Computer scientists could only dream of the capabilities that an average consumer might now take for granted at the time that the field of AI (artificial intelligence) was founded more than 50 years ago.
For decades, areas such as computer vision, deep learning, speech, and natural language processing have challenged the field's top exerts, yet today, it seems that computer scientists are making more progress every day in these areas (among many others).
Because of these breakthroughs, tools including Microsoft Translator are coming to life, and it is only up until recently that things like this were the stuff of fantasy and science fiction. In turn, so many people are being helped in so many ways by, for example, breaking down language barriers and facilitating communication.
Just the beginning
Last September, Microsoft announced the creation of Microsoft AI and Research, a new group that brings together approximately 7,500 computer scientists, researchers and engineers from the company’s research labs and product groups such as Bing, Cortana and Azure Machine Learning.
Microsoft Research AI, a research and incubation hub within Microsoft's research organization, is focused on solving some of AI’s most difficult challenges. The team of scientists and engineers will work closely with colleagues across Microsoft’s research labs and product groups in order to tackle some of the hardest problems in AI and accelerate the integration of the latest AI advances into products and services that benefit customers and society.
A core goal of Microsoft Research AI is to reunite AI research endeavors, such as machine learning, perception and natural language processing, that have evolved over time into separate fields of research. This integrated approach will allow the development of sophisticated understandings and tools that can help people do complex, multifaceted tasks.
Conclusion
Microsoft believes AI will be even more helpful when tools can be created that combine those functions and add some of the abilities that come naturally to people, like applying our knowledge of one task to another task or having a commonsense understanding of the world around us.
As AI moves from research to product, Microsoft is maintaining their commitment to foundational, open, and collaborative research in addition to their dedication to solving society’s toughest problems in partnership with all members of society. All the while, Microsoft is actively pursuing a mission in common with us here at Managed Solution, to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more.
"Cami" Boosts Customer Engagement at Dixons Carphone
Dixons Carphone is a major electronics retailer that is based in the UK but employs many people over 11 different countries. Dixons Carphone provides consumers with products and services that help them lead seamlessly connected lives at home, in the office, and on the move. Similar to most retailers, Dixons Carphone has had to adapt to modern consumer buying patterns by incorporating a larger amount of online product research and shopping. In fact, 90% of their customers start their shopping in some way or form online, and an astounding 65% use their phones to assist them while shopping in-store.
Dixons Carphone partnered with Microsoft with aims to find better ways to increase customer engagement as well as ways to better optimize employee time spent with customers, they determined that AI was the answer. Specifically, Dixons Carphone investigated the capabilities of the Microsoft Bot Framework and Microsoft Cognitive Services in the context of customer interactions. The Bot Framework helps companies build, test and deploy intelligent bots capable of interacting with customers in a conversational way, working in tandem with Cognitive Services, a collection of intelligent APIs hosted on Azure that provide the underlying language and image recognition capabilities that power the bots.
After contemplating and brainstorming a personality and persona for their bot, Dixons Carphone decided on "Cami" with a mildly geeky and confident personality. Cami, for the time being, accepts questions (as text-based input) as well as pictures of products’ in-store shelf labels to check stock status, using the Cognitive Services Language Understanding Intelligent Service (LUIS) for conversational abilities and the Computer Vision API to process images.
Dixons Carphone will also be putting Cami to use in order to help employees in their day-to-day responsibilities, for example, in doing stock checks. In addition, the research done in conjunction with Microsoft showed that when shopping in store, customers who researched a product online (as far as things like stock level) are frustrated by the fact that when they get into the store they must start from scratch through store employees. Cami helps bridge that gap through a "Wishlist" feature. As customers add items to their Wishlist, Cami saves the search criteria they used and store colleagues can pull up that information in-store to see what the customer was looking for, leading to a much more efficient shopping process.
