Tag: Artificial Intelligence

“I can immediately address weaknesses I didn’t even know that I had. I’m feeling more confident about performing my best.”

RaceFit’s solution has also been extended to other sports like high-intensity interval training (HIIT) training, cycling and tennis. Soon, RaceFit plans to expand the usability of its app to team sports, like football.

Beyond fencing

The technology is not just for coaches and high-end competitors. Anyone can use RaceFit in their regular lives. It comes with an exercise app with customizable routines. The app lets you know immediately if any of your movements need improvement, like if your hip position is too high while planking. It can keep track of your progress over time and prescribe new exercises to help you reach your fitness goals.

Additional sports, like cycling and running, are supported by downloadable modules.And more sports and exercises are being added to the list.

RaceFit co-founder and CEO Graham Mak says, “We are not limited to those exercises. We are only limited to human motion. If a customer says, ‘I’m in a canoe club and I want a canoe program,’ then we can do something like that.”

Mak also has plans to aid physical therapists. Wearing a simpler version of the sensor contained in a single band, patients can perform exercises as instructed by the therapists. The device will help the physical therapist determine if they do it correctly. “This will save a lot of time and it can be done with multiple patients at the same time.”

Dennis Poon, the company’s Chief Experience Officer, says physiotherapists who use the RaceFit system “can definitely take care of more patients and, more importantly, they will be able to monitor their recovery.”

A similar use is applicable to older people, especially those who live alone. According to the Hong Kong government, around 20% of adults over 65 have a fall at least once a year. Most of those report some kind of injury and nearly 10% break a bone. Since the RaceFit sensors give a complete picture of human movement, the system would know, for example, if a person has fallen down and needs assistance.

“What is the active and inactive times in a day? And, what about the time walking or sitting or lying on the bed? What does it represent? And, how can it affect health outcomes?” Mak says.

A long way from the garment industry

RaceFit’s journey to understanding human movement began with a much more pedestrian goal. According to Mak, his team just wanted to make a smart garment to revitalize the traditional apparel industry.

After three years of R&D, they decided to change direction and were inspired by the kind of motion-capture suits you see used in a Hollywood special effects production.

That led Mak to ask:  “What if we understand motion and make recommendations afterwards?” They realized that by using Microsoft Azure cloud, they could build their own AI solution to focus on fitness ability management. “For example, when you do a push-up, did you do it correctly or incorrectly?”

By being nimble, changing direction, and embracing new technologies, Mak and his team have created new business models that have transformed the company.

Poon sums it up this way, “We started our company focusing on Sports and Fitness, but we’ve gone way beyond that already.”

Developing a master plan to transform John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. Replacing a double-deck road with a massive tunnel in Seattle. Keeping beachgoers safe from polluted waters in New Zealand with advanced analytics.

Those are just a few of the thousands of complex projects delivered each year by Mott MacDonald, a global engineering, management and development consulting firm headquartered in London. With 180 principal offices in 50 countries, the company helps solve some of the world’s most urgent social, environmental and economic challenges.

Because Mott MacDonald doesn’t create physical products, its success relies on the knowledge and expertise of its 16,000 employees. To help them share and learn more easily, the company uses Project Cortex, a new service in Microsoft 365 that is part of Microsoft’s vision to transform knowledge and help people learn and grow their skills and expertise.

Announced this week at Microsoft Ignite, Project Cortex uses artificial intelligence to create a knowledge network that automatically connects and organizes organizations’ content into topics and generates topic cards, wiki-like “topic pages” and other new experiences in Microsoft 365.

The experiences will appear seamlessly in familiar tools like Office, Outlook and Microsoft Teams to help people find information, learn quickly and get up to speed faster within the apps they use every day. When employees see an unfamiliar acronym or project in email or chat, for example, they’ll be able to hover on the word and pop out a topic card with a description and related experts, documents and videos. A click on the card will call up a topic page, curated by AI and experts, with richer information like diagrams that link related and adjacent topics.

