Market Opportunity Meets Corporate Responsibility in Microsoft’s New Strategy.

With a Billion people worldwide living with some form of disability, there is tremendous scope for the development of assistive technologies – a market expected be worth over $26 Billion by 2024.

In the next 10 years, billions of IoT smart devices will be connected. AI will enable these devides to listen, see, reason and predict without a 24/7 dependence on the cloud (this physical interface between humans and machines is what Microsoft terms the “intelligent edge”) and the average smart home will generate around 50GB of data every single day.

In the next 10 years, billions of IoT smart devices will be connected. AI will enable these devides to listen, see, reason and predict without a 24/7 dependence on the cloud
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The AI for Accessibility program will provide seed grants of technology to developers, universities, nongovernmental organizations and inventors
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“AI can be a game changer for people with disabilities. Already we’re witnessing this as people with disabilities expand their use of computers to hear, see and reason with impressive accuracy,” explains Brad Smith, President and CLO at Microsoft.

This week at the company’s annual Build developer conference in Seattle, Microsoft announced the launch of AI for Accessibility, a new $25 million 5-year program aimed at accelerating the development of accessible and intelligent AI solutions. The aim is to enable disabled users to achieve more in three specific scenarios: Employment, Modern Life and Human Connection. The program comprises grants, technology investments and expertise, with innovations integrated into Microsoft Cloud services.

“Around the world, only one in 10 people with disabilities has access to assistive technologies and products. By making AI solutions more widely available, we believe technology can have a broad impact on this important community,” says Smith.

The AI for Accessibility program will provide seed grants of technology to developers, universities, nongovernmental organizations and inventors taking an AI-first approach focused on creating solutions in those areas.

It will also identify projects that show the most promise and make larger investments of technology and access to Microsoft AI experts to help bring them to scale, as well as working with external partners to incorporate AI innovations into platform level services.

We've started to see the impact AI can have accelerating accessible tech
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The aim is to enable disabled users to achieve more in three specific scenarios: Employment, Modern Life and Human Connection
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The Program will be run by Jenny Lay-Flurrie, Microsoft’s Chief Accessibility Officer, who has been credited with achieving a cultural change change within the company. Lay-Flurrie, who is deaf, was named a “Champion of Change” by the White House for her work and created a hiring program through which the company identifies and trains people with autism.

“We have started to see the impact AI can have in accelerating accessible technology. Microsoft Translator is today empowering people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing with real-time captioning of conversations. Helpicto, an application that turns voice commands into images, is enabling children in France with autism to better understand situations and communicate with others,” says Smith.

How that works in practice was poignantly showcased during Monday’s keynote, where Eric Bridges, CEO of the American Council of the Blind, talked about using the Seeing AI talking camera app on a daily basis to help his three-year-old son, Tyler to complete his schoolwork. Eric now uses the app to scan Tyler’s work so he can review it, but just two years ago, that same interaction would have required the assistance of a sighted person. Technology has, quite literally, removed that barrier so that a father can interact directly with his child, and that’s the fundamental call to action that the program is putting out for developers, NGO’s, academics, researchers and inventors – to accelerate their work for people with disabilities as they develop new technology products.

But while all this brings enormous possibilities for supporting vulnerable people and assisting disabled users in their everyday lives, Smith stresses that by innovating for people with disabilities, they are better innovating for us all – something that Engineer Katie Sullivan helped to demonstrate on stage at Build.

The Microsoft Build demo showcased how AI would help facilitate better collaboration and efficiencies in the workplace, using features such as facial recognition, live caption and translation technology
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The live demo involved showcasing how AI would help facilitate better collaboration and efficiencies in the workplace, using features such as facial recognition, live caption and translation technology. Sullivan joined the meeting with her sign language interpreter at a later stage, and remarked that the fact that the meeting was being captioned allowed her to participate more fully as she didn’t have to worry about constantly taking notes. Although that might prove more difficult for someone with a disability such as hers, it is certainly something that most people would find rather useful in such a scenario.