When Dixons Carphone goes live with the use of Cami, they will use the Cognitive Services Text Analytics API, Azure Application Insights, and Power BI dashboard to review which products customers are looking at, the sentiment of their interactions, and the questions they are asking. Understanding the questions that customers are asking and analyzing their interactions with the bot will help the company improve their communications and messaging as well.
Arvato Bertelsmann Protects Online Merchants from E-Commerce Fraud
An estimated 70 percent of online sellers in Germany have suffered fraud attempts, but only 14 percent of them use any safeguards today. Even though merchants are aware of the dangers of e-commerce fraud and the solutions available to protect themselves, they lack the resources to be able to manage the risk efficiently. On top of this, hackers quickly adapt their fraudulent ways and as a result, whatever solutions are put in place must adapt as well.
Arvato Financial Solutions, an integrated financial services provider, offers vital services around e-commerce safety for some 2,000 odd customers. One of eight divisions of Bertelsmann – the German media, services, and education giant – Arvato has recently partnered with Microsoft, inovex GmbH (a cloud and big data specialist), and a few of Arvato’s e-commerce customers with aims to create a fraud detection solution using Microsoft’s big data and machine learning offerings.
Through the combination of Azure services with the open-source Storm and Hadoop frameworks, Arvato built an integrated cloud-based solution that uses a modern lambda architecture to process massive data quantities using both batch and stream processing. The batch path transforms existing data using Hadoop, then, by applying machine learning algorithms, the solution develops self-learning analytical models from past fraud cases, for early recognition of any new fraudulent approaches. The stream-processing path captures incoming real-time transaction data via Azure Event Hubs. It then analyzes the data with the assistance of Storm and Azure Machine Learning to uncover fraudulent activities as they happen.
An important goal of the project was to visualize and monitor the models, and Power BI serves this function by displaying data sets drawn directly from cloud sources, Azure HDInsight and SQL Database, on several large screens in Arvato’s monitoring center.
Avato’s investment in good cloud design is paying for itself, helping the company reliably fulfill SLAs using cloud services. Their flexible architecture enables rapid deployment, which is key for fraud recognition in an international e-commerce setting. Using Microsoft machine learning on big data, Avato has created an innovative e-commerce fraud recognition solution and built the basis for innovative financial BPO services based on Microsoft Azure.
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When a disaster occurs, you’ve entered a “new reality,” says Lewis Curtis, director of Microsoft Services Disaster Response. It won’t be enough to simply restore your systems and applications to where they were before – disasters change everything, irrevocably and permanently.
But new computing technologies like the cloud are making it possible to quickly respond to a disaster, coordinate the response by governments and aid organizations, provide analytics to better understand and track its impact, and manage the aftermath. All of the same technologies and innovations that enable businesses to quickly respond to new opportunities and changing market conditions make the cloud an essential part of any disaster response.
Using technology to ease suffering
Disasters often wipe out the very systems that are desperately needed to cope with them.
Michael G. Manning, president and CEO of the Greater Baton Rouge Food Bank in Louisiana, understands this well. In August 2016, Baton Rouge, the state’s capital, was inundated by record rains. Four feet of flood water destroyed not only a million pounds of food held in reserve, but all of the food bank’s computer systems, the very ones that tracked the food bank’s supplies and who received them, and that ensured that hungry people were getting the food they needed.
Quickly moving their office and warehouse management applications to the cloud guaranteed that those applications would always be available, and that the loss of their systems “would never happen again,” Manning says. With cloud-based applications, the food bank could “operate anywhere, at any time, in any future disaster.”
Only months before, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake ravaged western Ecuador, and the government needed a basic software application to register those affected by the quake, and to ensure that shelter, food and medical supplies reached the 2,300 families left homeless by the disaster.
Neighboring Colombia had such an application. But how to quickly move it to Ecuador and get it running? In fact, within a week it was redeployed – to the Azure cloud. The Ecuadorian Red Cross also used the cloud to manage volunteers and blood bank data across the country.
In other cases, disasters bring new demands on applications – in both scale and load – that were never anticipated.
