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How veteran entrepreneur Jeff Ma is helping Microsoft double down on startups

Deborah Bachwritten by

Deborah Bach

How a veteran entrepreneur is helping Microsoft double down on startups

No one would have thought Jeff Ma would land where he did, least of all Ma himself.

For decades, Ma has been known in Silicon Valley as an entrepreneur who launched and sold several successful and diverse companies. More famously, he was a member of the MIT blackjack team that won millions from Las Vegas casinos and the inspiration for the main character in the movie “21” and the book “Bringing Down the House.” Ma has been an options trader, was a water polo coach for years, is an author and professional speaker, and has been a writer and on-air personality for ESPN.

He is, in other words, someone who defies easy pigeonholing. And when Ma took on a new role in the spring, the move raised eyebrows across Silicon Valley’s startup community. The seasoned entrepreneur with the colorful and unpredictable career was going to … one of the world’s tech giants?

“The fact that he went to Microsoft is a big deal,” said Kevin Compton, former operating partner at Kleiner Perkins and now co-founder of Radar Partners, a venture capital firm based in Palo Alto. “People were surprised. He could have gone anywhere, and he went there.”

The Golden Gate Bridge

In April, Ma became the vice president of Microsoft for Startups, a program launched in 2018 to give startups access to Microsoft’s technologies and marketing expertise and allow them to co-sell their products through the company’s global sales force. Ma was working on a consulting project when his longtime friend Eric Boyd, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s AI platform, approached him about the job. Boyd figured Ma would be a good fit, but Ma was initially skeptical. He’d been an entrepreneur for decades and just couldn’t see himself working for Microsoft.

But Ma knew Microsoft’s culture had shifted dramatically since CEO Satya Nadella took the reins in 2014, and he was intrigued. He flew up to the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington, and met with some executives. What he heard and saw convinced him that there was a unique possibility before him, a chance to do more for entrepreneurs whose needs and challenges he understood as well as anyone.

“I realized it was a huge opportunity,” he said. “Satya has made it clear that nurturing an ecosystem and making our partners successful is ultimately the most important thing to us.”

Six months into the job, Jeff Ma is proactively seeking out targeted startups and strengthening Microsoft’s presence in Silicon Valley.

Now six months into the job, Ma is shaking up Microsoft’s startup strategy, proactively seeking out targeted startups and strengthening Microsoft’s presence in Silicon Valley, where, he acknowledges, the company has traditionally not been top of mind for startups. Ma aims to change that through a feet-on-the-ground approach — talking to entrepreneurs about what Microsoft can do for them and raising awareness among venture capitalists and other influencers.

Jeff Ma poses by the San Francisco Bay.

“It’s ultimately the place we need to win. It’s the place where most of the successful startups come out of, and it’s the ecosystem that will have the greatest impact broadly on the rest of the ecosystem,” said Ma, who lives with his wife and their 1- and 3-year-old sons in Belvedere, just north of San Francisco.

Compton and others say if anyone can raise Microsoft’s profile in the hyper-competitive Silicon Valley, it’s Ma. They describe him as universally known in the valley’s startup world, an inclusive leader who builds teams of talented people and draws the best ideas from them. He’s charismatic, highly inquisitive and intensely smart, they say, able to process information and look at data in ways other people don’t, but also down-to-earth and fun to be around.

Ma is the type of person, Boyd said, who doesn’t just go to a restaurant, enjoy the experience and leave, like most people. He’ll chat up the chef, get to know the employees and strike up relationships.

“He’s a connector. He talks to everybody,” Boyd said. “He’s that type of personality that’s always sort of seeking out and finding people. I imagine he knows everyone in the valley and, if he doesn’t, then he knows someone who can get them in touch with them. In the startup world, connections are everything.”

“He’s a connector. He talks to everybody.”

Ma likes to talk about specialized versus generalized learning. A massive sports buff, he frames the distinction in those terms: Tiger Woods played golf from day one and is a specialized learner, he said, while Roger Federer was a generalized learner who played sports other than tennis while growing up. Ma is firmly in the latter category.

Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, to a chemical engineering professor father and a nurse anesthetist mother who both emigrated from China after the Communist takeover in 1949, Ma was the youngest of three children and the only boy. His parents were hardworking, strict and ambitious, sending their two daughters and son to the prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. Ma’s sisters enrolled as sophomores but he went as a freshman: As a strong-willed kid who was “too smart for my own good,” he chafed against his parents’ expectations and was eager to go away to school.

Ma graduated from Exeter and then the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received a degree in mechanical engineering in 1994. His father wanted him to become a doctor and he did enroll in pre-med but eventually realized medicine wasn’t for him. It was hard to let his father down, Ma said. He thinks about the sacrifices his parents made, how selfless they were about giving him and his sisters opportunities to succeed.

There’s a story about Ma’s father that stands out in his mind. He arrived in Seattle on a boat from Taiwan, then took a train to South Bend, Indiana. He had only about $50 on him and bought two hot dogs for the trip, but was so anxious about spending money that he couldn’t bring himself to eat them.

“I think about the times that I’m sitting around on a weekend with friends drinking wine, just enjoying ourselves. And I just don’t think my parents ever had many moments like that in their life,” Ma said. “It’s not really what they wanted and it’s not what they were ever able to allow themselves to do. Everything they did was for us.”

Two books leaning against one another

The summer after Ma’s senior year, he was living in his fraternity house with a couple of friends who were playing on the MIT blackjack team as a summer job. Ma liked to play poker but thought there was something a little unsavory about gambling in casinos. Still, he wanted to hang out with his buddies, and when he found out how much they were making, he was willing to give it a try.

Ma started flying to Vegas with the team on weekends, winning at blackjack by counting cards. He got good at it — so good that he became one of the team’s top players, helping the team win around $5 million during the seven years he was part of it. One night at an Irish pub in Boston, he met writer Ben Mezrich and told him about his experiences on the team. The main character in Mezrich’s book is based on Ma; the book was followed by the movie, with Ma making a cameo as a blackjack dealer in Vegas.

Looking back, what Ma misses most about those days isn’t the lavish lifestyle or the excitement of beating the casinos — it’s the camaraderie.

“We were a real team. The only other times I’ve felt that amount of collegiality was when I started companies,” he said.

Ma left the team in 2001, taking with him valuable lessons about how to analyze and apply data, stay with a data-driven approach and avoid bad decisions based on emotion or bias. He detailed those insights in a 2010 book, “The House Advantage: Playing the Odds to Win Big in Business,” and applied them in the four companies he launched: instructional golf site GolfSpan.com (sold to Demand Media), loan management company CircleLending (sold to Virgin), fantasy sports site Citizen Sports (sold to Yahoo) and productivity web service tenXer (sold to Twitter).