These capabilities “are going to further enhance our ability to reach our business goals with quicker access and connection to colleagues and their expertise — what we call our connected thinking,” says Simon Denton, Mott MacDonald productivity applications architect. “They’re going to help us build an even stronger knowledge network so people can have the right knowledge at the right time to deliver more excellent project outcomes for our clients. It’s going to be brilliant.”

The company already organizes its many experts and vast business knowledge into 47 communities that cover aviation, bridges and other practice areas. It began building its initial knowledge management system a few years ago to classify content in SharePoint and add people to Yammer groups based on interest.

Project Cortex, currently in private preview, will give Mott MacDonald even more advanced capabilities. Already secure and compliant, the product will allow automated policies based on precise document tags for added security. Its knowledge experiences, which build on an organization’s existing SharePoint content services, will permeate everyday work tools in Microsoft 365 and could one day include learning content from such platforms as LinkedIn Learning.

The solution will have powerful capture technology to make ingested content smarter. Powered by AI, it can extract information from structured content like forms, receipts and invoices. With machine teaching – having experts teach the AI how to respond – Project Cortex can also pull information from unstructured content like legal contracts and employee agreements.

It then adds metadata and classifies the documents into topics, automatically doing tasks that are traditionally manual and slow.

“We’re really excited about that,” says Denton. “We’re already talking about processing 30 years’ worth of drawings with good information on how something was built and how it needs to be maintained for the future. It’s going to unlock a lot of latent knowledge.”

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The knowledge vision

Scheduled for general availability in the first half of 2020, Project Cortex is the first new product to emerge from Microsoft’s knowledge vision, which includes new capabilities in other Microsoft 365 services such as Yammer, for communities of practice; Microsoft Stream, for intelligent video creation and sharing; and Workplace Analytics, for organizational insights.

As a longtime concept for organizing and re-using information, knowledge management has never fully solved the challenges it seeks to address due to disconnected information silos, technical limits and clunky end-user experiences, says Seth Patton, general manager of Microsoft 365 marketing.

But demand for knowledge has become particularly timely due to sweeping changes in the workplace. Automation, gig economies, flex work, skills shortages and retiring baby boomers have heightened the need for organizations to retain knowledge, share it with employees and help them learn new skills and expertise faster, Patton says.

“Business leaders and CEOs are recognizing the importance of their people’s skills and talent in their organizations’ ability to succeed,” he says. “It’s a recognition that upskilling and learning are the new workplace competitive advantage.”

Microsoft’s advances in AI and machine learning, SharePoint’s massive cloud content repository, the intelligence of the Microsoft Graph and integration with Office 365 apps have helped overcome previous challenges in knowledge management to help customers solve unmet needs.

 “All of us have had the experience of joining a new project, team or company,” Patton says. “It takes a long time to understand the language before you can contribute and participate. With Project Cortex you can get up to speed quickly and start contributing right away.”

Microsoft Search will also integrate Project Cortex, so people will be able to find topic cards and knowledge pages when they search. Microsoft Search is an important component in the company’s knowledge vision, bringing a unified, intelligent search experience across Microsoft 365 and Bing. It also extends to externally connected content, such as file shares. As content is crawled, it’s added to the knowledge network.

As video becomes an increasingly powerful way to capture and share knowledge, Microsoft Stream applies AI to provide automatic transcription for things like recorded meetings. AI-powered voice enhancement helps reduce background noise so people can better focus on what was discussed, and they can also now create short videos from mobile devices to share in Teams and Yammer.

More than a decade after it was created, Yammer has been completely redesigned with dozens of new capabilities, as well as new integrations with Teams, SharePoint and Outlook. These new features allow people to connect and share knowledge across teams and geographic locations.

Mott MacDonald connects people in Yammer communities that span 47 practice areas so they can share knowledge, ask questions and get answers.

As another way Microsoft 365 helps people share knowledge, Workplace Analytics provides business leaders insights into how people collaborate and spend their time with new self-service dashboards. These insights provide the context of industry benchmarks, as well as AI-driven analyses of business processes and networks of people.

This information can help identify high-performance trends such as close relationships between effective salespeople and engineers, or correlations between good onboarding experiences and more managerial one-on-ones. Leaders can then encourage and replicate similar patterns elsewhere.

