Spending more time on a computer because of remote, distance, virtual, or hybrid learning means it’s a great time to use some key features that can provide extra help with school assignments. Learn how to capture thoughts more quickly, get coaching to improve presentation skills, get assistance with math homework, do two things at once, and more. Whether you’re a parent helping a younger student or a student learning the basics of your computer, these tips are designed to help make schoolwork a little easier.
Capture thoughts more quickly
Most people can talk faster than they can type. If that describes you or your student, use speech-to-text to author content in Microsoft Word in Office 365 Education version for some extra help.
First-time users of the Dictate feature will be asked to give permission for Word to use the microphone, after which talking and transcribing can begin. Thoughts can be recorded with focus kept intact and productivity preserved. Word will do its best to transcribe everything with capitalization and punctuation. This is especially helpful for kids who have dyslexia, dysgraphia, or who have trouble reading or writing.
Get coached on presentation skills
Practicing presentations while looking into a mirror is a long-standing tradition, but at best it can help you with eye contact and facial expressions. Now you can get extra help on your presentation skills with Presenter Coach in PowerPoint. If you give permission to use your computer’s microphone, it can analyze a speech or presentation.
Here’s some of the things Presenter Coach looks out for:
Pacing (words per minute)
Pitch
Usage of fillers, like ums, ers, uhs, you knows, etc.
Informal speech
Euphemisms and culturally sensitive terms
For example, if you said the phrase, “best man for the job,” Presenter Coach would suggest “best choice for the job” to use more inclusive language.
Improve reading comprehension
Ever read a large block of single-spaced, tiny-sized text and not comprehend a word of it? Immersive Reader can help with that or can provide extra help to a student who is struggling to learn to read.
It takes text and increases the sizes of the letters and spacing between lines, while simultaneously enabling it to be read aloud in voice. As it progresses through the passage, it highlights words for focus. At any time, you can change the reading speed, font, background color, and even highlight which words are nouns, adjectives, or verbs.
This powerful tool can also read to you and can translate words or entire documents into 67 languages. It is included in Word, Outlook for the web, OneNote, Teams, Flipgrid, Forms, Microsoft Edge, Minecraft, Whiteboard, and Office Lens.
Get help with math assignments
Write or type math problems and Math Assistant in OneNote can solve it for you—helping you reach the solution quickly or displaying step-by-step instructions that help you learn how to reach the solution on your own. Math Assistant is a digital tutor that provides help for students and parents on math assignments and homework.
Say you were faced with a problem in your textbook with an ask like “solve for x”. Where would you start?
With Math Assistant in OneNote, it would be with the draw tool. After solving, you can even go as far as have Immersive Reader read steps aloud and generate quizzes for additional practice to help you learn the concepts, not just get the assignment done.
See what you need on screen, side-by-side
Your class is streaming in your browser and you’re taking notes in OneNote or “passing notes” in Teams or Skype. Your math notes are in OneNote and you’re doing a math worksheet online. Your reference material is on a web page and you’re answering questions in another app. If you’re still flipping back and forth between the different apps and windows, prepare to be delighted by Snap.
So, the extra time spent on a computer during remote, distance or hybrid learning, combined with the extra help with school assignments can help increase productivity and maximize academic success.
Microsoft Flight Simulator has a rich history as Microsoft’s longest running franchise, and we are proud to announce we are celebrating the simulator’s biggest launch in 38 years.
Just over two weeks ago, Microsoft Flight Simulator launched. Thanks to the incredible support of our community of fans, pilots, flight enthusiasts and virtual travelers, we have had more than one million unique players take to the skies. Additionally, Microsoft Flight Simulator was the biggest game launch in Xbox Game Pass for PC (Beta) history. On behalf of the entire team, we’d like to express our gratitude to all the fans who have begun to explore the world and the magic of flight with us.
It’s been wonderful to see the reactions to Microsoft Flight Simulator from the community, who have flown more than 26 million flights and logged more than 1 billion miles flown to date – the equivalent of flying around the world over 40 thousand times. Talk about racking up those frequent flyer miles!
In each of those billion miles, we’ve been delighted to see the flight simulation community enjoy the simulator and help improve the experience through their ongoing feedback, while also welcoming and training new simulation pilots.
Launch marks the beginning of a journey for us and this is just the start. There is plenty more to come on our flight itinerary including world updates, sim updates, and future themed DLC. Microsoft Flight Simulator is the ticket for anyone who has ever dreamt of flying or exploring the world. The sky is calling.
Today, we are proud to announce the general availability of the Lists app in Teams for all our commercial and GCC customers. As you might already know, Microsoft Lists, which we announced at Build 2020 is a Microsoft 365 app that helps you track information and organize your work. Lists are simple, smart, and flexible, so you can stay on top of what matters most to your team. Track patients, loans, issues, assets, routines, contacts, inventory and more using customizable views and smart rules and alerts to keep everyone in sync. With ready-made templates, you can quickly create lists from directly within Teams and access them on the Teams mobile app by accessing the Lists tab you added as a channel.
