“Some of the Microsoft tools around responsible AI are really good and show where those biases are,” Green says. “Those dashboards are fantastic.”
Reed agrees and adds that having “explainable AI” is critical for a healthcare organisation.
He also says that even after many decades of experience in orthopedics, he was surprised by some findings that the Responsible AI dashboard helped him spot.
“I was looking at what the AI model looks for to predict a risk of a ‘moderately severe’ complication. The dominant one was age, which was pretty obvious, followed by high blood pressure, which also made sense. The third one was the number of platelets.” These are cells in the blood that help clotting.
Reed was surprised to see that platelets carry such a significant weight in determining the outcome from surgery when compared to the other factors, and it may lead to new areas of research. That finding would have to be validated with different approaches, but it shows how technology is helping medical professionals to think differently about care.
NHS teams building their own AI models – as Green and Reed have done – are becoming increasingly common, as the healthcare sector tries to manage increasing workloads and provide cutting-edge care to millions of people.
Earlier this year, Health Education England, which supports the delivery of healthcare to the public, published its first roadmap to the use of AI in the NHS, which showed that the healthcare sector “recognizes the power and potential for AI to increase resilience, productivity, growth, and innovation.”
A total of 60 technologies are expected to be ready for large-scale deployment in England’s healthcare sector within a year. There are plans to roll out these and other digital tools across 67 clinical areas, including radiology, cardiology and general practice.
Patients might not notice the changes when they visit a hospital or their GP, but they could soon be benefitting from a more personalized and informative care experience.
Top image: Orthopedic surgeons Justin Green and Mike Reed from the Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust look at Microsoft’s Responsible AI Dashboard (Photo credit: Jonathan Banks)
Ever since Ada Lovelace, a polymath often considered the first computer programmer, proposed in 1843 using holes punched into cards to solve mathematical equations on a never-built mechanical computer, software developers have been translating their solutions to problems into step-by-step instructions that computers can understand.
Today, AI-powered software development tools are allowing people to build software solutions using the same language that they use when they talk to other people. These AI-powered tools translate natural language into the programming languages that computers understand.
“That allows you, as a developer, to have an intent to accomplish something in your head that you can express in natural language and this technology translates it into code that achieves the intent you have,” Scott said. “That’s a fundamentally different way of thinking about development than we’ve had since the beginning of software.”
This paradigm shift is driven by Codex, a machine learning model from AI research and development company OpenAI that can translate natural language commands into code in more than a dozen programming languages.
Codex descended from GPT-3, OpenAI’s natural language model that was trained on petabytes of language data from the internet. Codex was trained on this language data as well as code from GitHub software repositories and other public sources.
“It makes coding more productive in terms of removing not-so-fun work and also helping you remember things you might have forgotten and helping you with the approach to solve problems,” Peter Welinder, vice president of products and partnerships for OpenAI, said of Codex.
In this example, a creator working in the graphics rendering engine Babylon.js entered the natural language command, “create a model of the solar system” into the text box and the AI-powered software translated the command into code for a solar system model.
The increase in productivity that Codex brings to software development is a game changer, according to Scott. It allows developers to accomplish many tasks in two minutes that previously took two hours.
“And oftentimes, the things that the tools are doing is they are helping you to very quickly go through the least interesting parts of your job so that you can get to the most interesting parts of your job, which makes the qualitative experience of creating much more pleasant and stimulating and fun,” he said.
Microsoft subsidiary GitHub also worked with OpenAI to integrate Codex into GitHub Copilot, a downloadable extension for software development programs such as Visual Studio Code. The tool uses Codex to draw context from a developer’s existing code to suggest additional lines of code and functions. Developers can also describe what they want to accomplish in natural language, and Copilot will draw on its knowledge base and current context to surface an approach or solution.
GitHub Copilot, released in a technical preview in June 2021, today suggests about 35% of the code in popular languages like Java and Python generated by the tens of thousands of developers in the technical preview who regularly use GitHub Copilot. GitHub Copilot will move to general availability this summer, bringing this AI-assisted coding capability to millions of professional developers, Microsoft announced today at its Microsoft Build developer’s conference.