Ma spent three and a half years at Twitter, where he was vice president of analytics and data science. His presence and network in Silicon Valley, success as an entrepreneur and experience working for an established company like Twitter made him the ideal person to head Microsoft for Startups, said Charlotte Yarkoni, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for Cloud + AI.

“Jeff is a tenured entrepreneur who’s had multiple startups. Amazingly enough, they’ve all had a positive exit, which is really challenging to do,” Yarkoni said. “It’s a really, really substantial skill set you have to have to be an entrepreneur and be successful.

“Part of what we were looking for was a seasoned entrepreneur who had been in the startup space,” she said, “but who also had the maturity to understand and be able to leverage the broader benefits of a large company like Microsoft so we could achieve our aspiration of helping startups be successful, regardless of what their stage of maturity is.”

We’re going to try to do a lot to change the way the entrepreneurial mix looks, from a diversity and inclusion, gender and opportunity standpoint.

Jeff Ma sitting on a bench

Evan Reiser wasn’t even considering using a different cloud provider for his San Francisco-based security startup, Abnormal Security Corp. But Ma reached out a few months ago and told him about the support Microsoft for Startups could offer his two-and-half-year-old company beyond just technology.

“My immediate response was, ‘What are you talking about? Isn’t it all about technology?’” recalled Reiser, Abnormal’s CEO.

The business benefits of Microsoft prompted Abnormal to move its software onto the Azure platform. Under the partnership, Abnormal’s cybersecurity solution is now available to Microsoft’s large enterprise customers through its cloud storefronts, Azure Marketplace and App Source, as well as through its co-selling relationship. Those customers get Azure consumption credits for buying Abnormal’s solution and can purchase and easily integrate it directly through Microsoft, eliminating the lengthy procurement cycle that can sink startups.

Reiser said he’s impressed by Microsoft’s commitment to security and the advanced technologies, like Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services, accessible through Microsoft for Startups. The partnership strengthens Abnormal’s credibility, he said, and makes it easier to get in front of Fortune 500 companies.

“Our investment in the Microsoft ecosystem has helped us grow very quickly,” Reiser said. “I’m impressed from the top level down that there’s commitment from Microsoft to invest in startups and ultimately to enable all developers, whether at small companies or big companies, to build innovative things on their platform.”

Spending most of his days lately at home on Teams calls, Ma has been building his own team, which so far includes about 55 employees. His colleagues say he’s a leader who has strong opinions and is not afraid to disagree, but who is also caring and collaborative.

“Jeff is a really good leader because he sets very clear direction and a very clear strategy, but trusts you to do the right thing and execute against that strategy however you see fit,” said Lahini Arunachalam, Microsoft for Startup’s director of product management, who first worked with Ma at a tech company in 2018.

“He’ll listen to your opinion, listen to people on the team,” she said. “He wants to understand what’s going on, not only from a work perspective but also from a life and morale perspective. He cares deeply about his team and the people on his team.”

There are already thousands of companies in the Microsoft for Startups program, and Ma is focused on how to best support them and attract new ones in several different sectors. Longer term, he has two main goals in his role. He wants to shift the perception of Microsoft so entrepreneurs worldwide see it as the tech leader they want to work with. And he wants to create new programs and opportunities to help increase the number of startups launched by women and underrepresented minorities.

“Startup opportunity is definitely not distributed equally now, and it needs to be,” Ma said. “With Microsoft’s resources and ideas, we’re going to try to do a lot to change the way the entrepreneurial mix looks, from a diversity and inclusion, gender and opportunity standpoint.”

Ma’s oldest sister, Vivian, also worked for Microsoft before passing away in 2015. It’s bittersweet for him, thinking about how she would feel about his new role. “She would be so proud. I can only imagine how amazing it would be to be working here with her,” he said. “She would always still treat me like her little brother, which I think would be funny.”

Ma sees his position at Microsoft as a fortuitous confluence of choice and chance. His education — Exeter’s liberal arts environment and the technical world of MIT — and diverse career gave him a broad range of experience to bring to the role. But it was serendipity that Boyd thought to reach out to him about the job, he said, and serendipity that the opportunity came about during the COVID-19 pandemic, when a position at stable, thriving Microsoft was especially appealing.

“In many ways, I’ve never had any real idea of what I wanted to be. Even when I was an entrepreneur, it wasn’t really an intentional thing. It was, ‘This is an opportunity to learn and do something interesting.’ And that’s what I did,” Ma said.

“The Microsoft job is the first one that I have actually looked at and been like, ‘I’ve been building toward this my whole life, and it’s cool.’”

Originally published on 10/30/2020 /  Photos by Brian Smale /  © Microsoft

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Explore Microsoft’s commitment to sustainability, by the numbers

50M

Microsoft has pledged $50M to use AI and Cloud to solve the world’s biggest environmental challenges.

Wildlife

Wild Me uses computer vision and deep learning algorithms to power Wildbook, a platform that scans and recognizes individual animals and species.

Forestry

SilviaTerra FOCUS/Forests transforms how conservationists and landowners measure and monitor forests.

Conservation

Protection Assistant for Wildlife Security (PAWS) uses machine learning, AI planning and behavior modeling to aid conservationists in the fight against poaching.

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How one of the UK’s most famous voices is helping build a more accessible workplace

Athima Chansanchaiwritten by

Athima Chansanchai

How one of the UK’s most famous voices is helping build a more accessible workplace

Corie Brown, a continuity announcer for Channel 4 in the U.K., is known for her tenacious voice and feisty personality – but her big voice didn’t help at all when she was trying to get Jenny Lay-Flurrie’s attention at Future Decoded, an October 2019 Microsoft event in London where the two would share a stage for an interview.

“I will never forget her running down the backstage corridor, yelling after me, until someone reminded her I was deaf,” said Lay-Flurrie, Microsoft’s chief accessibility officer. “You’ve got a deaf girl interviewing a legally blind woman, which is funny on its own. But Corie and I were chatting afterwards, and I told her one of my problems is voicemail. People call me all the time and leave me voicemails, even though my voicemail actually says thank you for calling, but please don’t bother leaving a message. Send me an email, shoot me a text. A couple days later, after I’d returned to the U.S., she’s professionally recorded new voicemail messages for me. ‘This is Jenny’s phone, Jenny’s deaf, she’s not going to answer. Thank you.’ We cried laughing.

“I don’t get voicemails anymore.”