Introducing the Lists app in Teams
The vision of the Lists app in Teams is to bring all the collaboration and communication modalities to lists and list items, so it is easy to get work done.
The new Lists app experience in Microsoft Teams, for mobile on the left and for Web and desktop on the right.
Lists in Teams is supported as a team based tab app built on top of the Microsoft Teams platform and supports the following features:
New list creation from scratch, from templates (8 standard templates and 3 industry specific ones: Patients, Loans, and Incidents), from Excel table data and from an existing list.
Importing existing team lists as new tabs.
All standard list features that you can access in SharePoint web: column types, view formatting, Quick Edit, exporting to Excel, sorting, filtering, etc.
The ability to have a channel conversation about a list item (see below for more details).
All user actions on the list are audited and available in the Security and compliance center audit logging.
How do I get started? To get started, simply go to any channel where you would like to start tracking a list and hit the “+” button to explore the tab gallery and select the Lists app. Once the tab is added you can either create a new list or bring in an existing list (from another team or an older SharePoint site, but not a personal list from Lists home) into the channel as a new tab.
Create a new list inside Teams with conversations side-by-side. The above shows using the Asset manager template.
The Lists app in Teams includes 3 new industry-specific templates – Patients, Loans and Incidents. Team members start managing and tracking these key entities. Here are some examples of how these templates can be leveraged.
Create a new list from within Microsoft Teams and choose from numerous ready-made templates, including the new industry-specific ones.
Healthcare organizations can use the Lists app in Teams to support patient rounding, multi-discplinary huddles and discharge planning. The Patients template is an easy way for all health teams to track patient progress and keep in touch with their peers. If you have questions about storage of PHI in Teams, Lists, or Office 365, please see more documentation here.
Government agencies can use the Lists app in Teams to track incidents and coordinated incident response. The Incidents template helps people quickly setup a list and get started.
Loan officers at a morgtage broker or bank can use the Lists app to track a set of loans and informally collaborate on advancing a them to approval. The Loans template helps them get started with plenty of scope for further customization.
How do I start a conversation alongside a list item?
Once you have configured the tab and have a list with list items, you can start a conversation about an individual list item. Go to the details view (or form) for the list item by clicking into the title field and then click on conversation to start a conversation about the list item on the channel. With this feature, you can collaborate with your team about the list item (your key business entities) and get work done, faster.
Since the conversation is a channel message in Teams, all the messaging features like @mentions, rich text, giphies, stickers, emojis, mentions, tagging, and attachments are available for use! The conversation shows up in the right rail for the list item and also on the channel for those who might not have viewed the list as yet.
You can chat side-by-side individual list items within Teams.
See more about getting started with the Lists app in Teams “Create a list in Microsoft Teams” click-thru demo. And do not forget to try the Lists app experience in the Teams mobile app to track your lists within Teams on the go. Just go to your Teams android or iOS mobile apps and go to the channel where you have added the Lists app and click on more and tap on the tab name to open up the list.
Learn more about the Lists app in Teams
If you are unable to see the Lists app in your channel, please contact your Teams Admin because applications in the Teams app store can be disabled or enabled by app permission policies. For more information, see the Manage the Lists app in Teams article. If you are looking for more resources and guidance, please review the help article here. For general help content and resources on Microsoft Lists, check out the Microsoft Lists resource center.
Note: Users of the existing SharePoint tab app in Teams that have pinned a list will see their experience inside the tab get upgraded to the latest Lists in Teams experience. This change will be rolling out today as well.
Millions of people use SharePoint lists and libraries every month in Microsoft 365 to track issues, manage inventory, report status, onboard new hires, build out event agendas, manage FAQs, and more. With flexible columns, forms, and views, you can build your own solution to meet your specific needs without knowing how to code. All these great capabilities now come to you inside the Lists app in Teams.
As always, thanks for taking the time to read about Lists in Teams! We’d love to hear any feedback or ideas you might have. Do submit suggestions on user voice. We are listening!
“Emojis are already ubiquitous in digital communication platforms, including text-based messaging, email and social media. They require fewer ‘clicks’ to express intent, add context, or set tone. A single emoji can dramatically alter or enhance the interpretation of a message. We think they can be leveraged as a supplemental expressive proxy for people who may not have access to speech or the muscles that drive facial expression,” Paradiso says. “Our PALS collaborators have been some of the funniest, most thoughtful and creative people I’ve known, but their expressive range can be limited by the constraints of disability as well as today’s speech devices and their underlying technologies. We know that people want to express a lot more with their AAC devices than basic transactional communication. We wanted to create something that would help people stay more actively engaged in conversations, be visible in low light and from a distance, and provide another avenue for unique expression, playfulness and connection.”
