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Aiming to Deliver New Drugs Faster at Less Cost in the Cloud

Researchers from Molplex, a small drug discovery company; Newcastle University; and Microsoft Research Connections are working together to help scientists around the world deliver new medicines more quickly and at lower cost. This partnership has helped Molplex develop Clouds Against Disease, an offering of high-quality drug discovery services based on a new molecular discovery platform that draws its power from cloud computing with Windows Azure.

Rethinking Drug Discovery
David Leahy, co-founder and chief executive officer of Molplex, envisions a way to help pharmaceutical researchers anywhere in the world form effective drug discovery teams without large investments in technology or fixed running costs. "It takes massive computing resources to search through chemical and biological databases looking for new drug candidates. Our Clouds Against Disease solution dramatically reduces the time and cost of doing that by providing computation and chemical analysis services on demand," Leahy says.

Molplex regards drug discovery as a big data and search optimization problem. Clouds Against Disease uses its computational molecular discovery platform to automate decision making that is traditionally the scientists’ task.

"Instead of having teams of scientists scanning chemical information, our software searches for structures that have multiple properties matching the search criteria," explains Leahy. "When we integrate that with highly automated chemical synthesis and screening, it becomes a much more efficient and productive way of doing drug discovery."

Data Manipulation on a Larger Scale
In a recent pre-clinical study, the company applied its computational platform to more than 10,000 chemical structure and biological activity data sets. This action generated 750,000 predictive relationships between chemical structure and biological effect. After generating numerous possible outcomes, Molplex then used the same validation criteria that scientists would use to narrow down the 750,000 relationships to just 23,000 models covering 1,000 biological and physico-chemical properties, a relatively small data set that humans could then manage. "It would have taken hundreds of scientists several years to do this the conventional way," Leahy

Windows Azure was critical to the success of Clouds Against Disease. Molplex can access 100 or more Windows Azure nodes—in effect, virtual servers—to process data rapidly. The physical-world alternative would be to source, purchase, provision, and then manage 100 physical servers, which represents a significant investment in up-front costs. Before they could begin drug research, scientists taking this traditional approach would have to raise millions of dollars, but Windows Azure helps eliminate start-up costs by allowing new companies to pay for only what they use in computing resources.

Vladimir J. Sykora, co-founder and chief operating officer for Molplex, explains that the Molplex computational platform runs algorithms his company developed to calculate the numerical properties of molecules rapidly. Consequently, Molplex has been able to produce drug discovery results on a much larger scale than what was previously feasible. "We would not have been able to predict so many compounds without the cloud computing resources enabled by Windows Azure," asserts Sykora. "The speed and high level of detail provided by Windows Azure allow us to explore far beyond what would have been possible with traditional hardware resources."

Fighting Tropical Diseases
Molplex is embarking on a new collaboration with the Malaysian government to search for drugs that fight tropical diseases. This search has always been a lower priority for drug companies because the market is smaller, making it a less desirable commercial prospect. The traditional drug discovery program is geared to $1 billion a year blockbuster drugs; however, there are fewer opportunities today for drugs with that level of commercial potential.

Increasingly, scientists are researching tropical diseases that affect smaller populations; radically reducing the cost of drug discovery makes it feasible for scientists to tackle them. "Unlocking drug discovery technology from a physical location with the cloud has tremendous potential to help researchers work on curing these diseases faster and at less cost," asserts Leahy, "wherever they are in the world."

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Digital Crimes Unit uses Microsoft data analytics stack to catch cybercriminals

The Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit consistently leverages the latest in analytics technology, relying on some of the brightest employees, some of the smartest scientists, and certainly some of the company’s best partners in law enforcement, to disrupt and dismantle devious cybercriminals. Learn how Microsoft used some of our best technology to uncover the behavior of one cybercriminal ring, and how the Digital Crimes Unit worked in partnership with Microsoft IT and federal law enforcement, to shut down one of the nation’s most prolific cybercrime operations.