That episode is just one example of how Brown empowers others who have disabilities. Because of an early exposure to technology and her talent for radio, she’s been able to achieve professional goals that include being chosen from an applicant pool of thousands for her first job at the BBC. But she’s used her voice beyond that to advocate for others as founder and co-chair of 4Purple, Channel 4’s disability staff network.

2:06

Video: Meet Corie Brown

Brown, who’s been at Channel 4 for almost two decades, was one of those who spearheaded the network’s efforts to better reflect its audience on and off air.

“People want to see themselves. The diversity of thought makes you stronger, more profitable; and so the more different voices you have internally, the more likely you are creating content people externally can identify with,” Brown said.

Like other off-camera talent she can walk around with relative anonymity, until she talks at length with someone. Then maybe they recognize her voice, which on Channel 4 fills that junction from the end of one program to the start of the next one.

But even then, they’re not likely to suspect the role Brown has played in opening doors for people with disabilities.

“In the build-up to our coverage of the Paralympics in 2012, we were in a situation where lots of people had to up their game, from a disability perspective. It was a time of seismic change,” Brown said. She began to be more vocal about breaking down barriers in the workplace. “You have conversations with friends in the pub, but this was the first time I’d really talked to someone at work about what life was like for me, with limited eyesight. It was unexpectedly time to stick my head above the parapet. Before, I didn’t want to be perceived as different or judged to be less capable. In the build-up to the Paras it felt like everything was shifting.”

Corie Brown smiles while posing on a red chair.

Paul Sapsford manages the announcer team at Channel 4. He said Brown has “made disability in the workplace a positive topic for discussion and has really helped move up the diversity agenda.”

Sapsford has been at Channel 4 since 2007 and while he says Channel 4 has always had a positive outlook on disabilities and diversity, the Paralympics really ramped up the internal conversations.

“It was an extraordinarily powerful event for us externally and internally. It made everyone in the organization think deeply about our coverage and what that meant to us,” says Sapsford, who made it a point to increase diversity on his team. “We hired more disabled employees and made them feel welcome. Everyone’s needs are different, so you have to get it right.”

Sapsford had met Brown before she came to Channel 4, when she worked for the BBC and he was a network director and then an editor.

He said his first impression of Brown was that she was “bright, committed and full of enthusiasm,” and that since then she’s “increased confidence, which has come from experience and from challenging perceptions of disability in the workplace. She found a campaigning voice and uses it effectively. Corie’s attitude is an important part of taking this company forward.

Diversity of thought makes you stronger [and] more profitable.

The U.K. embraced the 2012 Paralympic games, thanks in large part to Channel 4’s marketing campaign, which dubbed the athletes as “superhumans” and the traditional, more famous Olympics as a “warm-up” to these competitions. Eighty-three percent of those people surveyed after the Paralympic games in 2012 agreed that Channel 4’s coverage had improved the perception of people with a disability.

“They were phenomenal ads that changed stereotypes and perceptions,” said Lay-Flurrie, who is British and remembered how the ads were a breath of fresh air for the disabled community. “We felt included in everything they did. You never get that.”

Corie Brown stands on a balcony.

“The atmosphere in the channel was electric,” Brown said. “We were riding on a high, but I and a few others started to think that the public perception was different than how we were as an organization, internally. ‘Hang on, are we really as good as we are on-air?’ Somehow we have to become more confident about disability.”

The channel formed an internal diversity task force that tackled inclusion issues in general and in 2016 Channel 4 engaged a disability workplace specialist, who affected many positive changes during his tenure.

“Behind the scenes and on-air, we put forward our best efforts,” Sapsford says. “You can’t have all that focus on Paralympians without it affecting every department at Channel 4. We had a platform to build on now. We took that experience to mean that anything is possible.”

This was a stark contrast to when Brown started working for Channel 4 in 2001, when nobody was talking about workplace adjustments – screen readers and magnifiers, speech-to-text, text-to-speech, assistive software, etc. – for people with disabilities. In the U.K., there are government funds to subsidize these adjustments, to discourage employers from seeing cost as a reason to not employ someone. Brown didn’t know about this Access to Work benefit until 2009.

“The only reason I heard about it was because they were offering mini health checks, and the nurse mentioned it to me. When I told her I didn’t know about it, she nearly fell off her chair,” she said. “It was the start of an awakening.”

Everyone’s needs are different, so you have to get it right.

Brown started taking advantage of that benefit. Previously, she’d brought to work her own assistive equipment – she uses a screen reader, which reads text aloud, and screen magnification. In her job she often works in live transmission. In broadcast television everything is timed to the second. Every event has an end point, every graphic has a fixed duration. To keep in sync, she gets a verbal countdown from her directors – this removes the challenge of needing to read a script and watch the screen at the same time.

Brown also asks for presentations ahead of meetings and introductions of participants at their outset – accommodations that make meetings more inclusive and productive. She feels that being able to ask for what you need isn’t a sign of weakness – “it’s actually really empowering for everyone.”

Channel 4 uses Microsoft Office 365 and Windows 10 – both of which Brown calls out as rich in accessibility features. She uses Microsoft Word for scripts. Whilst her colleagues print out their scripts, Brown reads on-air using a tablet running an autocue app with a large high-contrast font, reflecting a comfort level with technology that stretches back to her childhood.

Brown has spent all her life adapting to a “sighted” world. With their own lived experience of blindness, her parents decided early on she would get opportunities they didn’t – starting with mainstream schooling, versus going to a specialized school.

Corie Brown climbs a set of stairs.

“It’s the only thing I’ve ever known,” Brown said. “Some kids have very particular needs, but you’re going to go out and live in a big wide world. The sooner you’re mixing, the better. And of course, the shared learning experience is empowering for fully sighted peers too. It’s really important everybody is given the same opportunities.”

This was back in the 1980s, so they worked with the first incarnation of a scanner that read books out loud. She took typing lessons at school on “proper old banging typewriters” and was one of the children who tested a “turtle” – a precursor to the mouse. Later, she’d write on a word processor.

Her father, a computer programmer, used all kinds of gadgetry, so technology was very much a part of their daily lives.

Besides the tools she uses at work, she likes using the Microsoft’s Seeing AI app in her daily life.

“I really like the instant text handwriting recognition feature to capture handwritten cards – especially at Christmas!” she said. The Microsoft Soundscape app is one of her favorite navigation tools, as it features 3D audio and is especially useful when coming out of the Tube (London’s subway system) at a confusing junction.

While she’s been comfortable with technology pretty much her whole life, she now hopes to make it easier for others to use and ask for it.