The team looked at different types of secondary displays, but they kept coming back to LED displays, for several reasons: they’re low-cost, they work reasonably well and “they have kind of a cool factor.” The team’s collaborators in PALS also made it clear they didn’t want to use anything that could have unintended negative social consequences for the users.
“Watching somebody living with ALS and being able to empower them to do something that they previously had given up all hope of being able to do is enough to inspire you to want to do more,” says Dwayne Lamb, a developer who specializes in User Experience and User Interface creation who joined the Enable Group in early 2017. “Most of the time when you’re trying to communicate with somebody who can only use their eyes to communicate, they’re using their eyes to type into a keyboard on a device right in front of them, and although it’s not socially good etiquette, you commonly find yourself kind of looking over their shoulder to try and see what they’re typing.”
Expressive Pixels evolved in part from wanting to solve that problem.
Emoji in the Expressive Pixels app
And with Expressive Pixels, it’s possible to create animations on displays of many sizes, up to 64 x 64 pixels, says Christopher O’Dowd, who helped fill the hardware gaps on the project. He points out that LED displays are ubiquitous at Maker Faires, on houses during the holidays, etc. LED displays are so versatile, you often even find them on fabric (face masks, caps and backpacks, for instance) or banners.
One early way the team incorporated LED displays was through hands-free music, an award-winning SXSW project.
There, they used a custom midi-enabled, music synced LED array as a supplemental visualization to an eye controlled, physical drum rig designed for one of their collaborators, a Seattle area musician living with ALS. The project, which won the 2018 SXSW Interactive Innovation Award: Music and Audio Innovation, features a suite of novel eye-controlled applications for music performance, collaboration and composition.
“How does someone without access to speech or movement compose or perform music, command a stage, or connect with a live audience? What about collaborating with other musicians in rehearsed or improvisational scenarios? How can we lower the barriers to making school music programs more inclusive without ‘othering’ or minimizing the students with disabilities? These were some of our foundational questions,” Paradiso recalled. “We wanted to adapt our technology and designs to align with a person’s creative goals and real-life scenarios, rather than the way around.”
Lamb came up with the idea to add Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) capability, with the core idea to send out different signals to different instruments – an idea that would transfer to Expressive Pixels.
Did that trailer not explain what Minecraft Live is? Well, it shouldn’t have to. That’s what this post is for, allegedly. Minecraft Live is the new version of our annual live show, which has had many names such as MINECON Live and MINECON Earth. Why the name change? Would you ask rap superstar and underrated actor Sean Combs a.k.a P. Diddy a.a.k.a Puff Daddy that? No, you would not. What you will do instead is tune in to Minecraft Live on October 3rd at 12 ET to get answers to pertinent questions about what the rest of Mojang Studios have been working on all year. Will Seanothy and I be there? Maybe. I need to check our schedule.
The Minecraft Live team begged me to focus on the actual event, so I guess I better mention what you can expect. The main thing you need to know is that this year the celebration takes place online. Due to the impact of Covid-19, Mojang Studios has delayed Minecraft Festival until 2022 and will no longer be involved with official community events. Until then, we’re going to bring the party directly to your device and we’ve got all of our usual goodies lined up for you! Join us on Minecraft.net/live for updates, mob votes, news, and delightful banter. Oh, and chickens. Lots and lots of chickens.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution’s velocity, scope, and systems-level impact contribute to a shift in business models across all industries. The on-demand economy and changing nature of work, especially amid COVID-19, have led to a significant skills gap[1]. There are 1.7 million unfulfilled tech jobs across industries in the U.S. and Europe[2].
At Microsoft, our goal is to help people throughout the entire education and learning continuum—from education through one’s professional career—to fully participate in the digital economy. Part of this is about preparing the next generation for the jobs of tomorrow. Our unique responsibility and opportunity is to ensure everyone has access to the promise and potential of technology for the digital economy. This contributes to our mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. We believe that those who create with technology are those who write history and shape our future; everyone should have access to learning these skills.
Our ambition is to empower all students to confidently create with technology. Our products like Minecraft: Education Edition,MakeCode, and Visual Studio Code bring this to life by providing a canvas for creating with technology. We offer a range of options for learners of all ages to learn coding.
To prepare the next generation for the jobs of tomorrow while inspiring their creativity, we have partnered with Wonder Woman 1984, Smithsonian Learning Labs, and NASA to create distinct portfolios of project-based lessons that teach programming. We wanted to cultivate learning by connecting content to something interesting, relevant, and most importantly, inspiring for learners of all ages—whether they are 8, 18, or 80.
