by admin | May 25, 2021 | Employment, Markets, Private Jobs, Technology
By Nishant Arora,
Redmond (Washington State) : Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the big buzzword in the world of technology as it promises to change the way we live and interact with devices.
For Microsoft, there is nothing “artificial” about delivering on “intelligence” as the supreme aim is to empower nearly one billion people with disabilities.
The excitement about AI is so evident on the Microsoft campus here that various teams associated with the task have focused their energies towards achieving the impossible — to give differently-abled a normal, dignified life.
The change has been visible in the last couple of years under CEO Satya Nadella who has brought AI to the fore across domains — devices, Cloud, Office 365, Windows and so on.
For him, “Artificial Intelligence represents one of technology’s most important priorities, and heath care is perhaps AI’s most urgent application.”
“AI for Accessibility” is a new, $25 million, five-year programme from Microsoft for developers globally, including in India.
The programme will put AI tools in the hands of developers to accelerate the development of accessible and intelligent AI solutions for people with disabilities.
Jenny Lay-Flurrie, Microsoft’s first-ever Chief Accessibility Officer whose deafness set in at a young age, has a mammoth goal ahead — to utilise AI tools for accessibility and inclusion.
“Accessibility is all about making anything and everything accessible to everyone. We have several programmes for the disabled, like ‘Seeing AI’ and auto alt-text features that are helping narrate the world for people who are blind or have low vision,” Jenny told a group of visiting journalists.
The company has developed apps that describe what people see and feel, help them do text-to-speech and speech-to-text translation and, with predictive text, ensure that people don’t need to type as much.
“We now have eye control, learning tools, ‘Editor’ software, video and audio transcription, and ease of Access settings on Windows 10,” she added.
The “AI for Accessibility” programme provides seed grants of technology to developers, universities, non-governmental organisations and inventors.
At the Accessibility and Inclusion Xbox Lab here, Evelyn Thomas, Senior Programme Manager, is making sure that gamers with limited mobility can enjoy the experience with Xbox Adaptive Controller that has been created to remove barriers by being adaptable to more gamers’ needs.
“Persons with disabilities can now enjoy the immersive experience. You can see here the Xbox family of controllers and devices that are helping such people create a set-up that works for them in a way that is plug-and-play, extensible, and affordable,” Thomas explained.
Microsoft has worked with third-party manufacturers to support external inputs which can be plugged in to the new controller. These inputs include PDP’s One-Handed Joystick for the Xbox Adaptive Controller, Logitech’s Extreme 3D Pro Joystick, and Quadstick’s Game Controller.
Designed for the low-vision community, Microsoft’s app called “Seeing AI” harnesses the power of AI to describe people, text and objects. It can tell visually-impaired persons what is around them. If the phone is pointed at a park, the camera app can describe how the scene looks like.
Similarly, it can tell the amount of your restaurant bill or narrate just about anything it is pointed at.
“AI can help people develop professional skills and influence workplace culture and inclusive hiring,” Jenny said, adding that AI is capable of hearing, seeing, and reasoning with increasing accuracy.
By making software and devices smarter, and keeping them affordable, people gain independence to perform daily tasks and personalise tools for their unique needs.
“AI-driven technology can create possibilities for all people, regardless of how they listen, speak, or write,” Jenny said.
The truth is that only one in 10 people with disabilities globally has access to assistive technologies and products. And, according to Nadella, it is important for us to figure out how to empower more people.
“It has been a personal passion of mine to help people suffering with disabilities like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and autism,” Nadella said recently.
Nadella’s personal passion (his son has cerebral palsy) has now turned into a massive mission at Microsoft, with several teams working towards harnessing the power of AI to empower people with disabilities.
(Nishant Arora was in Redmond on the invitation from Microsoft. He can be contacted at nishant.a@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Corporate, Corporate Buzz, Markets, Social Media, Technology, World
San Francisco : Following Google’s exit from a controversial US military Cloud project, an open letter claiming to be from an unspecified number of Microsoft employees has urged the tech giant to also back out of the military project.
Potentially worth up to $10 billion, “Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI)” is a Cloud computing contract aimed to bring the entire military under the envelope of a single Cloud provider.
“The contract is massive in scope and shrouded in secrecy, which makes it nearly impossible to know what we as workers would be building,” an open letter titled “Microsoft, don’t bid on JEDI” said on the Medium portal written by “Employees of Microsoft”.
“Many Microsoft employees don’t believe that what we build should be used for waging war.
“When we decided to work at Microsoft, we were doing so in the hopes of ’empowering every person on the planet to achieve more,’ not with the intent of ending lives and enhancing lethality,” the open letter further read.
For those who say that another company will simply pick up JEDI where Microsoft leaves it, we would ask workers at that company to do the same, said the letter.
“A race to the bottom is not an ethical position. Like those who took action at Google, Salesforce, and Amazon, we ask all employees of tech companies to ask how your work will be used, where it will be applied, and act according to your principles,” the Microsoft employees said.
Succumbing to pressure from employees, Google last week dropped its bid to be part of the JEDI contract.
The employees backlashed and raised ethical questions on facilitating incorporation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on weapons, illegal surveillance and technologies that could cause “overall harm”.
“We need clear ethical guidelines and meaningful accountability governing how we determine which uses of our technology are acceptable, and which are off the table. Microsoft has already acknowledged the dangers of the tech it builds, there is no law preventing the company from exercising its own internal scrutiny and standing by its own ethical compass,” the letter by Microsoft employees detailed.
