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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Microsoft Connected Vehicle Platform Helps Automakers Transform Cars
Renault-Nissan is first auto manufacturer to commit to platform to build connected cars
Traditional automakers, many of whom ushered in an era of incredible disruption nearly a century ago, now face disruption themselves from four modern forces — connected, autonomous, shared and electric cars. The infrastructure and scale required to build a connected car is incredibly complicated, expensive and resource intensive. At its core, it’s a software challenge, and a chief obstacle for these brands is integrating the complex cloud technology required to deliver next-generation driving experiences.
Today at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, we announced the Microsoft Connected Vehicle Platform, a set of services built on the Microsoft Azure cloud and designed to empower auto manufacturers to create custom connected driving experiences. This is not an in-car operating system or a “finished product;” it’s a living, agile platform that starts with the cloud as the foundation and aims to address five core scenarios that our partners have told us are key priorities: predictive maintenance, improved in-car productivity, advanced navigation, customer insights and help building autonomous driving capabilities.
Microsoft’s cloud will do the heavy lifting by ingesting huge volumes of sensor and usage data from connected vehicles, and then helping automakers apply that data in powerful ways.
Available as a public preview later this year, it brings Microsoft’s intelligent services from across the company right into the car, including virtual assistants, business applications, office services and productivity tools like Cortana, Dynamics, Office 365, Power BI and Skype for Business.
Today, the car is more than just a ride between two places — it is a hub of activity for daily life. People are looking to have truly connected experiences in their cars so that they can get more done, save time and make life easier. While safety and security are baseline requirements, our services can help make a person’s work day more efficient. For instance, imagine that Cortana seamlessly connects you whether you’re at home or in your car. Let’s say you’re on your phone at home and tell Cortana to set up a meeting for you and your colleague the next morning at a coffee shop. The next time you get in your car, Cortana reminds you of the morning meeting and starts navigation to get you to that coffee shop.
Check out our video below to hear more about how the platform works and the benefits it offers to automakers and drivers.
Auto manufacturers embrace Microsoft’s technology
Our strength in building a global cloud at scale is the primary reason the Renault-Nissan Alliance chose to work with Microsoft, becoming the first auto manufacturer to commit to the Microsoft Connected Vehicle Platform. Today in Nissan’s CES keynote, the company announced that through our partnership with the Renault-Nissan Alliance, our platform will power next-generation, connected vehicles with advanced navigation, predictive maintenance, remote monitoring of car features and more. Nissan also demonstrated on stage how Cortana can enhance a driver’s experience. In addition, Azure offers the flexibility and choice to build a common platform for Renault-Nissan to deploy services to both Alliance brands by supporting devices and vehicles that run on multiple operating systems, programming languages and tools.
This partnership builds on our recent momentum with other automotive companies, such as our announcement this past week with Volvo to integrate Skype for Business in Volvo’s 90 Series cars, which will enhance productivity and make joining conference calls from the car a cinch. And we’ve partnered with BMW on BMW Connected, the automaker’s personal mobility companion service, to develop a scalable platform based on Microsoft Azure technologies to deliver in-car productivity services through Office 365, as well as intelligent personal assistance for drivers.
Microsoft a partner instead of a competitor
As you may have gathered, Microsoft is not building its own connected car. Instead, we want to help automakers create connected car solutions that fit seamlessly with their brands, address their customers’ unique needs, competitively differentiate their products and generate new and sustainable revenue streams. Our customers have shared that they want to work with a partner that not only offers the right tools, but also allows them to keep their data, has a secure and compliant cloud platform, and operates at a truly global scale (given that most automotive brands operate in more than one country). In fact, 85 percent of Fortune 500 companies already rely on Microsoft’s cloud for these reasons.
Using our platform, automakers and suppliers can benefit from the billions of dollars we’ve already invested in the cloud. Azure offers more than 200 services available in 38 worldwide datacenter regions, with robust measures for security and the global compliance and privacy regulations that are required to support connected cars, letting automakers focus on innovation rather than building out their own cloud-based infrastructure.