On March 22, 2014, a hillside saturated by heavy rains collapsed on the small Northwest town of Oso, Washington, flattening homes and killing 43 people. In the aftermath, nearly 200 government and aid agencies, including the Red Cross, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Washington National Guard and the U.S. Navy’s search and rescue team, as well as thousands of representatives of the media, descended upon Oso.
The local government’s record-keeping and coordination systems were quickly overwhelmed so Microsoft Services Disaster Response, with help from the Azure product team, migrated Oso’s records to the cloud. With its nearly limitless capacity, the cloud made it possible for everyone who needed access to the records to retrieve – and search – them quickly and efficiently. Using Office 365 they also quickly deployed an Incident Command Collaboration System that enabled incident commanders and emergency liaisons from the various agencies to connect with one another.
A year later, a massive earthquake leveled some 600,000 buildings and killed thousands of people in Nepal, leaving the remote, mountainous country faced with the massive task of rebuilding. “Disaster relief is always overwhelming,” Dan Strode, project manager for the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), said at the time. “There’s too much to do, too many people that need help, and never enough time or resources.”
The daunting task of rebuilding began with mapping where the original structures had stood. In the past, such records were maintained on paper. However, in order to expedite reconstruction, the Microsoft Innovation Center in Nepal built a mobile phone application that used a device’s GPS to help workers record the outline of a damaged home and store it in the cloud before clearing the debris. And to help restart the economy, the app also managed daily cash payments to the workers. Cloud applications like Office 365 and the data visualization tool Power BI helped them to coordinate and track progress.
Using artificial intelligence and the cloud to provide early warning
We can use modern technologies to respond to disasters, but could we someday use them to predict, or even prevent, these natural catastrophes?
Perhaps! A statistical algorithm known as M8 attempts to predict larger earthquakes from the appearance of smaller ones. A number of efforts in different regions around the world are applying neural networks (an artificial intelligence approach that simulates the activity of the human brain) in attempts to predict the occurrence and the magnitude. (Here’s an example from India.)
In Texas, Project “SHEM” (streamflow hydrology estimate using machine learning) uses artificial intelligence to predict floods even when the physical gauges that measure water levels fail; a computer model is “trained” using historical data to look for patterns that signify the water is rising.
And the cloud may well give new hope to solving the age-old problem of predicting the weather. One prototype application (written, by the way, by your own intrepid author) uses several hundred processors in the cloud to load and analyze a century’s worth of weather data from reporting stations around the world. The hope is that the capacious data set can be analyzed to identify long-term trends and answer some of our most troubling “what ifs” about weather events.
Rely on the cloud for scale, resilience and rapid response
Aside from the wonderful humanitarian nature of these stories, what is it that is so compelling and relevant about using technology for disaster recovery?
What aid agencies and governments are finding so useful about the cloud, machine learning and other emerging technologies – resilience, time to market, scale, agility – are all qualities that are essential in today’s rapidly changing business world.
Need to get the word out? You might take a page from the government of Alberta, Canada. To keep its citizens informed during the great wildfires of 2016, the government partnered with Microsoft and geographical information systems (GIS) partner ESRI to create a cloud-based mapping application of the fires.
Need new capabilities but don’t want to add IT overhead? The same lessons learned by the governments in Baton Rouge and Nepal can be applied to public and private companies. A sudden imperative to scale? Use the cloud, as they did for the Oso landslide.
New technologies are often proven in the crucible of disasters, and they drive new innovations that promise to keep us safer, long after the crisis has ended.
A 40-year veteran of the software industry, Barry Briggs previously served as CTO for Microsoft’s own IT organization, where he helped lead the company’s transition to the cloud. The Microsoft Services Disaster Response team in the last few years has operated more than 154 missions in over 30 countries, at no cost to the agencies or communities who ask for help.