“By ensuring that technology fulfills its promise to address the broadest societal needs, we can empower everyone – not just individuals with disabilities – to achieve more,” Smith concludes.

Can AI make the world a more inclusive place? https://t.co/nUEd8z6bjg

— TNW Contributors (@TNWcontributors) May 10, 2018

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio and @techtrends_tech on Twitter.

The post AI for Accessibility appeared first on Tech Trends.

Live from Seattle, Tech Trends scoops up all the tastiest bites from the #MSBuild2018 developer’s conference.

“We need to ask ourselves not only what computers can do, but what they should do,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in his opening keynote at Build.

The era of the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge is upon us
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Addressing an audience of over five thousand developers in Seattle’s Washington Convention Center, Nadella struck a soberly optimistic note; on the one hand insisting on the message he delivered last year about the great transformative power of technology, but also highlighting the monumental challenges that come with its rapid development.

“These advancements create incredible developer opportunity and also come with a responsibility to ensure the technology we build is trusted and benefits all.”

With customers in control, privacy is preserved
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It was clear that the Facebook scandal was top of mind here, even if (unsurprisingly) it wasn’t directly referenced as Nadella advocated for the need to put customers in control and safeguard privacy, or said that “GDPR is good, solid regulation and we’re working hard to build the compliance infrastructure.” He stressed, however, that it was just the beginning, as the work was never going to be done: “we’re going to continuously work to preserve privacy, this is just the starting point.”

As cloud based applications scale and power AI experiences, we have come to a place where you need data at planet scale and performance
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Ethical AI

By 2020, the average person will generate 1.5GB of data a day, a smart home 50GB and a smart city, a whopping 250 petabytes of data per day. This data – as the Cambridge Analytica debacle proved all too painfully – gives developers a tremendous amount of power, and responsibility.

The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of our daily lives
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Microsoft sees the “intelligent cloud” as the backbone of this revolution. In the next 10 years, billions of everyday devices will become “smart” – being able to see, listen, reason, predict and more, without a 24/7 dependence on the cloud. This is what they call the “intelligent edge” – the interface between computers and the real world. Within that vision, Azure is being built as “the world’s computer,” a ubiquitous computing fabric that would allow Microsoft to meet the digital sovereignty and regulatory needs of their customers while delivering the benefits of innovation.

“Artificial intelligence has truly replaced Windows as Microsoft’s key platform for developers,” says Nick McQuire, VP of Enterprise Research at CCS Insight. “The majority of developer focus will shift from operating systems to artificial intelligence platforms as they increasingly look to intelligence services that span all devices including Internet of things. Its intelligent cloud and intelligent edge strategy is a much more compelling proposition for developers which will continue to define its corporate strategy for the next several years.”

McQuire points to the fact that this follows similar moves made by Amazon Web Services over the past 12 months, and sees it as a clear statement of intent at gaining developer mindshare against Google ahead of its own developer event, Google I/O which also happens this week.

It’s all about putting people – rather than devices – at the centre
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Kinect gets a Second Life

The Kinect was the first commercial device to integrated speech, gaze and vision, and since its launch a broad range of industrial applications – from security to manufacturing and healthcare – have been developed for it, and the technology has also been incorporated in devices such as the HoloLens.

Microsoft want to enable developers to reach customers in a multi-sense, multi-device way
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Sensor technology has come a long way since then, however, and Microsoft now wants to combine those capabilities with Azure AI services such as Machine Learning, Cognitive Services, and IoT Edge. Project Kinect for Azure will be a package of sensors – with extra wide field of view – capable of inputting fully articulated hand tracking and high-fidelity special mapping. It will include a next-generation depth camera, with onboard compute designed for AI on the Edge, what Microsoft calls “ambient intelligence,” meaning the device’s ability to scan and make sense of its surroundings by contextualizing cloud and spatially scanned datain real-time. Which is all incredibly exciting, but as a Mixed Reality fan, they frankly had me at “Extra wide Field of View”.