Ultimately, Microsoft aspires to empower automakers in their goals for fully autonomous driving, with sophisticated machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities, as well as advanced mapping services. In fact, just last month we announced that through new and existing relationships with TomTom, HERE and Esri, together we will create more intelligent location-based services across Microsoft.
As a company, it’s our mission to empower all industries and businesses not only to survive disruption, but to seize it as an opportunity. The investments we’re making in the automotive space extend to countless other industries, such as financial services, manufacturing and smart cities. Wherever there’s a “connected signal,” Microsoft wants to be the partner that can help its customers improve people’s lives — on the road, in the cloud and everywhere in between.
Early diagnosis is key to gaining the upper hand against a wide range of diseases. Now Microsoft researchers are suggesting that records of the topics that people search for on the Internet could one day prove as useful as an X-ray or MRI in detecting some illnesses before it’s too late.
The potential of using engagement with search engines to predict an eventual diagnosis – and possibly buy critical time for a medical response — is demonstrated in a new study by Microsoft researchers Eric Horvitz and Ryen White, along with former Microsoft intern and Columbia University doctoral candidate John Paparrizos.
In a paper published Tuesday in the Journal of Oncology Practice, the trio detailed how they used anonymized Bing search logs to identify people whose queries provided strong evidence that they had recently been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer – a particularly deadly and fast-spreading cancer that is frequently caught too late to cure. Then they retroactively analyzed searches for symptoms of the disease over many months prior to identify patterns of queries most likely to signal an eventual diagnosis.
“We find that signals about patterns of queries in search logs can predict the future appearance of queries that are highly suggestive of a diagnosis of pancreatic adenocarcinoma,” – the medical term for pancreatic cancer, the authors wrote. “We show specifically that we can identify 5 to 15 percent of cases while preserving extremely low false positive rates” of as low as 1 in 100,000.
The researchers used large-scale anonymized data and complied with best practices in ethics and privacy for the study.
Eric Horvitz, a technical fellow and managing director of Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington, research lab (Photography by Scott Eklund/Red Box Pictures)
Horvitz, a technical fellow and managing director of Microsoft’s research lab in Redmond, Washington, said the method shows the feasibility of a new form of screening that could ultimately allow patients and their physicans to diagnose pancreatic cancer and begin treatment weeks or months earlier than they otherwise would have. That’s an important advantage in fighting a disease with a very low survival rate if it isn’t caught early.
Pancreatic cancer — the fourth leading cause of cancer death in the United States – was in many ways the ideal subject for the study because it typically produces a series of subtle symptoms, like itchy skin, weight loss, light-colored stools, patterns of back pain and a slight yellowing of the eyes and skin that often don’t prompt a patient to seek medical attention.
Horvitz, an artificial intelligence expert who holds both a Ph.D. and an MD from Stanford University, said the researchers found that queries entered to seek answers about that set of symptoms can serve as an early warning for the onset of illness.
But Horvitz said that he and White, chief technology officer for Microsoft Health and an information retrieval expert, believe that analysis of search queries could have broad applications.
“We are excited about applying this analytical pipeline to other devastating and hard-to-detect diseases,” Horvitz said.
Horvitz and White emphasize that the research was done as a proof of concept that such a “different kind of sensor network or monitoring system” is possible. The researchers said Microsoft has no plans to develop any products linked to the discovery.
Instead, the authors said, they hope the positive results from the feasibility study will excite the broader medical community and generate discussion about how such a screening methodology might be used. They suggest that it would likely involve analyzing anonymized data and having a method for people who opt in to receive some sort of notification about health risks, either directly or through their doctors, in the event algorithms detected a pattern of search queries that could signal a health concern.
But White said the search analysis would not be a medical opinion.
“The goal is not to perform the diagnosis,” he said. “The goal is to help those at highest risk to engage with medical professionals who can actually make the true diagnosis.”
White and Horvitz said they wanted to take the results of the pancreatic cancer study directly to those in a position to do something with the results, which is why they chose to first publish in a medical journal.