Business Problem

It’s not hard to find a good deal on the Internet, but this deal looked a little too good. Kelly Reynolds, a small-time operator in Des Moines, Iowa, was offering Windows software online at prices that were a small fraction of retail. In November 2013, an agent from the US Department of Homeland Security purchased a copy of the software, including a product key to activate and use it, and sent the key to Microsoft, along with a question: Was the product key legitimate or stolen?

They say timing is everything in life. In this case, it was true. Had the question been asked just a few years earlier, Microsoft probably would have passed it on to its Product ID Center, which would have checked the product key number against a database and identified it as a real number that hadn’t yet been activated. Microsoft probably would have answered that, as far as it could tell, the key was legitimate and unused. No flags would have been raised. And that might have been the end of the investigation.

Instead, it was only the start. That’s because Microsoft had already brought together leading data scientists, forensics specialists, and former law-enforcement officers; equipped them with the company’s own advanced
data-mining and analysis tools; installed them in the Digital Crimes Unit (DCU) of the newly created Cybercrime Center located on the Redmond, Washington, campus; and tasked these individuals to fight cybercrime worldwide.

Thanks to the involvement of the DCU, the inquiry about the suspect product key in Des Moines resulted in the identification of tens of thousands of stolen product keys, the disruption of a multimillion dollar criminal operation, and the generation of leads that are now helping to identify half a dozen more criminal enterprises. (Some names and locations have been changed due to ongoing investigations.)

This is a story of collaboration—starting with a team of Microsoft analysts who worked closely with law-enforcement agents in a public-private partnership at every stage of the investigation, from their earliest suspicions to the early-morning SWAT-team raid that busted the Des Moines operation.

Another partnership was equally crucial to the success of the case, this one a partnership wholly within Microsoft itself. It was an example of a model that sees business units—in this case, the DCU—working in collaboration with Microsoft IT, with each party playing to its distinctive strengths. Microsoft IT took the lead in providing and supporting the technology infrastructure on which the data analysis was based, and the DCU led in creating the data sets and models that would yield the most effective solutions. It’s a marked evolution from the traditional way that IT has been handled in most companies, with a centralized IT organization providing infrastructure and the business solutions that run on that infrastructure.

Here, Microsoft IT gathered and integrated data from 20 databases throughout the company, established a highly automated and efficient means of updating the system, and managed it on a 24 x 7 basis for optimal accuracy and availability. But it was the data scientists in the DCU who best understood the data and invented highly innovative ways to use it.

Yet another piece to the story is the collection of technologies for mining and analyzing big data that the investigators used to uncover the scope of the global conspiracy from a single set of numbers. It’s a collection of technologies that is proving increasingly useful not only to Microsoft but also to other corporations. And not only in the fight against cybercrime, but also in making sense of big data and propelling better, data-driven decisions in fields as diverse as physical sciences and financial services.

Those technologies include some of the newest Microsoft big data mining and analysis tools, including an Analytics Platform System to manage the massive volume of data; Azure HDInsight for big-data analysis; Azure Machine Learning for predictive analysis; and Power BI and Power Maps to give the Microsoft analysts a highly visual and easy-to-use tool to gain insights from the data.

When law enforcement asked about the Des Moines product key, the Microsoft DCU investigators were ready. They checked it against the 650 million product keys and 7 billion rows of data—growing at a rate of 4 million rows a day—in its product key activation database. No one had previously attempted to activate the key—a good sign. But then the key turned up in a Microsoft database of known stolen keys. It was one of more than 300,000 keys stolen from a Microsoft-contracted facility in the Philippines and resold and distributed by another rogue operator in China. That didn’t mean that Reynolds, in Des Moines, knew the key was stolen nor that he had any other stolen keys—but it was enough to raise suspicion.