Sapsford said Brown is making a difference at Channel 4 through her visibility in the organization, by speaking out on the challenges faced by existing and new employees, and by demanding attention from executives and heads of departments.

The only barriers are our thinking.

Famed for taking risks and challenging perceptions, one of Channel 4’s most enduring legacies from the Paralympic coverage in 2012 is “The Last Leg.” Hosted by “three guys with four legs” it’s now one of the network’s flagship shows. It began as a post-Paralympics round-up, but over the years has evolved into a satirical, “no-holds barred” topical news program. And Channel 4 has continued its coverage of the Paralympics.

Channel 4 thinks others could learn from its experience – and success.

“I think it’s about having the right attitude and the willingness to want to make changes,” Sapsford says. “The only barriers are our thinking. If you break down those barriers, there are no hindrances. We should make it work and we do make it work. We all have the same goal: we want to be the most inclusive, most diverse broadcaster in the U.K. I think here, genuinely for a long time, we’ve had the attitude of, we’re making a difference. We will continue to drive to do better.”

Originally published on 1/20/2020 / Photos by Brian Smale / © Microsoft except where noted.

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By The Numbers: Microsoft’s Seeing AI app has assisted people who are blind or have low vision with more than 20 million tasks

20 million

Microsoft’s Seeing AI app, which helps people who are blind or have low vision to better navigate the world around them, has assisted people with more than 20 million tasks.

How Seeing AI turns the visual world into an audible experience:

  • Scene
  • Products
  • Documents
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Story of ADLaM – ‘the alphabet that will prevent a people from being lost’ – now a limited-run hardcover book from Story Labs

The African language Fulfulde is spoken by more than 50 million people worldwide. But until recently this centuries-old language lacked an alphabet of its own.

Abdoulaye and Ibrahima Barry were just young boys when they set out to change that. While other children were out playing, the Barry brothers would hole up in their family’s house in Nzérékoré, Guinea, carefully drawing shapes on paper that would eventually become ADLaM – an acronym for “the alphabet that will prevent a people from being lost.”

In the decades since, ADLaM has sparked a revolution in literacy, community and cultural preservation among Fulani people across the world. Abdoulaye and Ibrahima have dedicated their lives to sustaining these efforts, including expanding ADLaM’s reach through Unicode adoption. And thanks to support from a dedicated cross-company team at Microsoft, ADLaM is now available in Windows and Office.

My team at Microsoft Story Labs recently had the privilege of working with Abdoulaye and Ibrahima on a longform feature story about ADLaM. Today I’m happy to announce that we’ve printed a limited-run book version of that story that contains both the original English and an ADLaM translation, so the community of millions now using ADLaM can enjoy it in print. A few copies of the book will be available in a contest giveaway by Microsoft Design on Twitter. The rest will go directly into the hands of the amazing people behind the unique achievement that is ADLaM.

When you’ve been working in the digital realm for most of your career like I have, it’s kind of a treat to make something you can hold in your own two hands! But the biggest reward here was the opportunity to shine a light on remarkable people like Abdoulaye and Ibrahima who have achieved so much, and the team at Microsoft who lent a hand.

Steve Wiens

Microsoft Story Labs

Story by Deborah Bach & Sara Lerner. Design by Daniel Victor.

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Microsoft Mixed Reality Capture Studios create holograms to educate and entertain

“We move the camera for you, versus you are the camera,” Waskey says. “It’s a very similar process to creating a video, but in the end, you’re getting a hologram.”

The process brings in several cross-company initiatives and strengths. Most recently, they’ve added Azure to the mix to boost the work.

“One of the pieces of tech that really proves to be important is the way we compress and package the results,” says Steve Sullivan, general manager of the Mixed Reality Capture Studio. “Some other providers struggle with heavy files that are hard to get to consumers. But we can crunch it down to about the size of a video stream from Netflix. So basically, anywhere you can stream Netflix, you can stream our holograms. And that puts us onto phones, web, HoloLens and – you name it. We’ve built players for every major device and platform, so if you’re a creator or performer wanting to reach an audience, we can get you there.”

Azure is a new element, Sullivan says, that gives the company and its partners the advantage of better scale and broader reach. It allows them to process much more data, as they’re able to rely on the cloud to process more content, more flexibly, than an on-site render farm. This also allows them to provide services to other capture providers who may already have their own infrastructure.

“Even those who capture with different technology can process their data in our Azure pipeline to leverage our compression and playback ecosystem, giving all creators more options,” Sullivan says.

And now, they’re taking this technology on the road with two mobile stages, for more informal sessions. New as of this year, these packaged configurations are easier to deploy and able to take advantage of the cloud, versus huge on-premise computing. The mobile capture studios can have fewer cameras (64 instead of 106), are lighter in weight and built for portability.

“This gives us the opportunity to go where the action is,” says Waskey, pointing to events like the British Open, in which Dimension demonstrated golfers’ swings.

“When we look at sports as a particular scenario, we’ve generally seen it at a very flat angle. Golf is truly three-dimensional, there’s an arc and plane that gets described, there’s a full range of motion to hit the ball. Every golfer is subtly different in how they approach that task. One of our partners, Dimension, used a mobile stage and the power of Azure to process very fast huge amounts of data to show golfers’ angles that are normally ‘too dangerous to film.’”

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Meet Tara Prakriya, leader in engineering Microsoft’s connected car platform

Mark Mobleywritten by

Mark Mobley

Microsoft’s connected car platform delivers a mobile datacenter to your driveway

The connected car revolution isn’t coming — it’s here. Going to a meeting, and have a conference call on the way? Your ride’s digital assistant will help you plan a route blessedly free of tunnels and drops in connectivity that could interfere. And while you drive, the car will help you stay in your lane.

Dr. Herbert Diess, Volkswagen AG chairman, Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, Tara Prakriya, and Christian Senger, Volkswagen board member & head of digital car & services, at the Volkswagen AG Digital Lab in Berlin.

Leading this effort on the engineering front at Microsoft is Tara Prakriya, General Manager for Azure IoT Mobility and Connected Vehicles. This team of dozens is working with the two largest industry players, Volkswagen Group and Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance, to create cars featuring unprecedented levels of interactivity.

“What our connected vehicle platform gives our clients is truly a digital chassis to achieve scale and efficiency in developing and delivering value to their customers,” Prakriya said. “Our customers are navigating a digital transformation of the industry and this digital chassis helps them absorb and fully take advantage of the new opportunities available in the market in a global way, including China.”