“I guess I’m at a point now in my career where I’m not interested in the potential for impact,” White said of the decision. “I actually want to have impact. I would like to see the medical community pick this up and take it as a technology, and work with us to enable this type of screening.”
And Horvitz, who said he lost his best childhood friend and, soon after, a close colleague in computer science to pancreatic cancer, said the stakes are too high to delay getting the word out.
“People are being diagnosed too late,” he said. “We believe that these results frame a new approach to pre-screening or screening, but there’s work to do to go from the feasibility study to real-world fielding.”
Horvitz and White have previously teamed up on other search-related medical studies – notably a 2008 analysis of “cyberchondria” – or “medical anxiety that is stimulated by symptom searches on the web,” as Horvitz puts it – and analyses of search logs that identify adverse effects of medications.
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Decades of computer vision research, one ‘Swiss Army knife’
When Anne Taylor walks into a room, she wants to know the same things that any person would.
Where is there an empty seat? Who is walking up to me, and is that person smiling or frowning? What does that sign say?
For Taylor, who is blind, there aren’t always easy ways to get this information. Perhaps another person can direct her to her seat, describe her surroundings or make an introduction.
There are apps and tools available to help visually impaired people, she said, but they often only serve one limited function and they aren’t always easy to use. It’s also possible to ask other people for help, but most people prefer to navigate the world as independently as possible.
That’s why, when Taylor arrived at Microsoft about a year ago, she immediately got interested in working with a group of researchers and engineers on a project that she affectionately calls a potential “Swiss Army knife” of tools for visually impaired people.
“I said, ‘Let’s do something that really matters to the blind community,’” said Taylor, a senior project manager who works on ways to make Microsoft products more accessible. “Let’s find a solution for a scenario that really matters.”
That project is Seeing AI, a research project that uses computer vision and natural language processing to describe a person’s surroundings, read text, answer questions and even identify emotions on people’s faces. Seeing AI, which can be used as a cell phone app or via smart glasses from Pivothead, made its public debut at the company’s Build conference this week. It does not currently have a release date.
Taylor said Seeing AI provides another layer of information for people who also are using mobility aids such as white canes and guide dogs.
“This app will help level the playing field,” Taylor said.
At the same conference, Microsoft also unveiled CaptionBot, a demonstration site that can take any image and provide a detailed description of it.
Very deep neural networks, natural language processing and more
Seeing AI and CaptionBot represent the latest advances in this type of technology, but they are built on decades of cutting-edge research in fields including computer vision, image recognition, natural language processing and machine learning.
In recent years, a spate of breakthroughs has allowed computer vision researchers to do things they might not have thought possible even a few years before.
“Some people would describe it as a miracle,” said Xiaodong He, a senior Microsoft researcher who is leading the image captioning effort that is part of Microsoft Cognitive Services. “The intelligence we can say we have developed today is so much better than six years ago.”
The field is moving so fast that it’s substantially better than even six months ago, he said. For example, Kenneth Tran, a senior research engineer on his team who is leading the development effort, recently figured out a way to make the image captioning system more than 20 times faster, allowing people who use tools like Seeing AI to get the information they need much more quickly.
A major a-ha moment came a few years ago, when researchers hit on the idea of using deep neural networks, which roughly mimic the biological processes of the human brain, for machine learning.
Machine learning is the general term for a process in which systems get better at doing something as they are given more training data about that task. For example, if a computer scientist wants to build an app that helps bicyclists recognize when cars are coming up behind them, it would feed the computer tons of pictures of cars, so the app learned to recognize the difference between a car and, say, a sign or a tree.
Computer scientists had used neural networks before, but not in this way, and the new approach resulted in big leaps in computer vision accuracy.
Several months ago, Microsoft researchers Jian Sun and Kaiming He made another big leap when they unveiled a new system that uses very deep neural networks – called residual neural networks – to correctly identify photos. The new approach to recognizing images resulted in huge improvements in accuracy. The researchers shocked the academic community and won two major contests, the ImageNet and Microsoft Common Objects in Context challenges.