“A lot of software has common frameworks and pieces of scaffolding. Copilot does such an awesome job of doing all that for you so you can focus your energy and your creativity on the things that you’re trying to solve uniquely,” said Julia Liuson, president of the developer division at Microsoft, which includes GitHub.
Julia Liuson, president of the developer division at Microsoft, which includes GitHub, expects that today’s tools will be the first wave of AI-assisted development. Photo courtesy of Microsoft.
As more developers experiment with Codex and GitHub Copilot, more clues to the potential of AI-assisted development are emerging, according to Welinder. For example, natural language documentation inside most software programs is sparse. Users of GitHub Copilot create this documentation by default as they use the tool.
“You get a bunch of comments in the code just from the nature of telling Copilot what to do,” he said. “You’re documenting the code as you go, which is mind-blowing.”
These comments, in turn, serve as a teaching tool for other developers, who often study other programs to learn how to solve specific problems in their own programs. The ability of Codex to translate from code to natural language is another way developers can learn as they program, which will lower the barrier of entry to coding, Welinder added.
From low code to no code
Meanwhile, AI-powered low code and no code tools, such as those available through Microsoft Power Platform, aim to enable billions of people to develop the software applications that they need to solve their unique problems, from an audiologist digitizing simple paper forms to transform hearing loss prevention in Australia to a tool that relieves the burden of manual data-entry work from employees of a family owned business and an enterprise grade solution that processes billions of dollars of COVID-19 loan forgiveness claims for small businesses.
Today, the hundreds of millions of people who are comfortable working with formulas in Microsoft Excel, a spreadsheet program, could easily bring these skills into Power Platform where they can build these types of software applications, according to Charles Lamanna, Microsoft corporate vice president of business applications and platform.
Charles Lamanna, Microsoft corporate vice president of business applications and platform, believes AI-powered tools will enable billions of people to develop software. Photo by Dan DeLong for Microsoft.
“One of the big pushes we’ve been doing is to go to the next level, to go from hundreds of millions of people that can use these tools to billions of people that can use these tools,” he said. “And the only way we think we can actually do that is to go from low code to no code by using AI-powered development.”
To do this, Lamanna’s team first integrated GPT-3 with Microsoft Power Apps for a feature called Power App Ideas, which allows people to create applications using conversational language in Power Fx, an open-source programming language for low code development with its origins in Microsoft Excel. The next step, announced at Build, is a feature called Power Apps express design, which leverages AI models from Azure Cognitive Services to turn drawings, images, PDFs and Figma design files into software applications.
“We’ve made it so that we can do image recognition and map it to the constructs that exist within an application. We understand what’s a button, what’s a grouping, what’s a text box and generate an application automatically based on those drawings without you having to understand and wire up all these different components,” Lamanna said.
YouTube Video
A new AI-powered feature called Power Apps express design helps turn sketches and other images into the bones of an app, helping people with little or no coding experience develop software.
This transition from low code to no code on the back of AI follows a general trend of computing becoming more accessible over time, he added. Personal computers were rare 40 years ago, spreadsheets were uncommon 30 years ago, internet access was limited 20 years ago, for example. Until recently, video and photo editing were reserved for experts.
Software development should also become more accessible, Lamanna said.
“If we want everybody to be a developer, we can’t plan on teaching everyone how to write Python code or JavaScript. That’s not possible. But it is possible if we create the right experiences and get them in front of enough people who can click and drag and drop and use concepts that are familiar to create amazing solutions,” he said.
Developers for the software-powered future
GitHub Copilot as well as the low code and no code offerings available via the Power Platform are the first phase of AI-powered development, according to Liuson. She envisions AI-powered models and tools that will help developers of all ability levels clean data, check code for errors, debug programs and explain what blocks of code mean in natural language.
These features are part of a larger vision of AI-powered tools that could serve as assistants that help developers more quickly find solutions to their problems and help anyone who wants to build an application go from an idea in their head to a piece of software that works.
“As a developer, we all have days that we have pulled out our hair, saying, ‘Why is this thing not working?’ And we consult with a more senior developer who points us in the right direction,” Liuson said. “When Copilot can go, ‘Hey here are the four different things that are common with this pattern of problem,’ that will be huge.”