Museum Heist Learn to code with Minecraft: Education Edition in this adventure based on the upcoming movie Wonder Woman 1984. Venture through an in-game museum and solve puzzles to find a stolen painting, learning basic coding and game design concepts along the way.
Chaos Maze Wonder Woman is in the Smithsonian Museum and she needs to collect artifacts before time runs out! In this free virtual experience, learners eight and older use block-based coding to design and code their own arcade game to play online.
Legendary gauntlets The indestructible gauntlets that Wonder Woman wears to deflect attacks are symbols of empowerment and strength. Make and code your own Wonder Woman gauntlets that light up and have sound—activated with the iconic arm cross. This activity requires the physical purchase of items.
Decode a secret message There’s a secret message that needs a code-cracker to find the truth. Learn how to crack a code that reveals an Easter-egg location from Wonder Woman 1984. Get a glimpse into the popular Python programming language with this introductory lesson that assumes zero background knowledge! You’ll be led through instructions to write two programs and learn about variables and functions.
Super quiz Which Wonder Woman 1984 character are you? Use Python to build a quiz yourself and share it with your friends. This lesson will teach you the basics of Boolean commands and conditionals. No prior background in computer science is needed.
These new modules and learning paths created by Sarah Guthals are inspired by NASA scientists. They help prepare learners for a career in space exploration.
1World Economic Forum. March 2019. The digital skills gap is widening fast. Here’s how to bridge it.
2Wall Street Journal. October 15, 2019. America’s Got Talent, Just Not Enough in IT, citing data from CompTIA.
In the spring of 2000, a young man walked into the Inner-City Computer Stars office in Chicago, determined to join this nonprofit’s digital skills training program and build a future for himself in technology. But first he had to prove that he was ready for that journey.
“He was 17 or 18 years old when he applied,” recalls Sandee Kastrul, the CEO and a founder of i.c.stars. Kastrul says she asked him to “go and build a website and come back.” So he did. “And this was back in the day, 20 years ago, so he had all these floppy disks with his code on it to show us what he had built. It was pretty incredible, and we said, ‘All right, we’ve got to have this kid joining the cohort.’”
Today, that young man, Kevin Gates, is a principal cloud solution architect at Microsoft. Gates remembers his first conversation with i.c.stars. He says he heard “HTML” mentioned for the first time. It sparked his curiosity, and learning to build a website was the beginning of a new chapter for Gates: “i.c.stars helped me stumble on what was a passion of mine, and that passion has led to a career. There is no doubt I would not be where I am without the program. I never would have imagined having the life I have without i.c.stars,” he says.
I.c.stars is a rigorous, tech-focused program that provides young adults from low-income communities with the tools to develop the technical and leadership skills needed for a career in technology, a field that continues to lack diversity and be in high demand.
Programs like this are vital to accelerating the distribution of digital skills. On Wednesday, Microsoft launched a new community skills grant program, part of the company’s commitment to racial equity and digital skills. It will include a $15 million investment over three years for Black- and African American-led nonprofits that are working to increase skill development and economic opportunities. The program includes grants, leadership development and technology enablement.
Research shows that companies with diverse leadership are more likely to be profitable. Despite this knowledge, the workplace does not reflect this.
There are several issues with hiring that further lock in inequality, says Byron Auguste, the CEO and co-founder of Opportunity@Work, an organization focused on economic inclusion. Auguste is a member of the advisory board for Microsoft’s community skills program that supports nonprofits in Black and African American communities.
One of the issues is the idea that you need a certain background to do a job. Auguste, however, thinks qualifications are what should matter. “If you can do the job, you should be able to get the job,” he says.
A part of the solution is building access to larger talent pools like i.c.stars does. Auguste says that often employers hire someone great and think that they just got lucky.
“Actually, they’re one of millions, not one in a million,” he says. The only way to get to the millions of talented people who are shut out, he continues, is by enabling not just one individual at a time, but via training programs and talent sources like these.
Microsoft’s skills initiative, of which this program is a part, hopes to help 25 million people around the world secure digital skills. In June, Microsoft made a public commitment to be more inclusive as an employer and to extend Microsoft’s support and outreach programs in Black and African American communities. As part of this, Microsoft’s community skills program will provide financial grants and tech enablement to community-based nonprofits reaching 5 million unemployed workers who need it most.
Naria Santa Lucia, general manager at Microsoft and lead on the larger skills initiative, explains the thinking behind this program: “It was designed with internal and external voices focused on community at the table. In addition to cash investments, we’re acting as a convener to bring together these organizations to share best practices.”
A part of this community-based skills program includes what Santa Lucia calls “a community of practice.” It offers a space for community leaders to come together and discuss concerns and issues they are having while Microsoft helps navigate solutions including tech enablement. The program aims to build up leadership in these programs but also individual nonprofit’s capabilities to help them further serve their communities.