Microsoft had me at ‘extra wide FOV’
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Lorraine Bardeen, GM Studio Manager, also introduced two new Mixed Reality Products during the keynote: Microsoft Remote Assist – which allows customers to better collaborate remotely with heads-up, hands-free video calling, image sharing, and mixed-reality annotations – and Microsoft Layout, which lets you import 3-D models to create room layouts in real-world scale, experience designs as high-quality holograms in physical space or in virtual reality. With a potential market of 2 billion first-line workers, this is a huge opportunity, Bardeen told developers.

Alexa+Cortana = BFFs

Microsoft was keen to show how it’s been fostering collaborations across the board in an effort to make its platform play nicely with pretty much anyone. It announced that the open-sourcing the Azure IoT Edge to allow developers to develop more easily for it, and then went on to treat us to a very well-choreographed demo introduced by Nadella, who said they’d been working with “their friends across the lake” to bring Alexa and Cortana together.

The whole world is becoming a computer
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Tom Taylor – SVP of Amazon Alexa, then came on stage together with his Microsoft counterpart to show how Cortana and Alexa could be “intelligent friends,” helping their users with different sorts of tasks and collaborating seamlessly with each other as well as their humans. As always you have to wonder how consistently and smoothly these things would work day-to-day, but it did make the audience giggle and in a divided world, all this talk of friendship and collaboration gives you a warm fuzzy feeling…

We’re ready and comfortable for the #msbuild2018 keynote from @satyanadella pic.twitter.com/x7fVQi2Hoo

— TechTrends (@techtrends_tech) May 7, 2018

Main #Build2018 announcements

• Following last year’s announcement of AI for Earth – a program to apply artificial intelligence towards unlocking solutions to climate, water, agriculture, and biodiversity issues facing the planet – Microsoft is now expanding that model with a new $25 million 5-year program called AI for Accessibility, aimed at accelerating development of accessible and intelligent AI solutions to benefit over one billion people around the world who live with disabilities.
• The world’s biggest drone company, DJI announced a commercial partnership with Microsoft to co-develop solutions leveraging Azure IoT Edge and Microsoft’s AI services across new scenarios such as agriculture, construction and public safety. They will create a new SDK for Windows 10 PCs to bring full flight control and real-time data transfer capabilities to nearly 700M Windows 10 connected devices globally.
• A joint effort with Qualcomm to create a vision AI developer kit running Azure IoT Edge which makes available the key hardware and software required to develop camera-based IoT solutions. The camera can also power advanced Azure services, such as machine learning, stream analytics and cognitive services that can be downloaded from the cloud to run locally on the edge.
• Speech Devices SDK delivering audio processing from multichannel sources for more accurate speech recognition, including noise cancellation and far-field voice. With this, developers can build a variety of voice-enabled scenarios like drive-thru ordering systems, in-car or in-home assistants, smart speakers, and other digital assistants.
• A preview of Project Brainwave – an architecture for deep neural net processing – is now available on Azure and on the edge, and makes it the fastest cloud to run real-time AI.
• Azure Cognitive Services updates include a unified Speech service with improved speech recognition and text-to-speech, which support customized voice models and translation.
• New updates to Bot Framework and Cognitive Services will power the next generation of conversational bots enabling richer dialogs, and full personality and voice customization to match the company’s brand identity.
• Azure Search with Cognitive Services integration – combining AI with indexing technologies so it’s possible to quickly find information via text or images.
• Partnership with GitHub that brings the power of Azure DevOps services to GitHub customers, including integration with Visual Studio App Center.
• The Microsoft Azure Blockchain Workbench makes it easier to develop blockchain applications by stitching together an Azure-supported blockchain network with cloud services.
• Power BI Visualizations makes it possible for developers to extend the custom visuals created for Power BI to Excel.

