them each month—and Azure provides a backbone for us to deliver on that promise.” —Michael Shaulov, CEO and co-founder, Fireblocks

Learn more examples from our Microsoft Ignite customer panel.

Get started

Many customers start by deploying a DCsv2 virtual machine from the Azure Marketplace and creating or modifying existing applications using the Open Enclave SDK.

Another great place to start is wrapping your existing Kubernetes applications to create confidential containers with the help of a partner such as Anjuna, Fortanix, or Scone, or using an open source solution like Graphene or Occlum.

You can also safeguard keys with Azure Key Vault Managed HSM, take advantage of confidential machine learning using ONNX models with the Confidential Inference Beta project on GitHub, or even secure IoT with Azure IoT Edge security with enclaves.

Posted on October 14, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

New podcast explores the people and AI powering Microsoft Security solutions

It’s hard to keep pace with all the changes happening in the world of cybersecurity. Security experts and leaders must continue learning (and unlearning) to stay ahead of the ever-evolving threat landscape. In fact, many of us are in this field because of our desire to continuously challenge ourselves and serve the greater good.

So many of the advancements in security are now utilizing this amorphous, at times controversial, and complex term called “artificial intelligence” (AI). Neural networks, clustering, fuzzy logic, heuristics, deep learning, random forests, adversarial machine learning (ML), unsupervised learning. These are just a few of the concepts that are being actively researched and utilized in security today.

But what do these techniques do? How do they work? What are the benefits? As security professionals, we know you have these questions, and so we decided to create Security Unlocked, a new podcast launching today, to help unlock (we promise not to overuse this pun) insights into these new technologies and the people creating them.

In each episode, hosts Nic Fillingham and Natalia Godyla take a closer look at the latest in threat intelligence, security research, and data science. Our expert guests share insights into how modern security technologies are being built, how threats are evolving, and how machine learning and artificial intelligence are being used to secure the world.

Each episode will also feature an interview with one of the many experts working in Microsoft Security. Guests will share their unique path to Microsoft and the infosec field, what they love about their calling and their predictions about the future of ML and AI.

New episodes of Security Unlocked will be released twice a month with the first three episodes available today on all major podcast platforms. We will talk about specific topics in future blogs and provide links to podcasts to get more in-depth.

Episode 1: Going ‘deep’ to identify attacks, and Holly Stewart

Listen here.

Guests: Arie Agranonik and Holly Stewart

Blog referenced: Seeing the big picture: Deep learning-based fusion of behavior signals for threat detection

In this episode, Nic and Natalia invited Arie Agranonik, Senior Data Scientist at Microsoft, to better understand how we’re using deep learning models to look at behavioral signals and identify malicious process trees. In their chat, Arie explains the differences and use cases for techniques such as deep learning, neural networks, and transfer learning.

Nic and Natalia also speak with Holly Stewart, Principal Research Manager at Microsoft, to learn how, and when, to use machine learning, best practices for building an awesome security research team, and the power of diversity in security.

Episode 2: Unmasking threats with AMSI and ML, and Dr. Josh Neil

Listen here.

Guests: Ankit Garg, Geoff McDonald, and Dr. Josh Neil

Blog referenced: Stopping Active Directory attacks and other post-exploitation behavior with AMSI and machine learning

In this episode, members of the Microsoft Defender ATP Research team chat about how the antimalware scripting interface (AMSI) and machine learning are stopping active directory attacks.

They’re also joined by Josh Neil, Principal Data Science Manager at Microsoft, as he discusses his path from music to mathematics, one definition of “artificial intelligence,” and the importance of combining multiple weak signals to gain a comprehensive view of an attack.

Episode 3: Behavior-based protection for the under-secured, and Dr. Karen Lavi

Listen here.

Guests: Hardik Suri and Dr. Karen Lavi

Blog referenced: Defending Exchange servers under attack

In this episode, Nic and Natalia chat with Hardik Suri on the importance of keeping servers up-to-date and how behavior-based monitoring is helping protect under-secured Exchange servers.

Dr. Karen Lavi, Senior Data Scientist Lead at Microsoft, joins the discussion to talk about commonalities between neuroscience and cybersecurity, her unique path to Microsoft (Teaser: She started in the Israeli Defense Force and later got her PhD in neuroscience), and her predictions on the future of AI.

Please join us monthly on the Microsoft Security Blog for new episodes. If you have feedback on how we can improve the podcast or suggestions for topics to cover in future episodes, please email us at securityunlocked@microsoft.com, or talk to us on our @MSFTSecurity Twitter handle.

And don’t forget to subscribe to Security Unlocked.