“There are a lot of programs supporting skills, but this is explicitly supporting a level of capacity building, too,” observes Auguste. “The seeds of success are there, but there’s much more to be done to scale these programs up.”
YouTube Video
Paying it forward
I.c.stars interviews hundreds of potential candidates for each training cycle. Participants complete a two-year program that involves more than 1,000 hours of practical experience and advancing their public speaking skills – because Kastrul believes that technical skills aren’t enough on their own.
“I want people to be great technologists,” she says. “I want them to be able to solve complex problems, build awesome solutions, using systems thinking, but I also want people to be able to connect to what’s important, connect to the larger picture and to figure out, ‘How do I make opportunities for others?’”
That sense of paying it forward within a community runs deep through i.c.stars and organizations like it. It’s why recent alumni such as Ernest Roberts say they devote so much of their spare time to supporting new interns as well as their peers.
“We all help each other,” says Roberts. “It does create this community of those who successfully complete the program and continue on – we’re all together. It’s been two years, and if it wasn’t for quarantine, I’d still be going back almost every day.” He now serves as president of the alumni association.
Roberts believes that i.c.stars changed his life. Before the program, he worked at a distribution center in Mississippi – a state where he said he found limited opportunities to work in technology.
“That was a huge thing for me in Mississippi, because there’s no real technology hub, no technology jobs,” he says. “So now, I started thinking, as I’ve been going through i.c.stars, about how can I bring this into Mississippi, where kids don’t know that they don’t have to be a truck driver? You don’t have to be a farmer. You don’t have to be a warehouse worker. You can actually go and do other things and get paid for your mind instead of your physical body.”
Now working as a developer for a global financial services firm, Roberts says his outlook has been transformed: “I was living check to check,” he says. “Now, I can save up. Now, I can go ahead and start that bank account for my son that I thought about. I can start building for the future, where I was only living in the present.”
Realizing your potential
For another recent alum, i.c.stars has provided confidence. LaTonya Judkins had also worked in shipping and receiving, and since completing the i.c.stars program in 2019, has found a role at a sports data analytics firm – an ideal match for this basketball player who says she has always been tech savvy.
“I thought other people do software engineering, but I didn’t think that I would do it,” she says, “because I don’t have the education, the background, I’m not already into it. I figured that people that do software engineering, you have to have started doing it since you were a kid, and have to know a lot of stuff in order to do it. So, going through i.c.stars, they teach you that you can teach yourself how to do these things that everybody else does, and you can be successful doing it.”
“In technology, in corporate America – I’m not saying you have to fit in, but you kind of have to find your space, and also be comfortable and see ahead,” she points out. “With i.c.stars, and the program, it explains and it embraces diversity and inclusion – being Black, being a woman.”
The open grant application is how Microsoft Philanthropies says it is exercising its commitment to making access to technology more equitable. The focus is on groups that are based in local communities. Santa Lucia says, “We are looking for those nonprofits with local impact and community-based solutions. We are also looking at nonprofits led by Black and African American members as well as serving the Black and African American communities.”
There are areas across the country that have significant racial disparities in access to education, employment, health care and home ownership. But geography does not mean lack of skill, or lack of ambition, and it is the talent embedded in these neighborhoods that technology companies such as Microsoft hope to find and help flourish.
Gates says, “Microsoft has always been conscious about the impact the employees have in the communities where they live. I believe being able to make an impact in smaller communities is critical.”
For more on the community skills program, click here. And follow @MSFTIssues on Twitter.
(Main picture: Alums of the i.c.stars program, from left to right, Ernest Roberts, LaTonya Judkins and Kevin Gates)
Azure Spring Cloud—a fully managed service for Spring Boot apps—is now generally available. With Azure Spring Cloud, you can focus on building the apps that run your business without the hassle of managing infrastructure. Simply deploy your JARs or code and Azure Spring Cloud will automatically wire your apps with the Spring service runtime. Once deployed you can easily monitor application performance, fix errors, and rapidly improve applications.
Azure Spring Cloud is jointly built, operated, and supported by Microsoft and VMware. You can use Azure Spring Cloud for your most demanding applications and be assured that Microsoft and VMware are standing behind the service to ensure your success.
Azure Spring Cloud is now available in 10 regions—West US2, Central US, South Central US, East US, East US2, UK South, North Europe, West Europe, Southeast Asia, and Australia East—across four continents. We expect to add 10 more regions in the coming months. You can start using Azure Spring Cloud in production today.
In October 2019, Microsoft and VMware announced the collaboration of Azure Spring Cloud. Since then, many customers have approached us about this differentiated offer. Java developers in many organizations have used the service and provided us with plenty of feedback to prioritize features to help shape Azure Spring Cloud. We have enabled security features to manage secrets, hybrid deployments, control ingress and egress to apps, and secure communications using TLS/SSL. To support performance and reliability we have enabled autoscaling, log streaming, alerts, and self-diagnostics.