Tools to recognize and accurately describe images
That approach is now being used by Microsoft researchers who are working on ways to not just recognize images but also write captions about them. This research, which combines image recognition with natural language processing, can help people who are visually impaired get an accurate description of an image. It also has applications for people who need information about an image but can’t look at it, such as when they are driving.
The image captioning work also has received accolades for its accuracy as compared to other research projects, and it is the basis for the capabilities in Seeing AI and Caption Bot. Now, the researchers are working on expanding the training set so it can give users a deeper sense of the world around them.
Margaret Mitchell, a Microsoft researcher who specializes in natural language processing and has been one of the industry’s leading researchers on image captioning, said she and her colleagues also are looking at ways a computer can describe an image in a more human way.
For example, while a computer might accurately describe a scene as “a group of people that are sitting next to each other,” a person may say that it’s “a group of people having a good time.” The challenge is to help the technology understand what a person would think was most important, and worth saying, about the picture.
“There’s a separation between what’s in an image and what we say about the image,” said Mitchell, who also is one of the leads on the Seeing AI project.
Other Microsoft researchers are developing ways that the latest image recognition tools can provide more thorough explanations of pictures. For example, instead of just describing an image as “a man and a woman sitting next to each other,” it would be more helpful for the technology to say, “Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are posing for a picture.”
That’s where Lei Zhang comes in.
When you search the Internet for an image today, chances are high that the search engine is relying on text associated with that image to return a picture of Kim Kardashian or Taylor Swift.
Zhang, a senior researcher at Microsoft, is working with researchers including Yandong Guo on a system that uses machine learning to identify celebrities, politicians and public figures based on the elements of the image rather than the text associated with it.
Zhang’s research will be included in the latest vision tools that are part of Microsoft Cognitive Services. That’s a set of tools that is based on Microsoft’s cutting-edge machine learning research, and which developers can use to build apps and services that do things like recognize faces, identify emotions and distinguish various voices. Those tools also have provided the technical basis for Microsoft showcase apps and demonstration websites such as how-old.net, which guesses a person’s age, and Fetch, which can identify a dog’s breed.
Microsoft Cognitive Services is an example of what is becoming a more common phenomenon – the lightning-fast transfer of the latest research advances into products that people can actually use. The engineers who work on Microsoft Cognitive Services say their job is a bit like solving a puzzle, and the pieces are the latest research.
“All these pieces come together and we need to figure out, how do we present those to an end user?” said Chris Buehler, a software engineering manager who works on Microsoft Cognitive Services.
From research project to helpful product
Seeing AI, the research project that could eventually help visually impaired people, is another example of how fast research can become a really helpful tool. It was conceived at last year’s //oneweek Hackathon, an event in which Microsoft employees from across the company work together to try to make a crazy idea become a reality.
The group that built Seeing AI included researchers and engineers from all over the world who were attracted to the project because of the technological challenges and, in many cases, also because they had a personal reason for wanting to help visually impaired people operate more independently.
“We basically had this super team of different people from different backgrounds, working to come up with what was needed,” said Anirudh Koul, who has been a lead on the Seeing AI project since its inception and became interested in it because his grandfather is losing his ability to see.
For Taylor, who joined Microsoft to represent the needs of blind people, it was a great experience that also resulted in a potential product that could make a real difference in people’s lives.
“We were able to come up with this one Swiss Army knife that is so valuable,” she said.
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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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Greener datacenters for a brighter future: Microsoft’s commitment to renewable energy
As the world increasingly races to a future based on cloud computing, a host of new and important public issues are emerging. One of these issues involves the energy and sustainability practices of the datacenters that power the cloud. Over the past year we’ve spent considerable time focusing on our work in this area at Microsoft, and I wanted to share today where we’re heading.
When it comes to sustainability, we’ve made important progress as a company since the start of this decade, but even more important work lies ahead. Across the tech sector we need to recognize that datacenters will rank by the middle of the next decade among the large users of electrical power on the planet. We need to keep working on a sustained basis to build and operate greener datacenters that will serve the world well.