The solutions are designed to be easy-to-use, customizable solutions. For the new Project Cortex, AI does the behind-the-scenes “heavy lifting” of mining and collecting useful, internal information, says Naomi Moneypenny, Microsoft director of content services and insights. Then experts can edit, update and add content to make sure knowledge pages are current and relevant.

“Our goal is to put intelligent content and knowledge services into the flow of the work you do every day to help you find the information you need, discover what you want and make your business processes more efficient,” says Moneypenny, who leads the Project Cortex product team. “All while enhancing and enforcing your security and compliance policies.”

At Mott MacDonald, Project Cortex will help build stronger connections across the company’s large, global communities and deliver timely information that helps employees create solutions to many complex challenges, build expertise and save time, all while enhancing service to customers, Denton says.

“I’m really excited by Microsoft’s vision for creating Project Cortex,” he says. “It fits completely with our strategy for knowledge networks. The idea of connecting people to content and content to people and building this network out, powered by Microsoft 365 — it’s going to be a game-changer for us.”

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Lead image: From left to right, civil engineer James Balla, project principal Jonathan Hine and civil engineer Cleopatra Meade work together at Mott MacDonald offices in London. (Photos by Mark Mercer)

Turning digital data into physical artifacts

With a nearly 100-year history in film and television, Warner Bros. owns one of the world’s deepest and most significant entertainment libraries. Re-releasing older films in new formats or for new audiences is an important part of the business. It’s also a tremendous cultural responsibility to preserve some of the world’s most beloved stories in perpetuity, Colf said.

“Imagine if a title like the ‘Wizard of Oz’ or a show like ‘Friends’ wasn’t available for generation after generation to enjoy and see and understand,” she said. “We think that’s unimaginable, and that’s why we take the job of preserving and archiving our content extremely seriously.”

The company has redundancy plans in place to handle multiple worst-case scenarios: an earthquake or hurricane that strikes one of the coasts, a fire where the suppression systems don’t kick in or a climate control failure that allows moisture to build up and ruin film stock.

The goal is to have three archival copies of each asset stored in different locations around the world: two separate digitized copies, along with the original physical copy on whatever medium a film or television episode or animated cartoon was created.

Fortunately, original film negatives will last for centuries if stored in the right conditions. But for some older television shows — think episodes of “Alice” shot in the 1970s — the original physical copy has a limited shelf life that requires migration to newer formats. And for today’s films and television shows that are shot digitally, the archival-quality third copy has a very short migration cycle of three to five years, which is challenging to manage.

“Let’s say a TV show is pushing directly into our digital archives; there’s nothing physical,” said Steven Anastasi, Warner Bros. vice president for global media archives and preservation services. “The digital file is going in but I don’t have something I can put in a vault or in a salt mine or anything physical coming into the building.”

Warner Bros. is potentially looking at Project Silica to create a permanent physical asset to store important digital content and provide durable backup copies. Right now, for theatrical releases that are shot digitally, the company creates an archival third copy by converting it back to analog film. It splits the final footage into three color components —cyan, magenta and yellow — and transfers each onto black-and-white film negatives that won’t fade like color film.

Those negatives are put into a cold storage archive. In these highly managed vaults, temperature and humidity are tightly controlled, and air sniffers look for signs of chemical decomposition that could signal problems. If they need the film back, they must reverse those complicated steps.

That process is expensive, and there are only a handful of film labs left in the world that can do it. And the process is not optimal from a qualitative point of view, said Brad Collar, Warner Bros. senior vice president of global archives and media engineering.

“When we shoot something digitally — with zeros and ones representing the pixels on the screen ­— and print that to an analog medium called film, you destroy the original pixel values. And, sure, it looks pretty good, but it’s not reversible,” Collar said.

“If we can take the digital representation of those pixels and put it on a medium like silica and read it back off exactly as it was when it came out of the camera, we’ve done our preservation job to the very best of our ability. That’s what I love about this,” he said.

It’s not economical to create archival film negatives for every digitally shot television episode in the Warner Bros. library. The company hopes Project Silica might prove to be a cheaper, higher quality alternative to create physical archives of digital content.