Developers say that it is simple to deploy, automate, operate, and monitor Spring Boot and Spring Cloud applications in Azure Spring Cloud. Our enterprise customers have benefited from fully managed infrastructure, automation, easier monitoring and troubleshooting, and increased developer productivity and satisfaction.
“The Azure Spring Cloud allows our teams to build new business services rapidly, as the platform and underlying infrastructure is fully managed. The platform is integrated with the Azure ecosystem, which enables us to achieve the desired level of automation and means to operate the services securely. Now that we have the first set of services running in production, it is all about doing more of the same using the Azure Spring Cloud to meet our critical delivery deadlines.”—Nicolas Andres, Head IT Group Finance Program, Swiss Re Management Ltd. (Switzerland)
“Raley’s is very pleased to collaborate with the Microsoft team. Spring Boot and Azure Spring Cloud have enabled our developers to focus more on feature development and more frequent deployments without worrying about underlying infrastructure or monitoring. The team is pleased with Spring Boot and Azure Spring Cloud, and looking to migrate the majority of our services to Spring Boot in next 6 months”—Abhay Kamble, Director, Unified Commerce, Raley’s (United States)
“As a leading integrated HR services provider, Liantis pursues new business opportunities in the digital economy, serving our customers with powerful applications and tools. The Azure Spring Cloud capabilities complement and extend our existing Spring Cloud software factory, allowing us to focus on the development of core business functionalities.”—Nicolas Van Kerschaver, CIO, Liantis (Belgium)
“Production is the happiest place on earth. I love seeing my applications there. I do not love wearing the pager! Spring Boot and Spring Cloud give me a framework for building resilient, cloud-native software. Azure Spring Cloud builds on the rich ecosystems of Microsoft Azure, Spring, and Kubernetes to deliver a turnkey platform optimized for Spring-based applications and services. Spring and Azure Spring Cloud let me deliver valuable software without worrying as much about the pager. They get me to production.” —Josh Long, Spring Developer Advocate, VMware
Distributed tracing
One of the Azure Spring Cloud features that customers have found particularly valuable is distributed tracing. Developers can easily identify issues in their applications and quickly troubleshoot and fix them.
Figure 1: Microservice transactions in Application Insights.
The diagram above captures microservice transactions in Application Insights for 4 hours with 70 percent sampling rate. We purposely dropped one of the microservices, to showcase services that are operating correctly (green) and those with bottlenecks (red). You can use integrated distributed tracing in Azure Spring Cloud to troubleshoot those bottlenecks, plan capacities and keep an eye on production.
Azure Spring Cloud in Managed Virtual Network
Security is a key tenet of Azure Spring Cloud. Customers want to isolate Azure Spring Cloud from the internet or place it in their own corporate networks. We are happy to share the preview of Managed Virtual Network in Azure Spring Cloud. This feature allows you to be in control of inbound and outbound network communications for Azure Spring Cloud and enables Azure Spring Cloud to interact with systems in on-premises data centers or Azure services in virtual networks.
In addition, the feature composes with Azure network resources such as Application Gateway, Azure Firewall, Azure Front Door and Express Route, and popular network products such as Palo Alto Firewall, F5 Big-IP, Cloudflare, and Infoblox. This way, you can secure the perimeters around your Spring Boot apps.
Figure 2: Reference architecture of Managed Virtual Network and Azure Spring Cloud.
Drive higher utilization of apps in Azure Spring Cloud with Autoscale
Autoscale has been one of the most sought-after features from customers. We are excited to share the preview of Autoscale in Azure Spring Cloud. It enables you to be more productive and cost-efficient by automatically scaling apps up or down based on load or schedule. Once Autoscale is enabled, you can be rest assured that the service will take care of your underlying infrastructure and the load on your apps.
In the load or metric-based mode, your apps will be horizontally scaled out to exactly how many apps and resources are needed for the load, but never go beyond the maximum limits that you set. Similarly, the number of apps and resources will be horizontally scaled-in to meet the minimum to meet your load, but never go below the minimum limits that you set. In the schedule-based mode, your apps will be scaled out and in based on your predefined schedule and limits.
Figure 3: Autoscaling in Azure Spring Cloud.
Build your solutions today
Azure Spring Cloud abstracts away the complexity of infrastructure management and Spring Cloud middleware management, so you can focus on building your business logic and let Azure take care of dynamic scaling, patches, security, compliance, and high availability. With a few steps, you can provision Azure Spring Cloud, create apps, deploy, and scale Spring Boot apps and start monitoring in minutes.