For Microsoft, this means moving beyond datacenters that are already 100 percent carbon neutral to also having those datacenters rely on a larger percentage of wind, solar and hydropower electricity over time. Today roughly 44 percent of the electricity used by our datacenters comes from these sources. Our goal is to pass the 50 percent milestone by the end of 2018, top 60 percent early in the next decade, and then to keep improving from there.
Especially given the magnitude of datacenter expansion that will continue throughout this time period, this is not a small goal. It requires that we understand where we’ve come from over the past few years and take a principled approach to our work in the future. We need to translate these principles into clear and concrete goals that we can use to hold ourselves accountable in a responsible way. And it will require work with many other important stakeholders and institutions, from environmental groups to utilities to governments themselves.
Important work to date
Our focus on sustainability is not new. We’ve been tracking and reducing emissions since 2007, and we’ve been operating our datacenters and the rest of the company at 100 percent carbon neutrality since 2012. We’ve achieved this progress by driving efficiencies, charging our business units a fee on carbon, and investing in sustainable energy projects and technologies. When we’re not able to eliminate our energy use or directly power our operations with green energy, we purchase renewable energy certificates to reduce carbon emissions. When we include the use of these certificates, 100 percent of our consumption has been powered by renewable energy since 2014.
Microsoft was in fact one of the first large enterprises to implement a global internal carbon fee model, charging each business unit a fee based on the carbon emissions of its business operations. This provides a powerful incentive to find carbon-saving alternatives and invest in carbon-reducing innovations. Thanks in part to this program, Microsoft was ranked by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as the second largest user of green power in the United States. Earlier this year we were honored to receive an EPA Climate Leadership Award and to be recognized by the United Nations and World Economic Forum for our carbon fee model.
As part of our commitment to carbon neutrality, we also offset the carbon impact of our air travel. We do this by investing in community projects that focus on issues such as clean cookstoves, habitat protection and restoration, and solar power and lighting – impacting more than 7 million people worldwide.
As a result of this work, we’ve reduced carbon emissions by 9.5 million metric tons, purchased 14 billion kilowatt hours of green energy, and cut energy consumption by 10 percent at our 125-building main campus in Redmond, Washington. All of this represents important progress and creates a strong foundation on which to build.
A principled approach to the future
While we’re proud of our progress, we readily recognize that even bigger steps will be needed in the future. In part this is because of the unique and increasingly important role that datacenters will play in the decades ahead.
Over the past 250 years a few select inventions have served as the fundamental catalysts for human progress. In the First Industrial Revolution that began in the latter 1700’s, steam and the steam engine played this role. A century later, the Second Industrial Revolution was based on electricity and electrical power plants, and then gasoline and the combustion engine. The Third Industrial Revolution relied on the microprocessor. The Fourth Industrial Revolution we’re now entering will feature major technology advances in physical materials, biological processes and digital technologies. But the fundamental cornerstones for all of these advances will be data – the electricity of our age – and the datacenters that will make this massive use of data possible.
Datacenters have become the engine of transformation. The good news is that public cloud datacenters operated by companies like Microsoft are more energy efficient than the private server facilities run by individual companies or governments. This is natural, given the degree to which this has become a core competency, and it reflects our focus on both world-leading R&D and large capital investments to drive datacenter energy efficiency.
But there is no room for complacency. The largest tech companies today may each consume as much electrical power as a small American state. There may come a point in just a few decades when we each may consume as much power as a mid-sized nation. This creates an obvious responsibility that we need to take seriously.
To help us live up to this responsibility, we have established three principles to guide our environmental sustainability work:
Transparency. We’re committed to the type of transparency that will hold ourselves accountable and share our track record with the public. We’ll report annually our total energy consumption and consumption across regions, the mix of sources for the power that we use, the impact of our internal carbon fee model and the investments we make. We also will be transparent about where we are investing in renewable energy certificates or international equivalents, and our investments in carbon offset projects around the world.