“What our customers look for in the partnership from Microsoft is not just a technology vendor, but a strategic partnership to help the full digital transformation, cultural transformation and market transformation that need to work in lock step. It’s a tall order, which is why we work with our customers to figure out what this is going to look like.”

Our connected vehicle platform gives our clients a digital chassis to achieve scale and efficiency in developing and delivering value to their customers.

“Pretty much everybody that’s on the team is really excited about this space,” said Larry Sullivan, co-head of the team with Prakriya and a veteran Microsoft engineer. “I think Tara brings a lot of that energy and the team gives that energy back as well. We’re not a huge team, but we’re really motivated, and we’re really fired up about helping our customers do business in a really positive way.”

Microsoft’s automotive initiatives engage such corporate partners as TomTom, Cubic Telecom, Moovit, DSA and Faurecia. They also leverage Microsoft’s work on the Internet of Things (IoT) and the company’s Azure cloud computing service. Prakriya believes it’s helpful to think of IoT as the information of things.

Tara Prakriya and Larry Sullivan consider themselves “two in a box” as collaborators on Microsoft’s connected car platform.

Tara Prakriya and Larry Sullivan consider themselves “two in a box” as collaborators on Microsoft’s connected car platform.

“The digital feedback loop is the term that we use at Microsoft,” Prakriya said. “IoT in many ways represents the digital feedback loop of physical things, physical spaces, physical environment and what products actually do in the marketplace. There are lots of decisions that our business customers need to make that IoT information can make a significant contribution to.

“And, once those decisions are made, there is new information, and that needs to be communicated as a feedback loop back to those physical environments, physical products, physical consumers and physical employees. The opportunity in connected vehicles, and mobility as a whole, is to be on the edge of getting the data so that we can do amazing things and then deliver it back to the edge again. What then connects the stationary things, like smart buildings, with smart transportation and mobility is Azure Maps.”

A car, Prakriya said, has plenty in common with other consumer electronics products: “You want experiences to become easy. You want the cars and the system to anticipate what your needs are. There is a lot of ease of use and delight that can be had for the consumers — both the drivers and the passengers. The cool challenge with delivering a connected vehicle platform is simplifying the complexities of what is really a mobile datacenter on wheels so that these experiences are easier to create, deploy and refine. Having a single connected vehicle and maps platform that underpins consumer experiences in the vehicle and on their phones, providing driving assistance and mobility as a service, goes a long way towards this goal.”

Connected car illustration.

Microsoft’s work in the automotive space is about helping each customer create a differentiated set of integrated services while taking advantage of a consistent, robust, flexible, global and secure digital chassis for scale. “They have different brand promises to their consumers,” Prakriya said, “and so as a result, the features that they are really thinking about and the digital value that they are trying to deliver to their customers are different. We are taking care of the boring stuff so that they can really think about what their brand promise is and deliver it.”

She points out that automakers are making these promises and creating these systems in the face of not one, not two, but four simultaneous upheavals in the industry. The first is basic digital connectivity, followed closely by the use of artificial intelligence — for example, in fighting driver distraction, among other applications. Then there are shared-vehicle services, and the gradual electrification of cars and trucks as manufacturers move away from fossil fuels, which will have impacts across the supply chain and all through the vehicle life cycle.

“It is an enormous amount of change that we know our customers are thinking about constantly,” Prakriya said, “so this is a lot of the reason why we created the set of platforms for IoT Mobility. We are very engaged with our customers because it’s so exciting to watch them navigate this. And if we can play any part in that navigation, it’s pretty wonderful.”

The challenge with delivering a connected vehicle platform is simplifying the complexities of what is really a mobile datacenter on wheels so that these experiences are easier to create, deploy and refine.

To further complicate matters, all of the team’s major customers are also working on driverless vehicles. “Azure’s storage and compute teams, along with the AI teams, and the devops teams, together have an excellent story for building your own autonomous driving models,” she said. “Azure has a pretty great end-to-end template and methodology that helps customers, from getting their big data onto Azure all the way through to working with ecosystem partners to be on Azure for things like simulation as well as collecting data from production vehicles to assist in validation.

“We work with a number of large customers on building their own autonomous driving models on Azure. Fully autonomous vehicles are, of course, more than just a technical problem. There are legal and regulatory considerations. In the meantime, assisted driving models are rapidly improving, and we are excited to work with our customers to deploy these models to vehicles using our connected vehicle platform and create a digital feedback loop.”

Larry Sullivan is an engineering manager who works on Microsoft’s connected car platform.

Larry Sullivan is an engineering manager who works on Microsoft’s connected car platform.

“Today, this data informs cutting-edge driver-assisted features like automatic braking, advanced cruise control and lane assist. Tomorrow, the information will be the backbone of autonomy. The leader in that space, bar none, is Microsoft,” wrote analyst Jon Markman in a recent Forbes article.

There is also an increasing focus on Azure Maps to keep up with the demands of multi-modal routing, HD Maps and fresh updates that connect ride share partners with map making partners. In addition, Azure Maps is an important pillar in geo-spatial analytics to help create new value for customers.

Prakriya “really understands the tech and the business and how those things come together,” co-head of the team, Sullivan said. “She is fantastic as a counterpart.”

Both Prakriya and Sullivan say they consider themselves “two in a box” as managers — even though he’s Texan and she’s not, he’s kind of a car guy and she drives a non-connected minivan that’s the same age as her 14-year-old son. They’re both fast talkers who laugh easily.

“We have a great time,” Sullivan said. “We have a lot of fun. This is an exciting industry. It’s really going through a bunch of changes and we feel well positioned to help, but like anything, it’s got a degree of insanity, and we have a lot of fun with just, ‘All right, what’s the craziness of the day?'”

Yet Prakriya’s scientific approach — she holds nine patents — persists even after she leaves the office. It extends to life with her son and husband, who works in the Microsoft Business and Applications Group.

“I am a crock pot maven,” she said. “There is almost nothing I cannot cook in a crock pot. It is the only way our family survives. A lot of Indian cooking works really well in the crock pot, baking as well — it is amazingly easy to bake in a crock pot.

Microsoft’s work in the automotive space is about helping each corporate customer create a differentiated set of services.

Prakriya and Sullivan walk along a woodsy trail on Microsoft’s Redmond campus. Prakriya and Sullivan walk along a woodsy trail on Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington campus.

“I joke that my aim is to bend the space-time continuum of figuring out how we eat as a family, and with the slow cooker, we have the option of stretching out the interval between when I cook and when the meal needs to be ready. I also like the whole end-to-end supply chain of food. It’s also about optimizing the shopping list, strategic use of the freezer, and considering the whole process all the way down to the dishes. It’s kind of fun.”