We will continue to bring more developer-friendly and enterprise-ready features to Azure Spring Cloud. To hear more from VMware on today’s announcement, head over to their announcement.
We would love to hear how you are building impactful solutions using Azure Spring Cloud. Get started today—deploy Spring apps to Azure Spring Cloud using quickstart!
Today, we’re announcing two new technologies to combat disinformation, new work to help educate the public about the problem, and partnerships to help advance these technologies and educational efforts quickly.
There is no question that disinformation is widespread. Research we supported from Professor Jacob Shapiro at Princeton, updated this month, cataloged 96 separate foreign influence campaigns targeting 30 countries between 2013 and 2019. These campaigns, carried out on social media, sought to defame notable people, persuade the public or polarize debates. While 26% of these campaigns targeted the U.S., other countries targeted include Armenia, Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Taiwan, Ukraine, the United Kingdom and Yemen. Some 93% of these campaigns included the creation of original content, 86% amplified pre-existing content and 74% distorted objectively verifiable facts. Recent reports also show that disinformation has been distributed about the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to deaths and hospitalizations of people seeking supposed cures that are actually dangerous.
What we’re announcing today is an important part of Microsoft’s Defending Democracy Program, which, in addition to fighting disinformation, helps to protect voting through ElectionGuard and helps secure campaigns and others involved in the democratic process through AccountGuard, Microsoft 365 for Campaigns and Election Security Advisors. It’s also part of a broader focus on protecting and promoting journalism as Brad Smith and Carol Ann Browne discussed in their Top Ten Tech Policy Issues for the 2020s.
New Technologies
Disinformation comes in many forms, and no single technology will solve the challenge of helping people decipher what is true and accurate. At Microsoft, we’ve been working on two separate technologies to address different aspects of the problem.
One major issue is deepfakes, or synthetic media, which are photos, videos or audio files manipulated by artificial intelligence (AI) in hard-to-detect ways. They could appear to make people say things they didn’t or to be places they weren’t, and the fact that they’re generated by AI that can continue to learn makes it inevitable that they will beat conventional detection technology. However, in the short run, such as the upcoming U.S. election, advanced detection technologies can be a useful tool to help discerning users identify deepfakes.
Today, we’re announcing Microsoft Video Authenticator. Video Authenticator can analyze a still photo or video to provide a percentage chance, or confidence score, that the media is artificially manipulated. In the case of a video, it can provide this percentage in real-time on each frame as the video plays. It works by detecting the blending boundary of the deepfake and subtle fading or greyscale elements that might not be detectable by the human eye.
This technology was originally developed by Microsoft Research in coordination with Microsoft’s Responsible AI team and the Microsoft AI, Ethics and Effects in Engineering and Research (AETHER) Committee, which is an advisory board at Microsoft that helps to ensure that new technology is developed and fielded in a responsible manner. Video Authenticator was created using a public dataset from Face Forensic++ and was tested on the DeepFake Detection Challenge Dataset, both leading models for training and testing deepfake detection technologies.
We expect that methods for generating synthetic media will continue to grow in sophistication. As all AI detection methods have rates of failure, we have to understand and be ready to respond to deepfakes that slip through detection methods. Thus, in the longer term, we must seek stronger methods for maintaining and certifying the authenticity of news articles and other media. There are few tools today to help assure readers that the media they’re seeing online came from a trusted source and that it wasn’t altered.
Today, we’re also announcing new technology that can both detect manipulated content and assure people that the media they’re viewing is authentic. This technology has two components. The first is a tool built into Microsoft Azure that enables a content producer to add digital hashes and certificates to a piece of content. The hashes and certificates then live with the content as metadata wherever it travels online. The second is a reader – which can exist as a browser extension or in other forms – that checks the certificates and matches the hashes, letting people know with a high degree of accuracy that the content is authentic and that it hasn’t been changed, as well as providing details about who produced it.
This technology has been built by Microsoft Research and Microsoft Azure in partnership with the Defending Democracy Program. It will power an initiative recently announced by the BBC called Project Origin.
Partnerships
No single organization is going to be able to have meaningful impact on combating disinformation and harmful deepfakes. We will do what we can to help, but the nature of the challenge requires that multiple technologies be widely adopted, that educational efforts reach consumers everywhere consistently and that we keep learning more about the challenge as it evolves.
Today, we’re highlighting partnerships we’ve been developing to help these efforts.
First, we’re partnering with the AI Foundation, a dual commercial and nonprofit enterprise based in San Francisco, with the mission to bring the power and protection of AI to everyone in the world. Through this partnership, the AI Foundation’s Reality Defender 2020 (RD2020) initiative will make Video Authenticator available to organizations involved in the democratic process, including news outlets and political campaigns. Video Authenticator will initially be available only through RD2020, which will guide organizations through the limitations and ethical considerations inherent in any deepfake detection technology. Campaigns and journalists interested in learning more can contact RD2020 here.