It was enough for law enforcement to search his curbside trash and discover records of another 30,000 product keys, which also turned up in the stolen-key database. Now, Microsoft and law enforcement had enough to act—but they wanted more. Analyzing a database of PCs with stolen software keys—a traditional way to look for patterns of fraud—turned up nothing suspicious about the Des Moines location. So how was an online seller in Des Moines connected to a stolen product-key ring halfway around the world? Both Microsoft and law enforcement wanted to know.

“We took datasets about product keys shipped worldwide and merged them with datasets about key activation—and we did it in ways we’d never tried to do before,” says Donal Keating, Senior Manager of Cyberforensics at the DCU. “That requires some heavy lifting to manage the data volumes, especially when you’re asking new questions and want the answers quickly. At a different moment in time, we wouldn’t have had these tools—and we wouldn’t have gotten our answers, certainly not as quickly and easily as we did. What happened in minutes might otherwise have taken days.”

When Keating and his team looked at the data in an untraditional way, the answers instantly became clear. Instead of focusing on the PCs on which product keys were activated, they decided to look only at the activations themselves—and then an IP address in Des Moines suddenly appeared as the most prominent site in the US (see map, below.). Law enforcement used the information to obtain warrants to connect the IP address to the location of the suspect activity.

More than 2,800 copies of Microsoft Office had been loaded and activated on just four computers there. “We don’t expect to see Microsoft Office loaded on a PC 700 times—let alone see it loaded 700 times onto each of four PCs,” says Keating, with some understatement. “We didn’t understand it, but it confirmed that whatever was going on in Des Moines wasn’t legitimate.”

When law enforcement entered and secured the house, they found plenty of evidence, including invoicing and purchasing records, and emails indicating the imminent delivery of another 300 stolen product keys.

The officers also found one of the PCs on which Reynolds had activated hundreds of stolen product keys. And from him, law enforcement got the answer to the mystery of why he had done so. Reynolds confessed that he had activated the keys—a bit less than 10 percent of his inventory—to test them, much as a drug dealer tests random samples of a new narcotics delivery to ensure its quality.

“That was a new insight into the behavior of the bad guys,” says Keating. “And it gave us a new pattern—the ‘test spike’ algorithm—to put into the big-data warehouse to help detect new cases.”

Already, leads and lessons from the Des Moines case have helped DCU identify other suspected stolen key operations at home and abroad. And Microsoft IT is helping the DCU make the data discoveries in this case a standard part of its cyberforensics toolkit for future investigations.

“The bad news is that cybercriminals have never been as brazen and as sophisticated as they are today. But there’s good news: our tools and technologies are better than ever, and that means we can do more to disrupt the cybercriminals. We leverage big data and technologies like Azure HD Insight, PowerBI, and PowerMaps to understand and glean behaviors on how they operate and anticipate their next moves. And we have deeper partnerships with industry, academic experts, and law enforcement, too—all of which helps us drive greater impact,” says David Finn, Executive Director & Associate General Counsel, Digital Crimes Unit.

Conclusion

Organizations realize a competitive edge when more employees are empowered with data. The unique approach that Microsoft has to data technology delivers this capability—whether through insights and analytics or with powerful reporting for line-of-business applications. In a world where business demands the speed to compete, Microsoft data solutions cut the time it takes to go from raw data to results for everyone.

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Wireless Subscribers Used 10 Trillion Megabytes of Data Last Year

By Aaron Pressman

Wireless subscribers used almost 10 trillion megabytes of data last year, more than double what they consumed in 2014, as the insatiable appetite for checking Facebook updates, watching YouTube videos, and uploading Snapchat stories continued to fuel growth.

There were also 228 million smartphones in use by the end of 2015, up 10% from a year earlier, CTIA, the wireless industry trade group, said in its annual survey report released on Monday. Counting all kinds of phones and other devices like tablets, the industry counted 378 million active devices at year-end, up 6% from 2014.