This new era of AI-assisted software development can lead to greater developer productivity, satisfaction and efficiency and make software development more natural and accessible to more people, according to Scott.
For example, a gamer could use natural language to program non-player characters in Minecraft to accomplish tasks such as build structures, freeing the gamer to attend to other, more pressing tasks. Graphic designers can use natural language to build 3D scenes in the graphics rendering engine Babylon.js. Teachers can use 3D creation and collaboration tools like FrameVR to speak into existence a metaverse world such as a moonscape with rovers and an American flag.
“You can describe to the AI system what you want to accomplish,” Scott said. “It can try to figure out what it is you meant and show you part of the solution and then you can refine what the model is showing you. It’s this iterative cycle that’s free flowing and natural.”
These tools, Scott added, will also swell the ranks of developers in a world that will be increasingly powered by software.
“Because the future is so dependent on software, we want a broad and inclusive set of people participating in its creation,” he said. “We want people from all sorts of backgrounds and points of view to be able to use the most powerful technology they can lay their hands on to solve the problems that they have, to help them build their businesses and create prosperity for their families and their communities.”
Related
Top photo: Kevin Scott, Microsoft chief technology officer, said AI-powered tools help developers get from thoughts in their heads to code. Photo courtesy of Microsoft.
John Roach writes about Microsoft research and innovation. Follow him on Twitter.
Announcing Intro to Tech Skills sessions at Microsoft Build 2022!
Once again, our premier developer conference, Microsoft Build, will feature a curated collection of sessions specially created for students and those looking to learn a new tech. From May 24 through May 26, Intro to Tech Skills sessions will give you the opportunity to learn about new technologies or areas of interest, figure out which ones are right for you, learn what to expect and how to get started. You’ll get a better understanding of how developer technologies and tools work along with learning resources that can help you further your career in tech. And speaking of your career in tech, we have tips for you on that too!
Join our Intro to Tech Skills sessions and pack your developer toolkit with tools that you’ll rely on time and time again.
Session title
Description
“Intro to Tech Skills”? Tell me more!
Find out about resources, programs, and upcoming sessions as hosts @SalmanMKC and @madebygps welcome you to 2 days of learning and fun for students and all learners.
A peek inside the developer’s toolkit
Get an overview of the common tools that developers use to write and share their code. This session covers the basics of Visual Studio Code, GitHub, and more.
So many programming languages, so little time–which should I learn?
Hear a panel of experts discuss a variety of popular programming languages including C#, TypeScript, Python, and low-code programming.
“Hello, World!” in 3 programming languages
New coders, get a taste for a few popular programming languages and even see them in action.
A guided journey into AI
Learn the differences between AI, machine learning, and deep learning along with popular practices and tools.
Driving inclusion and accessibility with dev tooling and AI services
Learn how you can help build the future of inclusion and accessibility with actions you can take to incorporate inclusivity into your product.
Tackling the technical interview
Prepare for your technical interviews–hear the questions and coding problems you’ll likely encounter in your interview.
Microsoft technologies and the dev community: Who’s building what? Get inspired!
Check out real-life scenarios created by students, MVPs, and Cloud Advocates with Microsoft Azure, Power Platform, and Microsoft 365.
Build your own resume website and stand out to recruiters
Create an impactful resume and create a website in this 2-in-1 session; come away with a resume published on your new website that you can immediately point potential employers to.
The New Developer’s Guide to the Cloud
Kickstart your cloud learning journey. We’ll look at cloud fundamentals from .NET to Java to Node.js to Python so you can start building on the cloud immediately.
We also have fun student-focused activities outside the sessions:
Minecraft time machine—build and share your vision of what your community or school will look like in 100 years!
AI match game—play our version of the popular card matching game using Azure Cognitive Services to analyze the tile images and identify landmarks, animals, and words, but here’s a warning—unlike the classic game, the pairs of images in our game are not exact matches!
Microsoft Cloud Skills Challenge— Join the fun and compete against your peers while you learn new technology using Microsoft Learn‘s self-paced learning environment.
And make sure to tune in to the 2022 Imagine Cup World Championship on May 24 at 8:30AM PT during the keynote of Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella where you’ll find out which of the 3 remaining teams will take home the trophy and USD100,000!