Both at home and at work, she pursues a hobby: knitting. She’s a contributor to Knit-A-Square, a South African charity that collects knitted squares and assembles them into blankets for vulnerable and orphaned children, many of whom are affected by HIV/AIDS. She said that knitting is the perfect accompaniment to a conference call.

“We do a lot of them because our customers are in Europe,” she said, “and they are kind of all in different places, right? Knitting keeps me away from the keyboard because it’s easy to get distracted. It is a way to keep my fingers active so I can focus.”

And for Prakriya, Sullivan and the team, focus is key — because there’s always another question to answer from another angle.

“Just connecting things does not solve the big challenges,” Prakriya said. “There is definitely a lot of work to do. We are trying to provide the platforms to make that work easier. We have great support from our management chain. We are aligned all the way up and down with our wickedly smart compatriots in business development — shout out to [Executive Vice President of Business Development] Peggy Johnson’s team — as well as marketing, teams in the field, as well as PR. And our close relationship with our partners and customers makes the work exciting and fun.

“What Larry and I and the extended IoT Mobility team are doing is a shining example of everything about the fantastic Microsoft culture at work. It’s about solving the right problems the right way, in an aligned manner, so that the best people who understand the problem from different dimensions can come together and achieve something really great, and help our customers achieve something that is frankly even greater.”

Originally published on 9/12/2019 / Photos by Brian Smale / © Microsoft

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Ibrahima and Abdoulaye Barry: How a new alphabet is helping an ancient people write its own future

Deborah Bach

Written by Deborah Bach

Sara Lerner

Audio by Sara Lerner

How a new alphabet is helping an ancient people write its own future

When they were 10 and 14, brothers Abdoulaye and Ibrahima Barry set out to invent an alphabet for their native language, Fulfulde, which had been spoken by millions of people for centuries but never had its own writing system. While their friends were out playing in the neighborhood, Ibrahima, the older brother, and Abdoulaye would shut themselves in their room in the family’s house in Nzérékoré, Guinea, close their eyes and draw shapes on paper.

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When one of them called stop they’d open their eyes, choose the shapes they liked and decide what sound of the language they matched best. Before long, they’d created a writing system that eventually became known as ADLaM.

The brothers couldn’t have known the challenges that lay ahead. They couldn’t have imagined the decades-long journey to bring their writing system into widespread use, one that would eventually lead them to Microsoft. They wouldn’t have dreamed that the script they invented would change lives and open the door to literacy for millions of people around the world.

They didn’t know any of that back in 1989. They were just two kids with a naïve sense of purpose.

“We just wanted people to be able to write correctly in their own language, but we didn’t know what that meant. We didn’t know how much work it would be,” said Abdoulaye Barry, now 39 and living in Portland, Oregon.

“If we knew everything we would have to go through, I don’t think we would have done it.”

ADLaM is an acronym that translates to ‘the alphabet that will prevent a people from being lost.’

A new writing system takes shape

The Fulbhe, or Fulani, people were originally nomadic pastoralists who dispersed across West Africa, settling in countries stretching from Sudan to Senegal and along the coast of the Red Sea. More than 40 million people speak Fulfulde — some estimates put the number at between 50 and 60 million — in around 20 African countries. But the Fulbhe people never developed a script for their language, instead using Arabic and sometimes Latin characters to write in their native tongue, also known as Fulani, Pular and Fula. Many sounds in Fulfulde can’t be represented by either alphabet, so Fulfulde speakers improvised as they wrote, with varying results that often led to muddled communications.

The Barry brothers’ father, Isshaga Barry, who knew Arabic, would decipher letters for friends and family who brought them to the house. When he was busy or tired, young Abdoulaye and Ibrahima would help out.

“They were very hard to read, those letters,” Abdoulaye recalled. “People would use the most approximate Arabic sound to represent a sound that doesn’t exist in Arabic. You had to be somebody who knows how to read Arabic letters well and also knows the Fulfulde language to be able to decipher those letters.”

Abdoulaye asked his father why their people didn’t have their own writing system. Isshaga replied that the only alphabet they had was Arabic, and Abdoulaye promised to create one for Fulfulde.

“At a basic level, that’s how the whole idea of ADLaM started,” Abdoulaye said. “We saw that there was a need for something and we thought maybe we could fix it.”

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The brothers developed an alphabet with 28 letters and 10 numerals written right to left, later adding six more letters for other African languages and borrowed words. They first taught it to their younger sister, then began teaching people at local markets, asking each student to teach at least three more people. They transcribed books and produced their own handwritten books and pamphlets in ADLaM, focusing on practical topics such as infant care and water filtration.

While attending university in Conakry, Guinea’s capital city, the brothers started a group called Winden Jangen — Fulfulde for “writing and reading” — and continued developing ADLaM. Abdoulaye left Guinea in 2003, moving to Portland with his wife and studying finance. Ibrahima stayed behind, completing a civil engineering degree, and continued working on ADLaM. He wrote more books and started a newspaper, translating news stories from the radio and television from French to Fulfulde. Isshaga, a shopkeeper, photocopied the newspapers and Ibrahima handed them out to Fulbhe people, who were so grateful they sometimes wept.

But not everyone was pleased by the brothers’ work. Some objected to their efforts to spread ADLaM, saying Fulbhe people should learn French, English or Arabic instead. In 2002, military officers raided a Winden Jangen meeting, arrested Ibrahima and imprisoned him for three months. He was not charged with anything or ever told why he was arrested, Abdoulaye said. Undeterred, Ibrahima moved to Portland in 2007 and continued writing books while studying civil engineering and mathematics.

ADLaM, meanwhile, was spreading beyond Guinea. A palm oil dealer, a woman the brothers’ mother knew, was teaching ADLaM to people in Senegal, Gambia and Sierra Leone. A man from Senegal told Ibrahima that after learning ADLaM, he felt so strongly about the need to share what he’d learned that he left his auto repair business behind and went to Nigeria and Ghana to teach others.

“He said, ‘This is changing people’s lives,’” said Ibrahima, now 43. “We realized this is something people want.”

ADLaM comes online

The brothers also understood that to fully tap ADLaM’s potential, they needed to get it onto computers. They made inquiries about getting ADLaM encoded in Unicode, the global computing industry standard for text, but got no response. After working and saving for close to a year, the brothers had enough money to hire a Seattle company to create a keyboard and font for ADLaM. Since their script wasn’t supported by Unicode, they layered it on top of the Arabic alphabet. But without the encoding, any text they typed just came through as random groupings of Arabic letters unless the recipients had the font installed on their computers.