There’s much more work ahead to reach that scale — Microsoft researchers would need to significantly increase the speed at which data can be written and read, as well as its density. Warner Bros. envisions its own infrastructure to read data from the glass archives. But both partners see promise in how far they’ve come.

“If Project Silica’s storage solution proves to be as cost-effective and as scalable as it could be — and we all recognize it’s still early days — this is something we’d love to see adopted by other studios and our peers and other industries,” Colf said.

“If it works for us, we firmly believe that this will be a benefit to anyone who wants to preserve and archive content,” she said.

Last year, Cape Town, South Africa, came within days of running out of water. This summer, Chennai, India, ran dry, with residents standing in line for hours for government water supplies.

Global demand for water is rapidly growing – but it is becoming increasingly scarce. Almost a third of the world’s population is estimated to be living in water-scarce areas, according to the World Data Lab.

With an increase in shortages driven by climate change and a growing global population, better management of this resource is crucial.

Here’s how some grantees from Microsoft’s AI for Earth program are trying to help

[READ MORE: How clean water data is helping to protect Brazil’s precious ecosystems] 

Monitoring drinking water supplies

A team of researchers at Stanford University’s Natural Capital Project is combining remote-sensing data with machine learning to detect smaller dams and reservoirs. These structures deliver drinking water and generate hydropower, but they can also risk threatening ecosystems if not built and managed carefully.

Developed using Microsoft Azure, the algorithm will be made freely available to the sustainable development community.

Managing water in megacities

The rapidly growing demand for water in India will soon significantly outpace its supply. Dr. Yogesh Simmhan is using the Internet of Things (IoT) to help ensure people have access to an affordable, safe water supply. This can be an issue in areas with dense populations, particularly megacities (those with populations over 10 million), many of which experience water scarcity and inequitable access.

As part of his work with the EqWater project, Dr. Simmhan is using data analytics and machine learning to understand the causes of variations in access to water for individual neighborhoods; algorithms can be used to better manage supplies, such as improved water scheduling or detecting leaks.

Pooling data on areas such as flow from reservoirs, seasonal weather and residential use, the team can predict peak demand and identify shortfalls.

[READ MORE: A shift in perspective: Taking a new view on water security through technology]

Better understanding of the weather

Improved forecasting of droughts and floods will become increasingly important as climate change drives more extreme weather events. The Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes project, based at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, is working to increase its understanding of some of the less well-recognized weather phenomena affecting the western U.S.

Such phenomenon is atmospheric rivers – large bodies of water vapor in the sky. Although little is understood about them, they are known to trigger intense storms and flooding, and are major contributors to water supplies. Equally, droughts can occur if they fail to arrive at the expected time or place. Deep learning is helping the team predict their behavior.

Investigating the effect of tree loss

Drought, climate change, wildfires and insect infestation have all contributed to an increase in tree loss in the western U.S., where forest health is a major concern. Trees help prevent flooding by absorbing rain and slowing run-off; they contribute to drinking water supplies by helping replenish aquifers and purifying water; and they play a vital role in carbon capture.

Tony Chang and a team at the research nonprofit Conservation Science Partners are using cloud computing and machine learning to assess tree health and biomass, using images from NASA, the U.S. Geological Society, the National Agricultural Imagery Program and others. This data is linked to information about regional water sources in order to uncover the connections between forest conservation and management and water supplies.

The analysis is initially being applied in California before being rolled out to rest of the western U.S.

[READ MORE: How scientists are confronting environmental challenges with the help of AI]

Predicting armful algae blooms

Africa Flores, a research scientist at the University of Alabama’s Earth System Science Center, and her team are using AI to analyze satellite images and weather models to help predict harmful algal blooms. These out-of-control colonies of algae deplete oxygen in the water and make it potentially toxic to humans and wildlife.

Working on Lake Atitlán in the Guatemalan Highlands, she uses machine learning to analyze data on variables such as rainfall, temperature and cloud cover. She hopes deeper insight into the conditions that may lead to such blooms will help authorities take preventive measures and potentially improve agricultural practices. Her plan is to use her algorithm in other freshwater bodies in Central and South America.

