Microsoft is privileged to work with leading-edge customers and partners who are taking the power of the cloud and artificial intelligence and applying it to their businesses in novel ways. Our new series, How AI Transforms Business, features insights from selective such customers and partners. Join us in these conversations and see how your company and customers may be able to benefit from these solutions and insights. All Episodes 1. How Can Autonomous Drones Help the Energy and Utilities Industry? Headquartered in Norway, eSmart Systems develops digital intelligence for the en ..read more

Welcome to How AI Transforms Business, a new series featuring insights from conversations with Microsoft partners who are combining deep industry knowledge with AI in novel ways and, in doing so, creating leading-edge intelligent business solutions for our digital age. Our first episode features eSmart Systems, which is in the business of creating solutions to accelerate global progress towards sustainable societies. Headquartered in the heart of Østfold county, Norway, eSmart Systems develops digital intelligence for the energy industry and for smart communities. The company is strategically ..read more

This post is authored by Anusua Trivedi, Senior Data Scientist at Microsoft. This post builds on the MRC Blog where we discussed how machine reading comprehension (MRC) can help us “transfer learn” any text. In this post, we introduce the notion of and the need for machine reading at scale, and for transfer learning on large text corpuses. Introduction Machine reading for question answering has become an important testbed for evaluating how well computer systems understand human language. It is also proving to be a crucial technology for applications such as search engines and dialog systems ..read more

A special guest post by cricket legend and founder of Spektacom Technologies, Anil Kumble. This post was co-authored by Tara Shankar Jana, Senior Technical Product Marketing Manager at Microsoft. While cricket is an old sport with a dedicated following of fans across the globe, the game has been revolutionized in the 21st century with the advent of the Twenty20 format. This shorter format has proven to be very popular, resulting in a massive growth of interest in the game and a big fan following worldwide. This has, in turn, led to increased competitiveness and the desire on the part of both p ..read more

Announcing new open source contributions to the Apache Spark community for creating deep, distributed, object detectors – without a single human-generated label This post is authored by members of the Microsoft ML for Apache Spark Team – Mark Hamilton, Minsoo Thigpen, Abhiram Eswaran, Ari Green, Courtney Cochrane, Janhavi Suresh Mahajan, Karthik Rajendran, Sudarshan Raghunathan, and Anand Raman. In today's day and age, if data is the new oil, labelled data is the new gold. Here at Microsoft, we often spend a lot of our time thinking about "Big Data" issues, because these are the easiest to sol ..read more

This post is authored by Tara Shankar Jana, Senior Technical Product Marketing Manager at Microsoft. What if we could infuse AI into the everyday tools we use, to delight everyday users? With just a little bit of creativity – and the power of the Microsoft AI platform behind us – it's now become easier than ever to create AI-enabled apps that can wow users. Introducing Snip Insights! An open source cross-platform AI tool for intelligent screen capture, Snip Insights is a step change in terms of how users can generate insights from their screen captures. The initial prototype of Snip Insights ..read more

By Joseph Sirosh, Corporate Vice President and CTO of AI, and Sumit Gulwani, Partner Research Manager, at Microsoft. There are an estimated 250 million "knowledge workers" in the world, a term that encompasses anybody engaged in professional, technical or managerial occupations. These are individuals who, for most part, perform non-routine work that requires the handling of information and exercising the intellect and judgement. We, the authors of this blog post, count ourselves among them. So are a majority of you reading this post, regardless of whether you're a developer, data scientist, bu ..read more

Based on a recent conversation between Joseph Sirosh, CTO for AI at Microsoft, and Roger Magoulas, VP of Radar at O'Reilly Media. Link to video recording below. Joseph and Roger had an interesting conversation at the recently concluded O'Reilly AI Conference in San Francisco where Joseph delivered a keynote talk on Connected Arms. Their discussion initially focused on a new low-cost 3D-printed prosthetic arm that can "see" and which connects to cloud AI services to generate customized behaviors, such as different types of grips needed to grasp nearby objects. But the conversation soon pivoted ..read more

This post is co-authored by Chun Ming Chin, Technical Program Manager, and Max Kaznady, Senior Data Scientist, of Microsoft, with Luyi Huang, Nicholas Kao and James Tayali, students at University of California at Berkeley. This blog post is about the UC Berkeley Virtual Tutor project and the speech recognition technologies that were tested as part of that effort. We share best practices for machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques in selecting models and engineering training data for speech and image recognition. These speech recognition models, which are integrated with immersi ..read more

Earlier this week, MIT, in collaboration with Boston Consulting Group, released their second global study looking at AI adoption in industry. A top finding of this report is that the leading companies in AI adoption are now convinced of the value of AI and are now facing the challenge of moving beyond individual point solutions toward broad, systematic use of AI across the company and at-scale. In the report, Joseph Sirosh, CTO of AI at Microsoft, discusses how Microsoft is building a complete AI platform that empowers enterprises to implement these AI-first business models and do so at scale ..read more