On October 9, Microsoft wrote a blog post, saying the company is going through a technology transformation that is unlocking new mission scenarios for government agencies that were simply not possible before.
“We are going through a technology transformation that is unlocking new mission scenarios for government agencies with the ability to plan farther, gather information more efficiently and deliver insight where it is needed most,” the post noted.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Branding, Business, Markets, Medium Enterprise, Technology
Madrid : Microsoft has announced an experimental release of “Robot Operating System (ROS1)” for Windows as a next step in bringing features like Machine Learning (ML), computer vision, Internet of Things (IoT), Cloud services and other Microsoft technologies to home, education, commercial and industrial robots.
The announcement comes as part of the “ROSCon 2018” that is being in Madrid, Spain where Microsoft is demonstrating a “ROBOTIS Turtlebot 3” robot that recognises and steers towards the person closest to it and runs on the “Windows 10 IoT Enterprise” solution.
“This development will bring the manageability and security of ‘Windows 10 Internet of Things (IoT) Enterprise’ solutions to the ‘ROS’ ecosystem,” Lou Amadio, Principal Software Engineer, Windows IoT, Microsoft wrote in a blog-post late on Friday.
“ROS” is a set of libraries and tools that are used to build complex robots and “Windows 10 IoT Enterprise” delivers enterprise manageability and security solutions to industry based IoT devices used in retail, manufacturing, healthcare and other industries.
The tech giant has joined the ROS Industrial Consortium –an open source project that extends the advanced capabilities of the ROS software to manufacturing — to extend and improve the productivity and return on investment of industrial robots.
“Windows has been a trusted partner of robotic and industrial systems for decades and we’re looking forward to bringing the intelligent edge to robotics by bringing more advanced features,” Amadio added.
With the advancements of robots, Microsoft plans to experiment into advanced development tools.
“Microsoft will host the Windows builds for ‘ROS1’ and shortly ‘ROS2’, as well as provide documentation, development and deployment solutions for Windows,” wrote Amadio.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | World
New York : Unicef has launched a partnership with Microsoft to tackle the education crisis impacting children and young people affected by conflict and natural disasters, providing them with protection services.
The two along with the University of Cambridge, are developing a ‘learning passport’ — a digital platform that will facilitate learning opportunities for children and young people within and across borders, Unicef said in a statement late on Wednesday.
The learning passport would be tested and piloted in countries hosting refugees, migrants and internally displaced persons.
“Conflicts and natural disasters have disrupted learning opportunities and the quality of education for 75 million children and young people, many of whom have migrated across borders or been forcibly displaced,” said Henrietta Fore, Unicef Executive Director.
At present, many education systems in countries hosting refugees are struggling to acknowledge and recognise what refugees, migrant children and young people have already learned in school.
“This partnership is focused on creating scalable learning solutions to help millions of displaced and refugee children gain the skills they need to thrive,” noted Brad Smith, Microsoft President.
Microsoft and Unicef would also develop new innovations to protect children and young people affected by emergencies.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Networking, News, Online Marketing, Technology
By Gokul Bhagabati,
New Delhi : The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), which came under heavy criticism this year following the leak of class 10 mathematics paper and class 12 economics paper, has forged a partnership with tech giant Microsoft to prevent such leaks in the future.
The paper leaks triggered nation-wide outrage among students and parents. This set the CBSE, which has 20,299 schools in the country, in action, paving the way for the partnership with Microsoft which developed an encrypted security solution for digital question papers for the board within a period of three months.
“We have developed for CBSE an innovative solution which makes question papers leak-proof until 30 minutes prior to the start of the examinations,” Anil Bhansali, Managing Director, Microsoft India (R&D) and Corporate Vice President, Cloud and Enterprise, told IANS in a telephonic interaction.
“But if the question papers get leaked after they are allowed to download (just half an hour before the start of the exam) due to some bad actors, the system allows easy traceability as question paper for each centre are watermarked,” Bhansali said.
At present, the solution is having its pilot run, but it has passed the first test with flying colours, Microsoft claimed.
As part of their collaboration, CBSE and Microsoft successfully executed in July the first ever pilot of the digital question paper generation and delivery process at 487 centres for compartment examinations for class 10.
How does the system work?
The system allows the Controller of examination to track the entire process using a software solution built on Windows 10 and Office 365.
The overall process is encrypted and a two-factor authentication process is embedded. So examiners will have to identify themselves before they can download the examination papers. They are allowed to download the papers (after authetification) only 30 minutes prior to start of the exams.
“The system allows various authentification process. For example, it can be OTP (one-time password) based or biometric based. It is up to the clients what two authentification process they want to choose,” Bhansali added.
“The authentification can even be Aadhaar-based,” said the Microsoft executive.
The solution leverages features in Office 365 to encrypt and watermark the papers. The watermark has the individual center’s code imprinted on it which allows for localisation and traceability in the eventuality of a paper leak.
A CBSE administrator initiates the distribution of the examination papers, which results in the generation of emails to the respective centres with a link to OneDrive, a file-hosting service operated by Microsoft, where an exam paper, specific to the exam centre can be downloaded.
Apart from securing the system, this digitisation process is expected to save significant amount of time and cost for examination administrators due to online paper generation, automated delivery process and reduction in approval cycles.
“The system that we have developed for CBSE can be easily replicated for other boards or examination administrators. We will be happy to share it with other central or state authorities that conduct examinations for various purposes,” Bhansali told IANS.
(Gokul Bhagabati can be contacted at gokul.b@ians.in)
—IANS