• A new way to connect your phone to your PC with Windows 10 that enables instant access to text messages, photos and notifications – imagine being able to quickly drag and drop your phone’s photos into a document on your PC in one swift movement — without having to take your phone out of your pocket.
• Microsoft 365 currently has 135M commercial monthly active users and nearly 700M Windows 10 connected devices. The suite of new features announced at Build are aimed at better blending between web and application environments for end users and developers and enabling developers to create experiences

Technology can be a force multiplier is unlocking solutions for some of the biggest challenges facing society
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Remember you can find out more about Build and watch the live keynotes here and play the Microsoft Build announcements bingo with the card below!

The world is a computer, filled with an incredible amount of data
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For companies looking to get into Immersive technologies such as VR/AR/MR/XR our Virtual Reality Consultancy services offer guidance and support on how best to incorporate these into your brand strategy.

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio on Twitter.

The post Power and Responsibility: Highlights from Microsoft Build appeared first on Tech Trends.

Thousands of developers gather in Seattle as Microsoft Build unveils new products and an ambitious vision for the future of technology.

We're seeing a paradigm change in user experience
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The opening keynotes of this morning’s conference – from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Executive Vice Presidents Scott Guthrie and Harry Shum – outlined the company’s vision for becoming the world’s largest productivity platform. With over 500 million Windows 10 monthly active devices, and 90% of Fortune 500 companies already using the Microsoft Cloud, their combined platforms offer developers like those in the audience “over a billion opportunities to reach and connect with Microsoft customers. You can, for example, achieve single sign-on across 12 million organizations, dramatically reducing friction, yet this fantastic opportunity comes with tremendous responsibility,” said Nadella. “The future of technology will be determined by the choices we make as developers.”

The future of technology will be determined by developers' choices
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He then showed the audience a poignant video which told the story of how Haiyan Zhang, Innovation Director at Microsoft Research Cambridge, invented and programmed a wearable that helped designer Emma Lawton manage the hand tremors caused by her advancing Parkinson’s disease. It ends with the moment when Lawton – wearing the Emma, the watch-like device that was named after her – managers to write her name and draw straight lines again for the first time in many months. As they cry openly, it was difficult not to join in, and as both women joined Nadella onstage they received the morning’s biggest round of applause.

Although the rest of the demos and testimonials weren’t quite as emotional as that, the common theme that ran through all of them was one of highlighting how all these high-level technologies actually translate into real-world problem solving for businesses, individuals, and society as a whole. The tone it set for the conference was one of grounded and confident optimism for the future that developers can build with them, and, that takes shape in the idea of the Microsoft Graph.

We're moving towards an intelligent cloud with an intelligent edge
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What underpins this expansion of the Microsoft Graph is the idea that we’re moving from a mobile-first and cloud-first world towards an integrated intelligent cloud with an intelligent edge. This intelligent cloud will ultimately enable us to search the real world in the same way as we do the digital one, by building in contextual awareness that combines insights from devices and the world of work.

“This is a fundamental change in the paradigm of the apps that we are building,” says Nadella. And because this new type of user experience that is emerging will span all our devices, it will need new platform capabilities such as Azure IoT Edge, which seamlessly extends cloud computing to a range of edge devices.

Artificial Intelligence is also a big piece of that vision, and Microsoft’s ambition is to use AI to augment the capabilities of every developer, organization, platform and person to achieve more, “amplifying human ingenuity with intelligent technology.”

It is ultimately up to us whether the future we build with technology becomes an utopia or a dystopia
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Ultimately, as Nadella concludes, it is up to us whether the future we build with technology is utopian or dystopian. He told the audience he was an unapologetic technology optimist, yet also keenly aware of the unintended consequences that often come from adopting new technologies. In other words, we need to guard against an Orwellian 1984 scenario while embracing the fact that we’re very much living in a Brave New World.