For more on AI, visit AI for Earth. And follow @MSFTIssues on Twitter.  

Artificial intelligence is a staple of many movie plots – and those thrilling stories often revolve around the potential dangers of AI, rather than the good it can do.

Since popular culture plays a part in shaping attitudes about technology, it’s not surprising that questions surrounding AI are informed by what we see in the movies.

People are asking whether we are creating a future that we’ll be able to control, and whether computers will remain accountable to people. This, too, has been the stuff of science fiction in popular films. Here are five times Hollywood has taken on AI.

[Subscribe to Microsoft on the Issues for more on the topics that matter most.]

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

HAL 9000 is a super-intelligent computer in charge of the operations of Discovery One, a spaceship undertaking a journey to Jupiter. Hal, as he’s known, has a personality and a human-sounding voice. However, he experiences a severe malfunction and stops listening to the humans he’s assisting in order defend the mission’s programmed directives.

Blade Runner (1982)

Replicants – humanoid robots that are almost indistinguishable from people – are used for dangerous jobs in this movie. They have a short lifespan, and some have started to rebel in a bid to live longer – no matter what. Blade Runner culminates in a standoff, where the leader of a band of rogue replicants delivers an impassioned monologue on the meaning of life.

Ghost in the Shell (1995 & 2017)

The French philosopher René Descartes believed the human mind was separate from the body – like a ghost in a shell. In this story, people can upgrade their bodies with cybernetic implants. Imagine a smart hearing aid or a prosthetic limb that’s integrated with the nervous system.

But when a scientist embeds an upgraded mind in the form of AI implanted into another person’s body, a conflict emerges. Memories of an unknown life begin to trouble the cyborg. Which internal monologue is the real one?

I, Robot (2004)

It is 2035 and robots are common, acting as servants to people. These robots are guided by the three laws of robotics:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws

Those three laws of robotics were drawn up by Isaac Asimov, who wrote Robot series of short stories and novels in the middle of the 20th century. The first in the series – “I, Robot” – was the inspiration for the movie.

The movie considers what happens when a robot is suspected of committing murder, and what it means when a robot claims to have its own thoughts and dreams.

Ex Machina (2014)

This is another movie where robots can be hard to differentiate from humans and have developed their own sense of self.

A computer programmer, Caleb Smith, spends time with a sociopathic robot creator, Nathan, and a robot, Ava. Nathan wants Caleb to help conduct a live Turing test – he wants to know if Caleb can be fooled by Ava.

Caleb and Ava form an emotional attachment. Not only does she resemble a human in form, but in her speech and mannerisms, too. After convincing himself that Nathan is a malevolent presence, Caleb plots to help Ava escape.

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While all these movies are set as fiction, the questions they raise are real. We should be asking hard questions about the technology we create. Can we control it? Who will it impact and how?  And perhaps instead of asking what technology can do, asking what technology should do. For example, AI can benefit the world in many ways including enhancing efficiency in the workplace, assisting in saving languages, preserving history and helping save the environment.

When it comes to AI, the benefits are real, but so are the risks. Tech companies have a responsibility to ensure products are developed responsibly, employ transparency and be guided by a principled approach. However, governments and civil society have an important role to play as well. It’s critical that we all work together to ask the hard questions and develop the right answers.

The New York Times Best Seller “Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age” by Brad Smith and Carol Ann Browne looks at the impact of AI, the rise of cyberattacks, threats to digital privacy and more. Order it here.

We live in an ever more digital, connected world. With the emergence of Artificial Intelligence, the opportunity we have to provide truly personalized, accessible learning and experiences to all students around the world is now upon us. Leaders in education have the opportunity to dramatically impact outcomes more than ever, from changing the way in which they engage with students throughout the student journey, to providing truly personalized learning, to improving operational efficiencies across the institution. At Microsoft, our mission in education is to empower every student on the planet to achieve more. Through that lens, we believe education leaders should consider opportunities to introduce new technologies like AI into the design of learning and technological blueprint to expand the horizon for driving better outcomes and efficiencies for every student and institution around the world.