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Microsoft brings Cortana to the Android lock screen
By Sarah Perez as written on techcrunch.com
Following a series of beta trials, Microsoft officially announced this morning that it’s bringing its virtual assistant Cortana to the lock screen of Android devices. Initially, Microsoft had tested putting an overview of your day on the lock screen – offering information like the day’s weather, commute times, flight or meeting information, and more – where it could be seen at a glance.
The feature was designed to compete with Google’s own Assistant technology, which also offers similar information.
During the beta, users could head into the Cortana’s Setting menu to switch on lock screen integration. This would place a floating Cortana circle logo with “Swipe to Open” on the screen. If you swiped it, you’d be shown your personalized feed, schedule and the other information Cortana offered.
The Cortana lock screen integration was rolled out earlier this month, Microsoft confirms, but it’s now widely available.
Today, you’re also able to interact with Cortana above the lock, the company says. That means you can ask questions to their virtual assistant, as you could with Siri or Google Assistant, for example, as well as perform various tasks like setting reminders.
This functionality could further challenge Google on its own platform. As Google’s only entry in the PC space is Chrome OS, it may be more useful for Windows users to add Cortana to their phones, given its interoperability across desktop, laptop, and mobile – including iOS and Android, not just Windows 10.
Microsoft says it has also improved the Cortana home on Android, making the information easier to read, along with other improvements like the ability to quickly add reminders and new calendar items, plus easier access to viewing, editing and adding items to lists.
Cortana in December rolled out an updated design on iOS and Android, Microsoft reminded users in today’s announcement. This upgrade had been focused on making it easier to get things done by putting the most important tasks more towards the center of the experience. The default experience is very purple, instead of the blue-and-black of the earlier Cortana look and feel. However, Microsoft added more color options in the weeks after the upgrade, including blue, green, and black.
In addition to its U.S. and U.K. availability, Cortana for iOS and Android is also launching in Australia today.
Microsoft and partners combine the cloud, AI, research and industry expertise to focus on transforming health care
The goal is noble: Empower people to lead healthier lives. And yet, few industries in the world face more complex problems than health care. Disparate and disconnected information systems, the uncertainties within regulatory environments around the world and the inevitable disruptions in core business models all pose perplexing and interlocking challenges.
As we look at some of the challenges in health care, a natural question we ask ourselves is, How can Microsoft bring its capabilities to bear to solve some of these problems?
It’s a big challenge. But we believe technology – specifically the cloud, AI and collaboration and business optimization tools – will be central to health care transformation.
Making a difference in health care will require all that Microsoft can bring, fused with the industry expertise and experience from our partners: leading health care organizations and the companies that serve them.
We are incredibly energized about the opportunities to make a difference in health care. We’ve been listening carefully to our customers and partners within the health care sector, and we’ve heard their message: Let’s work together, innovate together and create solutions that can empower people to lead healthier lives.
Today, we are expanding our commitment to building a healthier future with new initiatives and solutions, making it easier for health industry partners and organizations to use intelligent technology to improve the lives of people around the world.
Healthcare NExT: Fusing research, AI and industry expertise through partners
Healthcare NExT, a new initiative to dramatically transform health care, will deeply integrate greenfield research and health technology product development, as well as establish a new model at Microsoft for strategic health industry partnerships. Through these collaborations between health care partners and Microsoft’s AI and Research organization, our goal is to enable a new wave of innovation and impact using Microsoft’s deep AI expertise and global-scale cloud.
This initiative includes investments in resources for our partners to capture new opportunities to apply AI to healthcare, such as the Microsoft AI in Health Partner Alliance, an expanding group of partners focused on advancing health technology. Alliance members will receive unique training and access to Microsoft technologies, engineering expertise and data sets.