The user experience of the future will span all your devices. From mobile first to the intelligent cloud @satyanadella #MSBuild2017 pic.twitter.com/WxXD0CHvWL

— Alice Bonasio (@alicebonasio) May 10, 2017

Here are some of the main announcements and news from Microsoft Build 2017

• Azure Cosmos DB – Touted as the industry’s first globally distributed multi-model database services built from the ground up to power planet-scale cloud services and data-intensive applications — from IoT to AI to mobile — it promises greater fault tolerance and support for all data types, delivering millisecond latency at the 99^th percentile
• Visual Studio 2017 for Mac enables developers to work seamlessly across Windows and Mac environments with full support for mobile, web and cloud workloads, and previews of Docker tools, Azure Functions and Xamarin.IoT support.
• Customizable cognitive services such as Bing Custom Search, Custom Vision Service, Custom Decision Service and Video Indexes now join a roster of 29 services available to developers, each with unique customization options that enable customization of intelligence capabilities such as vision, speech, language, knowledge and search into apps and bot experiences.
• Cognitive Services Labs were also launched, enabling developers to experiment with new services, such as a Gesture API, which, although still in early stages, offers some exciting possibilities for developing Mixed Reality applications for devices such as the HoloLens, which are already operated partially through gestures
• Cortana Partnerships were signed with HP on devices and Intel on reference platforms to deliver Cortana-enabled devices. Additionally, the Cortana skills kit is now in public preview (Currently S. only), where developers can build skills for Cortana by creating a bot and publishing it to the new Cortana channel of the Bot Framework across Windows 10, Android, iOS and the new Cortana-powered Harman Kardon Invoke speaker.
• MySQL and PostgreSQL-managed services that join Azure SQL Database to give developers expanded choice and flexibility on a service platform to deliver more availability and scalability, with minimal downtime, plus data retention and recovery.
• Database migration services, which will allow Oracle and SQL Server customers to more easily move their data and quickly modernize their apps..
• Windows Server Containers support in Azure Service Fabric, with Visual Studio tooling, and a preview of the ability to use Docker Compose support for Service Fabric to deploy containerized apps to Service Fabric — enabling developers to deliver mission-critical, scalable apps and services.
• DocuSign supports a rapidly growing customer base of 300,000 companies and more than 200 million users across 188 countries. The company today announced Microsoft Azure is its preferred cloud for global expansion, starting in Canada. DocuSign uses Azure SQL Database to process much larger volumes of digital transactions.
• Microsoft Graph APIs available to developers, including APIs from SharePoint and Planner. The Microsoft Graph gives developers access to Office 365 data and intelligence and helps connect between people, conversations, projects, schedules, processes and content. These insights help developers build smarter apps and enable smarter ways to work.
• Presentation Translator, which leverages Microsoft’s Translation APIs, was featured, allowing real-time translation to multiple languages during any presentation.
• Adaptive cards supported by the Microsoft Bot Framework, developers can write cards once that work across multiple apps and platforms. Using the Bot Framework, developers can also now publish to new channels including Bing, Cortana and Skype for Business, and implement Microsoft’s payment request API for checkout in their bots.
• Azure Batch AI Training is a new Azure offering currently only available in private preview, that will allow developers and data scientists to configure an environment with parameters and run their models against multiple CPUs and GPUs, and eventually field-programmable gate arrays.
• Tact – the sales experience platform that turns any connected device into a AI-powered virtual sales assistant was demoed in anticipation of its release later this year, showing how multiple Microsoft products such as Dynamics 365, Office 365, Microsoft Teams, Cortana Skills, Microsoft Graph and Sentiment Analysis, will be integrated into it.

For companies looking to gain a competitive edge through technology, Tech Trends offers strategic Virtual Reality and Digital Transformation Consultancy services tailored to your brand.

Alice Bonasio is a VR and Digital Transformation Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio on Twitter.

The post #MSBuild2017 News and Announcements appeared first on Tech Trends.