Help to accelerate the transition to a clean energy infrastructure. We’re committed to using more clean energy every year. We will be mindful about siting datacenters and other facilities where renewable energy sources are readily available or can be made available during ramp-up or operational phases. Wherever we operate, we will work to bring new renewable energy sources online either through investments in new projects, by engaging on enabling policy changes that will help accelerate availability of more clean energy, and by working with utilities to increase the availability of renewable energy on the grid.
Investments in research. Finally, we’re committed to cutting-edge research and development investments to advance our energy responsibilities. We will continue, in particular, to focus on R&D that will lead to further improvements in the efficiency of computing infrastructure, datacenters, servers and software performance. We will also work to advance sustainability through the products, platforms, and capabilities we use to run our business and offer our customers and partners, and we will invest in new technologies that have the capability to create more clean energy at scale.
Practical energy commitments
We recognize the importance of translating these principles into action. We’ve concluded that this requires that we make to ourselves and to the public five clear and concrete commitments:
1. Improving our energy mix. First, we need to focus on our datacenters’ sourcing of electricity. Today, although 100 percent of the electricity used by our datacenters is renewable based on a mixture of direct projects and renewable energy certificates (or the equivalent), only about 44 percent of that power is generated by wind, solar and hydropower sources. Some of that electricity comes from projects where Microsoft directly procures renewable energy, such as the Keechi wind farm in Texas and the Pilot Hill wind farm in Illinois, while the rest is supplied by wind, solar and hydropower sources on the grid. But this means that we have a large opportunity to address the remaining 56 percent either with our own direct purchases or by encouraging the addition of new wind, solar, or hydropower additions to the grid.
We recognize that both the volume and percent of energy from these renewable sources needs to be higher. As we move forward, we will continue to purchase renewable energy certificates to ensure we reduce our carbon emissions to zero. But more important, we are setting goals to grow the percent of wind, solar, and hydropower energy we purchase directly and through the grid to 50 percent by 2018, 60 percent early in the next decade, and to an ongoing and higher percentage in future years beyond that. As we make progress, we’ll report on it and share how we’re thinking about our next milestone on this path.
2. Maintaining carbon neutrality. Through investments in energy efficiency, direct purchases of renewable energy, renewable energy certificates or the equivalent, and carbon offsets, we will continue to be 100 percent carbon neutral in our operations and business air travel.
3. Retiring all green attributes from projects in which we invest. Any time we purchase green energy, we will not sell the renewable energy certificates or any other green “attributes” for others to claim.
4. Investing in new energy technologies. We will continue to invest in new energy technology, such as our biogas and fuel cell work, that have the potential to accelerate the availability of new types of energy and drive new efficiencies.
5. Supporting public policies that help enable new renewable energy sources. Finally, we will support public policies that accelerate the availability of additional renewable energy in markets where we operate. We believe this is an imperative not only for our ability to meet our own commitments, but for the energy improvements that are needed by the tech sector more broadly.
Toward a broader conversation about a sustainable future
The more we’ve focused on these issues, the more apparent it has become that the world needs an ever-broadening conversation to make sustained progress. Much has been accomplished in this regard in recent years, including a new global commitment to address these issues. But we’ll all need to work together to translate this into the types of practical steps that are needed.
We definitely learned a lot earlier this year about the types of practical steps that can make a difference. Microsoft joined an innovative public-private partnership with Dominion Power and the State of Virginia to do just that. Dominion will build a 20-megawatt solar energy plant to bring new, additional clean energy to the grid in Virginia, and Microsoft helped fund it and will claim and retire the green attributes. Partnering with utilities and governments in these types of ways can impact the grid beyond our own operational needs and can help accelerate the transition to a cleaner energy economy.
The progress that’s needed will not come easily. The issues are complex and the steps that are needed are varied. Real progress will require that groups across the non-governmental, business and governmental communities find new ways to work together.
At Microsoft, our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. In a world of more than 7 billion people, this plainly comes with a responsibility to advance sustainability in our operations, including datacenters, to deliver innovative solutions that will help address the environmental challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.