Second, we’ve partnered with a consortium of media companies including the BBC, CBC/Radio-Canada and the New York Times on Project Origin, which will test our authenticity technology and help advance it as a standard that can be adopted broadly. The Trusted News Initiative, which includes a range of publishers and social media companies, has also agreed to engage with this technology. In the months ahead, we hope to broaden work in this area to even more technology companies, news publishers and social media companies.
Media Literacy
We’re also partnering with the University of Washington (UW), Sensity and USA Today on media literacy. Improving media literacy will help people sort disinformation from genuine facts and manage risks posed by deepfakes and cheap fakes. Practical media knowledge can enable us all to think critically about the context of media and become more engaged citizens while still appreciating satire and parody. Though not all synthetic media is bad, even a short intervention with media literacy resources has been shown to help people identify it and treat it more cautiously.
Today, we are launching an interactive quiz for voters in the United States to learn about synthetic media, develop critical media literacy skills and gain awareness of the impact of synthetic media on democracy. The Spot the Deepfake Quiz is a media literacy tool in the form of an interactive experience developed in partnership with the UW Center for an Informed Public, Sensity and USA Today. The quiz will be distributed across web and social media properties owned by USA Today, Microsoft and the University of Washington and through social media advertising.
Additionally, in collaboration with the Radio Television Digital News Association, The Trust Project and UW’s Center for an Informed Public and Accelerating Social Transformation Program, Microsoft is supporting a public service announcement (PSA) campaign encouraging people to take a “reflective pause” and check to make sure information comes from a reputable news organization before they share or promote it on social media ahead of the upcoming U.S. election. The PSA campaign will help people better understand the harm misinformation and disinformation have on our democracy and the importance of taking the time to identify, share and consume reliable information. The ads will run across radio stations in the United States in September and October.
Finally, in recent months we have significantly expanded our implementation of NewsGuard, which enables people to learn more about an online news source before consuming its content. NewsGuard operates a team of experienced journalists who rate online news websites on the basis of nine journalistic integrity criteria, which they use to create both a “nutrition label” and a red/green rating for each rated news website. People can access NewsGuard’s service by downloading a simple browser extension, which is available for all standard browsers. It is free for users of the Microsoft Edge browser. Importantly, Microsoft has no editorial control over any of NewsGuard’s ratings and the NewsGuard browser extension does not limit access to information in any way. Instead, NewsGuard aims to provide greater transparency and encourage media literacy by providing important context about the news source itself.
Policy considerations
Governments, companies, non-profits and others around the world have a critical part to play in addressing disinformation and election interference broadly. In 2018, the Paris Call for Trust & Security in Cyberspace brought together a multistakeholder group of global leaders committing to nine principles that will help ensure peace and security online. One of the most critical of these principles is defending electoral processes. In May, Microsoft, the Alliance for Securing Democracy and the Government of Canada launched an effort to lead global activities on this principle. We encourage any organization interested in contributing to join the Paris Call.
Today, Microsoft is joining Allianz, Amazon and S&P Global in announcing plans to launch the Climate Finance Foundation, a new initiative led by the Linux Foundation to build the OS-Climate Platform. This initiative leverages open-source analytics and open data to empower the investment community, as well as NGOs, academia and others, to help better model companies’ exposure to climate change. Microsoft is committing to sharing its significant and relevant sustainability data to advance the financial modeling and understanding of climate change impact.
Climate change is one of the most pressing challenges of the 21st century. Microsoft is investing heavily to address this challenge. In January, we announced a new sustainability strategy focusing on carbon, water, waste and biodiversity. We have made one of the boldest climate commitments of any company: Microsoft will be carbon negative by 2030 and will remove all the carbon we have emitted since our founding by 2050. In addition, through the AI for Earth initiative, we are leveraging the power of Azure to help solve global environment challenges. In April, as part of our focus on biodiversity, we committed to an ambitious program to aggregate environmental data from around the world and put it to work in a planetary computer platform. With today’s commitment and our own data contribution to the Climate Finance Foundation, we seek to help build a global and open Data Commons of sustainability data.
The ability to access high-quality and transparent data about corporate sustainability will be critical to enable the broader community to build accurate and reliable financial models about the impact of climate change. As highlighted by the Linux Foundation, this will require the efforts and the data of many to succeed and we hope additional community stakeholders will join.
In April, we launched an Open Data Campaign to work to close the “data divide” and ensure that every organization can benefit from AI and the data economy. As part of the campaign, we committed to participating in open data collaborations to tackle the major challenges of our time. While a lot remains to be done, we are excited to take a step towards this objective. We will also work to ensure that the outcomes of the collaboration stay open, usable and empowering, in alignment with Microsoft’s Data Collaboration Principles.