Transforming patient and clinician empowerment with UPMC
The first planned strategic research partnership for Microsoft’s Healthcare NExT initiative is with UPMC (University of Pittsburgh Medical Center), one of the largest integrated health care delivery networks in the United States. The $13 billion Pittsburgh-based system, comprising more than 25 hospitals, a 3 million-member health plan and 3,600 physicians, will be a core partner in our efforts to improve health care delivery through a series of projects, beginning with a focus on transforming clinician empowerment and productivity. With UPMC’s long track record of clinical and commercial innovation and Microsoft’s expertise in advanced AI capabilities, the two organizations plan to work together to bring innovative new solutions to market, beginning with implementation at UPMC.
“Despite UPMC’s efforts to stay on the leading edge of technology, too often our clinicians and patients feel as though they’re serving the technology rather than the other way around. With Microsoft, we have a shared vision of empowering clinicians by reducing the burden of electronic paperwork and allowing the doctor to focus on the sacred doctor-patient relationship,” said Steven D. Shapiro, M.D., chief medical and scientific officer of UMPC and president of UPMC’s Health Services division.
Additional collaborations from Healthcare NExT include partners applying the cloud, AI and research to some of the biggest problems in health care:
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HealthVault Insights is a new research-based project designed to allow partners to generate new insights about patient health, drive adherence to care plans and encourage patient engagement powered by the latest scientific advances in machine learning. Tribridge and System C & Graphnet Care Alliance are building on HealthVault Insights to create innovative solutions for patient adherence to provider care plans.
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Microsoft Genomics is making the sample-to-answer process fast and easy through an Azure-powered genome analysis pipeline and an orchestrated ecosystem of innovative partners including BC Platforms and DNAnexus.
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Microsoft’s AI health chatbot technology is also a research-based project that will enable partners to build AI-powered conversational health care tools. MDLIVE intends to use our health bot technology to help patients self-triage inquiries before they interact with a doctor via video. Premera Blue Cross, the largest health plan in the Pacific Northwest, plans to use our health bot technology to transform how members can look up information about their health benefits. Health Navigator’s symptom checker brings best practices to other customers and partners.
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Project InnerEye is a research-based, AI-powered software tool for radiotherapy planning. The goal of the project is to allow dosimetrists and radiation oncologists to achieve 3D contouring of patients’ planning scans in minutes rather than hours. The assistive AI technology gives experts full control of the output accuracy while enjoying high levels of consistency and potential cost savings.
Enabling 21st-century house calls powered by the Microsoft cloud
Microsoft Office 365 Virtual Health Templates provide new functionality to connect people and providers through voice, video and messaging in any interface or application, powered by Skype for Business. The open source templates make it easy for industry partners, developers and enterprises to build solutions to provide care wherever patients may be.
RingMD, Careflow, Cambio and GE Healthcare have built from Office 365 Virtual Health Templates compelling and easy to use experiences.
Addressing health care business optimization with SaaS apps
New services from our partner ecosystem, powered by the Microsoft cloud, help address business process challenges outside of the clinic. Available today is CGI ProperPay for claims analytics. ProperPay provides predictive analytics, rules management and best practices for reducing health care claims fraud, waste and abuse, a $450 billion-plus problem driving up health care costs around the globe. CGI ProperPay for claims analytics joins a growing number of business and engagement applications in the Microsoft AppSource catalog like Tribridge’s Health360 Care Coordination.
Looking to the future
With any significant advance in technology it’s important to consider the unintended consequences, as well as the benefits. At Microsoft, we’re grounding our efforts in a set of core design principles that focus on the human benefit of AI, transparency and accountability. We believe that ethics and design go hand in hand.
Further, we understand that security, privacy, and compliance remain a top priority for health organizations. Microsoft Chief Information Security Officer for Health Hector Rodriguez recently reinforced our commitment to customers highlighting key investments across these core principles of trust in technology.
At the intersection of health, technology and people lies great promise. Our mission is to empower every person and organization to achieve more, and we’re excited to meet many of you next week at HIMSS17 and continue our close partnership in health care to achieve more together. If you’re at HIMSS17 next week in Orlando, Florida, be sure to stop by our booth No. 2509 to see our solutions in action. Follow our HIMSS17 story on @Health_IT to learn more.