Following that setback, Ibrahima made a fateful decision. Wanting to refine the letters the Seattle font designer developed, which he wasn’t happy with, he enrolled in a calligraphy class at Portland Community College. The instructor, Rebecca Wild, asked students at the start of each course why they were taking her class. Some needed an art credit; others wanted to decorate cakes or become tattoo artists. The explanation from the quiet African man with the French accent stunned Wild.

“It was mind-blowing when I heard the story of why he was doing this,” said Wild, who lives in Port Townsend, Washington. “It’s so remarkable. I think they deserve a Nobel Peace Prize for what they’re doing. What a difference they’ve made on this planet, and they’re these two humble brothers.”

Wild was struck by Ibrahima’s focus and assiduousness in class. “He was always a star student,” she said. “He had this skill set and unending patience. He worked and worked and worked in class on the assignments, but at the same time, he was taking all this stuff he was learning in class back to ADLaM.”

Hand-drawn letters of the ADLaM alphabet

Wild helped Ibrahima get a scholarship to a calligraphy conference at Reed College in Portland, where he met Randall Hasson, a calligraphy artist and painter. Hasson was seated at a table one afternoon, giving a lettering demonstration with another instructor, and Ibrahima came over. A book about African alphabets rested on the table. Ibrahima picked it up, commented that the scripts in the book weren’t the only African alphabets and offhandedly mentioned that he and his brother had invented an alphabet.

Hasson, who has extensively researched ancient alphabets, assumed Ibrahima meant that he and his brother had somehow modified an alphabet.

“I said, ‘You mean you adapted an alphabet?’” Hasson recalled. “I had to ask him three times to be sure he had actually invented one.”

After hearing Ibrahima’s story, Hasson suggested teaming up for a talk on ADLaM at a calligraphy conference in Colorado the following year. The audience sat rapt as Hasson told Ibrahima’s story, giving him a standing ovation as he walked to the stage. During a break earlier in the day, Ibrahima asked Hasson to come and meet a few people. They were four Fulbhe men who had driven almost 1,800 miles from New York just to hear Ibrahima’s talk, hoping it would finally help get ADLaM the connections they sought.

Hasson was so moved after speaking with them that he walked away, sat down in an empty stairwell and cried.

“At that moment,” he said, “I began to understand how important this talk was to these people.”

Ibrahima made connections at the conference that got him introduced to Michael Everson, one of the editors of the Unicode Standard. It was the break the brothers needed. With help from Everson, Ibrahima and Abdoulaye put together a proposal for ADLaM to be added to Unicode.

Andrew Glass is a senior program manager at Microsoft who works on font and keyboard technology and provides expertise to the Unicode Technical Committee. The ADLaM proposal and the Barry brothers’ pending visit to the Unicode Consortium generated much interest and excitement among Glass and other committee members, most of whom have linguistics backgrounds. Glass’s graduate studies focused on writing systems that are around 2,000 years old, and like other linguists he uses a methodological, technical approach to analyze and understand writing systems.

But here were two brothers with no training in linguistics, who developed an alphabet through a natural, organic approach — and when they were children, no less. New writing systems aren’t created very often, and the chance to actually talk with the inventors of one was rare.

“You come across things in these old writing systems and you wonder why it’s the way it is, and there’s nobody to ask,” Glass said. “This was a unique opportunity to say, ‘Why is it like this? Did they think about doing things differently? Why are the letters ordered this way?’ and things like that.”

Microsoft worked with designers to develop a font for Windows and Office called Ebrima that supports ADLaM and several other African writing systems.

It was during the Unicode process that ADLaM got its new name. The brothers originally called their alphabet Bindi Pular, meaning “Pular script,” but had always wanted a more meaningful name. Some people in Guinea who’d been teaching the script suggested ADLaM, an acronym using the first four letters of the script for a phrase that translates to “the alphabet that will prevent a people from being lost.” The Unicode Technical Committee approved ADLaM in 2014 and the alphabet was included in Unicode 9.0, released in June 2016. The brothers were elated.

“It was very exciting for us,” Abdoulaye said. “Once we got encoded, we thought, ‘This is it.’”

But they soon realized there were other, possibly even more challenging hurdles ahead. For ADLaM to be usable on computers, it had to be supported on desktop and mobile operating systems, and with fonts and keyboards. To make it broadly accessible, it also needed to be integrated on social networking sites.

The brothers’ script found a champion in Glass, who had developed Windows keyboards for several languages and worked on supporting various writing systems in Microsoft technology. Glass told others at Microsoft about ADLaM and helped connect the Barry brothers to the right people at the company. He developed keyboard layouts for ADLaM, initially as a project during Microsoft’s annual companywide employee hackathon.

Judy Safran-Aasen, a program manager for Microsoft’s Windows design group, also saw the importance of incorporating ADLaM into Microsoft products. Safran-Aasen wrote a business plan for adding ADLaM to Windows and pushed the work forward with various Microsoft teams.

“It was a shoestring collaboration of a few people who were really interested in seeing this happen,” she said. “It’s a powerful human interest story, and if you tell the story you can get people onboard.

“This is going to have an impact on literacy throughout that community and enable people to be part of the Windows ecosystem, where before that just wasn’t available to them,” Safran-Aasen said. “I’m really excited that we can make this happen.”

Photograph of brothers Ibrahima and Abdoulaye Barry in front of a bridge on the Willamette River in Portland, OregonADLaM creators Ibrahima and Abdoulaye Barry in Portland, Oregon.

Microsoft worked with two type designers in Maine, Mark Jamra and Neil Patel, to develop an ADLaM component for Windows and Office within Microsoft’s existing Ebrima font, which also supports other African writing systems. ADLaM support is included in the Windows 10 May 2019 update, allowing users to type and see ADLaM in Windows, including in Word and other Office apps.

Microsoft’s support for ADLaM, Abdoulaye said, “is going to be a huge jump for us.”

ADLaM is also supported by the Kigelia typeface system developed by Jamra and Patel, which includes eight African scripts and is being added to Office later this year. The designers wanted to create a type system for a region of the world lacking in typeface development, where they say existing fonts tend to be oversimplified and poorly researched. They consulted extensively with Ibrahima and Abdoulaye to refine ADLaM’s forms, painstakingly working to execute on the brothers’ vision within the boundaries of font technology.

“This was their life’s work that they started when they were kids,” Patel said. “To get it right is a big deal.”