That’s why I’m excited to share that Microsoft’s AI Business School now offers a learning path for education. Designed for education leaders, decision-makers and even students, the Microsoft AI Business School for Education helps learners understand how AI can enhance the learning environment for all students—from innovations in the way we teach and assess, to supporting accessibility and inclusion for all students, to institutional effectiveness and efficiency with the use of AI tools. The course is designed to empower learners to gain specific, practical knowledge to define and implement an AI strategy. Industry experts share insights on how to foster an AI-ready culture and teach them how to use AI responsibly and with confidence. The learning path is available on Microsoft Learn, a free platform to support learners of all ages and experience levels via interactive, online, self-paced learning.

The Microsoft AI Business School for Education includes a number of modules across sales, marketing, technology and culture, but most importantly, it calls upon the expert insights from education leaders including:

• Professor Peter Zemsky uses INSEAD’s Value Creation Framework to show the advantages AI presents for educational institutions and how an organization can determine the right approach that works with their strategy and goals.
• Michelle Zimmerman, author of “Teaching AI: Exploring New Frontiers for Learning,” shares her experience as an educator and why she sees believes AI can transform how students learn.
• David Kellerman of the University of New South Wales (UNSW) shares his perspective on what’s unique about AI in higher education and how using AI can transform the way institutions collaborate and encourage students to be lifelong learners. As a key research institution in Australia, the University of New South Wales (UNSW)is focused on being a learning institution that collaborates across academic and operational departments as it uses AI to create a personalized learning journey for students. Dr. Kellerman shares his perspective on what’s unique about AI in higher education and how using AI to transform the way institutions collaborate can create students that are lifelong learners.

The Microsoft AI Business School for Education joins a larger collection of industry-specific courses including financial services, manufacturing, retail, healthcare and government. With this holistic portfolio, the AI Business School can also help students learn about AI application across a number of industries and roles. We’ve already seen several universities and vocational colleges incorporate this curriculum into their courses across business, finance, economics and health-related degrees as a means of providing real-world examples of AI opportunity and impact.

New research has highlighted the importance of adopting AI to transform the learning experience for students. Last week at the Asian Summit on Education and Skills (ASES) in India, Microsoft and IDC unveiled the latest findings from the study “Future-Ready Skills: Assessing the use of AI within the Education sector in Asia Pacific.” The study found that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will help double the rate of innovation improvements for higher education institutions across the region. Despite 3 in 4 education leaders agreeing that AI is instrumental to an institute’s competitiveness, 68% of education institutions in the region today have actually yet to embark on their AI journey. Those who have started integrating AI have seen improvements in student engagement, efficiency and competitiveness, as well as increased funding and accelerated innovation.

Microsoft is proud to be working with schools and institutions around the world to improve understanding of Artificial Intelligence and support leaders, educators and students to get ready for the future, like the recent collaboration in India with CBSE to train up over 1000 educators.

I’m beyond excited to be here in London with my Microsoft colleagues, as well as innovators, researchers, experts and business decision-makers from around the world at Future Decoded. Over the next two days, we will hear inspiring stories about the possibilities that exist for artificial intelligence to transform the future of work in every industry – and how critical it is that businesses foster a culture that includes everyone as we search for ways to incorporate AI responsibly.

This morning’s announcement that Microsoft is collaborating with Novartis to use AI to develop treatments and medications faster has the potential to improve patients’ lives across the globe. A critical component of our work together is the commitment by Novartis to take AI across the entire organization.

This will enable Novartis to bring together previously siloed data sets and research, and to use AI to build upon existing work quickly and efficiently. But it will also do something that might be even more important: It will empower Novartis associates.

Whether they work in research and development, commercial, operations, finance or elsewhere, Novartis associates are being asked to join this AI transformation. Their contributions and voices matter and are vital to the organization’s success.

Advocating a holistic approach

A cultural transformation is required for a company like Novartis to implement an AI strategy successfully throughout the organization. It requires empathetic leadership, collaboration across departments, trust among employees and a willingness to accept change. It’s not an easy feat. We at Microsoft know this because we haven’t always gotten it right the first time out of the gate. We are happy to share our learnings and best practices with our partners and customers, and with business decision-makers at large through our AI Business School, a free online master class series.

