Everyday AI: Microsoft showcases progress in infusing AI into core products


Microsoft AI News



Everyday AI: Microsoft showcases progress in infusing AI into core products

Artificial intelligence is playing a role in everything from helping blind people recognize currency to making search engines more intelligent and intuitive. At an event in San Francisco on Wednesday, Microsoft showcased a number of advances across its product line that use AI to help people get more nuanced information and assist with more complex needs.
These advances include:
  • AI in Office 365: Microsoft announced new Office 365 AI capabilities to help subscribers discover insights from data, leverage organizational knowledge, arrive on time and more.
  • Conversational bots: Microsoft announced the general availability of Microsoft Azure Bot Service and the Language Understanding service, part of Microsoft Cognitive Services, and showcased customers including UPS, Molson Coors and Equadex who are using these services.
  • Cortana Skills Kit: Microsoft announced a number of new productivity features for Cortana, including updates to the Skills Kit. That enables developers to build more accessible, discoverable and engaging skills with skills suggestions and skills chaining.
  • Intelligent search in Bing: Microsoft’s Bing search engine announced new AI-powered search features that provide faster answers and more comprehensive information, and allow users to interact more naturally with the search engine.
  • Intelligent ad solutions: Bing Ads showcased how AI is being used to deliver intelligent and personalized audience targeting, campaign optimization tools and more customized ad experiences.
  • Reddit partnership: Microsoft and Reddit announced a partnership to deliver more intelligent search results by surfacing relevant Reddit conversations and AMAs in some answers. Microsoft also is bringing Reddit data to Power BI via Socialgist.
  • Seeing AI: Microsoft announced updates to Seeing AI, an app aimed at helping people who are blind or have low vision. New features include color and currency recognition, plus a musical light detector that uses sound to let people know if a light is on or off. Seeing AI is now available in 35 countries.
  • Putting numbers in perspective: If a U.S. user asks Bing how big Syria is, they learn the country is 71,498 square miles and about equal to the size of Florida. That’s part of a project that aims to help people make sense of the jumble of numbers they increasingly encounter in the digital world.
  • AI for Earth commitment: Microsoft announced this week that it is broadening its AI for Earth program and committing $50 million over the next five years to put artificial intelligence technology in the hands of individuals and organizations around the world who are working to protect the planet.
  • AI-powered health bot: Microsoft’s Healthcare NExT initiative announced a private preview of an AI-powered project designed to enable healthcare partners to easily create intelligent and compliant healthcare virtual assistants and chatbots.
  • AI in Photos: Just in time for the holidays, new intelligent features in the Photos app for Windows 10 make it easier to search and create videos from the thousands of photos people take each year.

‘Aha, now I get it!’ Microsoft is building technology to put numbers in perspective

When people in the United States ask Microsoft’s search engine Bing how big Syria is, they learn the country is 71,498 square miles and about equal to the size of Florida. When they ask Bing how many calories are in a serving of ice cream, they learn that a scoop contains 137 calories, which is equal to about 11 minutes of running.
These two-part answers supplied by Bing are early, real-world examples of a technology being developed inside Microsoft’s research labs to help us make sense of the jumble of numbers we increasingly encounter in the digital world.

The future is quantum: Microsoft releases free preview of Quantum Development Kit

So you want to learn how to program a quantum computer. Now, there’s a toolkit for that.
Microsoft is releasing a free preview version of its Quantum Development Kit, which includes the Q# programming language, a quantum computing simulator and other resources for people who want to start writing applications for a quantum computer. The Q# programming language was built from the ground up specifically for quantum computing.

Debugging data: Microsoft researchers look at ways to train AI systems to reflect the real world

Artificial intelligence is already helping people do things like type faster texts and take better pictures, and it’s increasingly being used to make even bigger decisions, such as who gets a new job and who goes to jail. That’s prompting researchers across Microsoft and throughout the machine learning community to ensure that the data used to develop AI systems reflect the real world, are safeguarded against unintended bias and handled in ways that are transparent and respectful of privacy and security.

‘Contextual bandit’ breakthrough enables deeper personalization

News portals that simultaneously personalize every part of the landing page for every visitor and mobile health apps that adaptively tweak every part of an exercise regimen to maximize the benefit of every user are becoming plausible due to an advance in a type of interactive machine learning that my team will describe at the Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems running December 4-9 in Long Beach, California.

AI and Our Future With Machines with Dr. Eric Horvitz

When it comes to artificial intelligence, Dr. Eric Horvitz is as passionate as he is accomplished. His contributions to the field, and service on the boards of nearly every technical academy and association in the country, have earned him the respect – and awe – of his colleagues, along with the position of Technical Fellow and Managing Director of Microsoft Research. Dr. Horvitz talks about the goal of artificial intelligence, his vision for our collaborative future with machines, what we can learn from the Wright brothers, and how a short stint of “six months, maximum” became an illustrious and, in his words, joyful, 25-year career at Microsoft Research.

Will machines one day be as creative as humans?

Recent methods in artificial intelligence enable AI software to produce rich and creative digital artifacts such as text and images painted from scratch. One technique used in creating these artifacts are generative adversarial networks (GANs). Today at NIPS 2017, researchers from Microsoft Research and ETH Zurich present their work on making GAN models more robust and practically useful.

Microsoft looks to healthcare partners for ways to bring AI benefits to cancer patients

A team of artificial intelligence experts at Microsoft’s Cambridge, U.K., research lab has spent more than a decade looking at ways that AI could be used to make cancer treatment more targeted and effective.
Now, the research team behind one of those projects, called InnerEye, is asking third-party medical software providers to help them better understand how this kind of research could be integrated into tools that medical experts use to plan cancer treatments today, as part of Microsoft’s Healthcare NExT initiative.

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