Data traffic growth dramatically outpaced increases in other wireless services, the group reported. Minutes of talking increased 17% to 2.8 trillion minutes and the number of text and MMS messages grew less than 2% to 2.1 trillion. Data traffic increased 138% to 9.6 trillion megabytes, or the equivalent of streaming 59,219 videos every minute.

Even with the massive growth in usage, Americans don’t always end up using all the data they pay for, according to some studies. One review of wireless bills estimated that 85% of consumers spent more than necessary for data plans and left unused 1.6 GB per month on average.

The CTIA survey data comes as the industry is fighting federal net neutrality rules that require wireless carriers to treat data traffic equally, limiting their ability to charge major Internet sites and services for reaching customers. A decision on the legality of the rules is expected any day from the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. At the same time, the industry is expected to spend $30 billion or more on new spectrum licenses at an upcoming auction to help relieve network congestion in the most populated areas.

Industrywide wireless revenue increased only 2% to $192 billion in 2015, the group said.

Almost half of all U.S. households rely solely on mobile phones and have cancelled their landlines, the group said. Wireless-only households exceeded 48% at the end of the year, up from just 8% ten years ago.

The industry continued to blanket the countryside with cell towers, with the number of cell sites reaching almost 308,000 at the end of the year, up 3% from the year before.

CTIA members represent 97% of the industry, including all four of the largest mobile companies, AT&T, Verizon Communications, T-Mobile, and Sprint.

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FUNDEMEX: Small nonprofit makes big strides through tech

As written on microsoft.com

FUNDEMEX (Mexican Foundations for Entrepreneurs) supports entrepreneurs in the rural corners of Mexico, enabling the disadvantaged to climb out of poverty. A dated IT system often slowed operations to a crawl, though, and made working on the road a technological headache. The Office 365 Nonprofit program changed all that.

The universality of the cloud-based suite, available to qualifying nonprofits for free or at a huge discount, allows FUNDEMEX to

• send multimedia updates from the field,

• eliminate costly delays,

• work anytime from anywhere, and

• bring advanced technology to underserved communities.

Thanks to the donation, FUNDEMEX is empowering more entrepreneurs than ever—and watching the benefits fan out to change even more lives.

"Reliable software in the cloud makes us more efficient so we can better achieve our goals and save money."

Regina de Angoitia Guerrero, Director of Partnerships and Development

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A ripple effect in the cloud

Crossing the digital divide

FUNDEMEX works with other nonprofits and entrepreneurial groups operating in underdeveloped parts of Mexico, thereby reaching more clients than they could alone. “With Microsoft Office 365, FUNDEMEX is able to reduce the digital divide as rural communities lack access to information technologies,” Marisa Monroy, director of programming, says. These organizations are often hundreds of miles away and have the most rudimentary tech, but cloud-based tools enable employees on both sides to collaborate with ease.

“Without this partnership with Microsoft we couldn’t have reached the organizations that we have,” she adds. “The technology generates a triple result: economic, social and environmental development.”

Expanding capacity in the field

FUNDEMEX employees travel to partner sites throughout Mexico, from a small-scale organic coffee farm to a women’s weaving cooperative. Staff upload reports and photos to OneDrive, updating the home team about progress via their mobile phones. Instant communication prevents the need for expensive follow-up visits since they can address issues while employees are on-site. And because they share documents in the cloud, they avoid the confusion of image-heavy emails bouncing.

What’s more, using Skype for Business allows them to join meetings taking place at their office in Mexico City. With a staff of just seven, every member is invaluable, and the organization couldn’t function if employees went offline every time they hit the road.

Managed Solution is a full-service technology firm that empowers business by delivering, maintaining and forecasting the technologies they’ll need to stay competitive in their market place. Founded in 2002, the company quickly grew into a market leader and is recognized as one of the fastest growing IT Companies in Southern California.

We specialize in providing full managed services to businesses of every size, industry, and need.

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