We launched AI Business School because we knew AI will be used more and more to help businesses innovate and solve problems, and we wanted to help business leaders be ready to do so with confidence. We recognized that every industry in the private and public sector faces its own challenges, and we wanted to provide concrete examples for each of them through tailored information and real-world case studies. Today, we are excited to roll out a new release of AI Business School, with expanded information for government leaders, new and adapted lessons within our responsible AI module and a new learning path for education industry decision-makers and educators.

Responsible AI: The expanded responsible AI content aims to illustrate how organizations can put principles into practice. As an example, we share a view on design principles for building AI solutions, plus a video on what tools can help you develop responsible AI.  We also have a new video Q&A with Matt Fowler, VP and Head of Machine Learning, Enterprise Data and Analytics at TD Bank Group, who talks about his company’s AI journey. Plus, trusted AI expert Cathy Cobey from EY shares how to make governance both tangible and measurable.

Education: We teamed up with education experts including Michelle Zimmerman, author of “Teaching AI: Exploring New Frontiers for Learning,” to highlight ways AI can transform classrooms as well as the operations and processes of learning institutions. We know that educators and administrators at every level of education are being asked to do more with less, and AI can help.

Government: A new module about identifying governing practices for responsible AI in government draws on the wisdom from experts at EY and Altimeter Group. We share examples from governments around the world to shed light on what government officials should consider and how to take action.

In addition to continually bolstering the online learning experience, we partner with customers around the globe for in-person training and collaboration. For example, UK enterprise customers will soon be able to participate in AI Business School sessions in the Microsoft Store in London!

I believe that helping everyone understand how to better approach AI can be a boon to every industry, and to society at large. I have been overwhelmed by the feedback and engagement with AI Business School, and I am humbled and grateful for the many conversations it has enabled with customers and business leaders!

One such customer is TD Bank, whose leaders have sought to advance an industry-wide dialogue on what responsible AI looks like in financial services. Microsoft works with TD on a variety of fronts as the bank continues to advance its AI capabilities.

Adapting to an AI-first world

As AI is adopted across financial services, TD’s leaders believe it’s a critical time to initiate an industry-wide discussion on the unique opportunities and challenges of this technology. TD recently released a report called Responsible AI in Financial Services that brought together perspectives from AI experts and consumers to inform key areas where the financial services industry needs to focus to build best practices for the responsible use of AI. The three areas of focus identified in the report – addressing explainability, controlling for bias and promoting diversity – are informing TD’s work as they develop AI-powered solutions and unlock new and innovative ways to meet customer needs.

Microsoft encourages each of our partners and customers to embed their organizational values into every aspect of their AI strategy. Our own core principles – fairness; reliability and safety; privacy and security; inclusiveness; transparency; and accountability – inform how we develop and design AI.

We continue to invest in the research and creation of tools that can tackle the challenges of bias, privacy, security and interpretability. Just last week we announced a partnership with Harvard University to develop a service for differential privacy that will open new possibilities for groundbreaking research while also protecting sensitive information.

And last month we joined forces with other industry leaders to improve the detection of AI-generated deepfakes. We will continue to make every effort to ensure that this technology we work so hard to advance will be used in ways that will also advance society. Because it is not enough to know that we CAN do something with the help of AI; it is vital that we first ask whether we SHOULD.

As I see it, the biggest potential that AI holds is its ability to help us work together to tackle our toughest problems. I see its possibility to bring people together, to improve lives and to help save our planet. One of our AI for Earth grantees, global nonprofit OceanMind, is doing just this: They are using AI to detect illegal and unregulated fishing, which helps authorities protect ocean life and promote sustainability.

The responsible creation and use of AI is not the job of any one company, but one that we all share, and it requires the shared responsibility to think about not just what AI can do, but what it should do.  Our overarching goal is to empower everyone to innovate and use AI responsibly so that it reflects their positive goals, good intentions and core values.

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