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The 6 not-so-obvious reasons a project plan fails
By Maddie Murray
Read more about Microsoft's findings here
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Eco-testing a building before it is even built
Architects and engineers all over the world are inventing new ways to reduce the time, cost, and risk of constructing energy-efficient, high-performance buildings. Data-intensive analysis plays a key role in the design of “green” buildings—but the high cost of such analysis can be prohibitive to these eco-pioneers. Microsoft Azure Azure provides a way to help building designers perform complex data analysis cost-efficiently—and quickly—facilitating the design of energy-efficient buildings.
Using pre-fabricated parts and fast computers
Despite the global demand for sustainably-designed buildings, many design businesses face practical implementation challenges, such as the time-intensive process of performing computer simulations, and the expenses of the powerful technology that is needed to reduce execution time, sustainable design specialists, and computer aided design (CAD) software. The good news: cloud computing has tremendous potential to change all of that.
Green Prefab, a small startup company in Italy, is working with Microsoft Research Connections and the Royal Danish Academy to develop next-generation tools that will one day allow in-depth simulations of a building’s performance—before it's built. This innovative approach is possible by using Microsoft Azure, Microsoft’s open and powerful public cloud platform—to provide inexpensive data-intensive analysis.
Green Prefab is developing a library of prefabricated green building components that can be used to design eco-friendly buildings. Architects will be able to access civil engineering services, via the cloud, to produce energy efficiency reports, conduct in-depth structural analysis, and view photo-realistic preview images of the building. Green Prefab has teamed up with Microsoft Research Connections to develop some of the first tools for Microsoft Azure.
One essential ingredient of Green Prefab’s industrialized approach is its use of a data model that was developed for the construction industry in the 1990s by an international consortium known as buildingSMART. The buildingSMART model is an open format that makes it easy to exchange and share building information modeling (BIM) data between applications that were developed by different software vendors.
The open format of buildingSMART's data model has made it easier for Green Prefab to model prefabricated green building components. New tools that use massive computational power to simulate building performance will help the sustainable building industry.
Developing energy simulations
With the goal of making it possible for engineers and architects to analyze complex building scenarios extremely quickly, Green Prefab and the Institute of Architectural Technology of the Royal Danish Academy collaborated to validate the potential usefulness of building performance energy simulations in the cloud.
The Royal Danish Academy conducted an experiment that used Green Prefab’s prototype web-based tools with the supercomputer in Barcelona, Spain, to execute parametric energy simulations of buildings by using the power of cloud computing.
The design of the test building reflected the floor space, occupancy, and environmental setting of a standard office in Copenhagen, Denmark. In order to understand the advantages of the proposed service, in comparison to conventional ways of using simulations, a parallel experiment was conducted. Starting from the same building design, the same architect conceived and tested 50 design options with a standard dual-core PC.
The cloud-based approach achieved approximately twice the potential energy savings, 33 percent, compared to only 17 percent for the conventional approach. It also reduced computing time significantly. Running the 220,184 parametric simulations on a standard dual-core PC would have taken 122 days; running those same energy simulations in the cloud took only three days.
Reducing building time, cost, and risk
The wide adoption of cloud-based civil engineering tools could radically reshape the green building industry; Green Prefab's photo-realistic, 3-D illustrations of buildings in design are just the first step. By producing digital, full-detailed models of a building, Green Prefab expects to be able to guarantee its appearance and performance, save construction time, and reduce costs as much as 30 percent.
Even small architectural firms will be able to control costs in the pre-construction phase and reduce uncertainties during construction as civil engineering tools in the cloud become available to small and medium-sized architecture and engineering firms around the world.
Microsoft’s collaboration with Green Prefab presents an optimistic picture of a future in which new cloud-based tools help reduce the energy consumption of buildings substantially. Such scientific breakthroughs will facilitate a shift towards building more environmentally friendly buildings that use energy and water efficiently, reduce waste, and provide a healthy environment for working and living.
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