And to many Africans, Jamra said, a script is more than just an alphabet. ”These writing systems are cultural icons,” he said. “It’s not like the Latin script. They really are symbols of ethnic identity for many of these communities.”

They’re also a means of preserving and advancing a culture. Without a writing system it’s difficult for people to record their history, to share perspective and knowledge across generations, even to engage in the basic communications that facilitate commerce and daily activities. There is greater interest in recent years in establishing writing systems for languages that didn’t have them, Glass said, to help ensure those languages remain relevant and don’t disappear. He pointed to the Osage script, created by an elder in 2006 to preserve and revitalize the language, as an example.

“There is a big push among language communities to develop writing systems,” Glass said. “And when they get them, they are such a powerful tool to put identity around that community, and also empower that community to learn and become educated.

“I think ADLaM has tremendous potential to change circumstances and improve people’s lives. That’s one of the things that’s really exciting about this.”

Keeping a culture alive

Ibrahima and Abdoulaye don’t know how many people around the world have learned ADLaM. It could be hundreds of thousands, maybe more. As many as 24 countries have been represented at ADLaM’s annual conference in Guinea, and there are ADLaM learning centers in Africa, Europe and the U.S. On a recent trip to Brussels, Ibrahima discovered that four learning centers had opened there and others have started in the Netherlands.

“I was really surprised. I couldn’t imagine that ADLaM has reached so many people outside of Africa,” he said.

Abdoulaye “Bobody” Barry (no relation to ADLaM’s creator) lives in Harlem, New York and is part of Winden Jangen, now a nonprofit organization based in New York City. He learned ADLaM a decade ago and has taught it to hundreds of people, first at mosques and then through messaging applications using an Android app. The script has enabled Fulbhe people, many of whom never learned to read and write in English or French, to connect around the world and has fostered a sense of sense of cultural pride, Barry said.

“This is part of our blood. It came from our culture,” he said. “This is not from the French people or the Arabic people. This is ours. This is our culture. That’s why people get so excited.”

Close-up photograph of a hand writing letters in the ADLaM alphabet with a felt-tip pen

Suwadu Jallow emigrated to the U.S. from Gambia in 2012 and took an ADLaM class the Barry brothers taught at Portland Community College. ADLaM is easy for Fulfulde speakers to learn, she said, and will help sustain the language, particularly among the African diaspora.

“Now I can teach this language to someone and have the sense of my tribe being here for years and years to come without the language dying off,” said Jallow, who lives in Seattle. “Having this writing system, you can teach kids how to speak (Fulfulde) just like you teach them to speak English. It will help preserve the language and let people be creative and innovative.”

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Jallow is pursuing a master’s in accounting at the University of Washington and hopes to develop an inventory-tracking system in ADLaM after she graduates. She got the idea after helping out in her mother’s baby clothing shop in Gambia as a child and seeing that her mother, who understood little English and Arabic, could not properly record and track expenses. ADLaM, she said, can empower people like her mother who are fluent in Fulfulde and just need a way to write it.

“It’s going to increase literacy,” she said. “I believe knowledge is power, and if you’re able to read and write, that’s a very powerful tool to have. You can do a lot of things that you weren’t able to do.”

The Fulbhe people in Guinea historically produced a considerable volume of books and manuscripts, Abdoulaye Barry said, using Arabic to write in their language. Most households traditionally had a handwritten personal book detailing the family’s ancestry and the history of the Fulbhe people. But the books weren’t shared outside the home, and Fulbhe people largely stopped writing during French colonization, when the government mandated teaching in French and the use of Arabic was limited primarily to learning the Koran.

“Everything else was basically discounted and no longer had the value that it had before the French came,” Abdoulaye said.

Having ADLaM on phones and computers creates infinite possibilities — Fulbhe people around the world will be able to text each other, surf the internet, produce written materials in their own language. But even before ADLaM’s entry into the digital world, Fulfulde speakers in numerous countries have been using the script to write books. Ibrahima mentions a man in Guinea who never went to school and has written more than 30 books in ADLaM, and a high school girl, also in Guinea, who wrote a book about geography and another about how to succeed on exams. The president of Winden Jangen, Abdoulaye Barry (also no relation to Ibrahima’s brother), said many older Fulbhe people who weren’t formally educated are now writing about Fulbhe history and traditions.

“Now, everybody can read that and understand the culture,” he said. “The only way to keep a culture alive is if you read and write in your own language.”

‘The kids are the future’

Though ADLaM has spread over several continents, Ibrahima and Abdoulaye aren’t slowing down their work. Both spend much of their spare time promoting the script, traveling to conferences and continuing to write. Ibrahima, who sleeps a maximum of four hours a night, recently finished the first book of ADLaM grammar and hopes to build a learning academy in Guinea.

On a chilly recent day in Abdoulaye’s home in Portland, the brothers offer tea and patiently answer questions about ADLaM. They are unfailingly gracious, gamely agreeing to drive to a scenic spot on the Willamette River for photos after a long day of talking. They’re also quick to deflect praise for what they have accomplished. Ibrahima, who sometimes wakes up to hundreds of email and text messages from grateful ADLaM learners, said simply that he’s “very happy” with how the script has progressed. For his brother, the response to ADLaM can be overwhelming.

Having this writing system, you can teach kids how to speak Fulani just like you teach them to speak English. It will help preserve the language and let people be creative and innovative.

“It’s very emotional sometimes,” Abdoulaye said. “I feel like people are grateful beyond what we deserve.”

The brothers want ADLaM to be a tool for combating illiteracy, one as lasting and important to their people as the world’s most well-known alphabets are to cultures that use them. They have a particular goal of ADLaM being used to educate African women, who they said are more impacted by illiteracy than men and are typically the parent who teaches children to read.

“If we educate women we can help a lot of people in the community, because they are the foundation of our community,” Abdoulaye said. “I think ADLaM is the best way to educate people because they don’t need to learn a whole new language that’s only used at school. If we switched to this, it would make education a lot easier.”

That hasn’t happened yet, but ADLaM has fostered a grassroots learning movement fueled largely through social media. There are several ADLaM pages on Facebook, and groups with hundreds of members are learning together on messaging apps. Abdoulaye said he and Ibrahima used to hear mostly about adults learning ADLaM, but increasingly it’s now children. Those children will grow up with ADLaM, using the script Abdoulaye and Ibrahima invented all those years ago in their bedroom.

“That makes us believe ADLaM is going to live,” Abdoulaye said. “It’s now settled into the community because it’s in the kids, and the kids are the future.”

Originally published on 7/29/2019 / Photos by Brian Smale / © Microsoft

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KING5 News: The man behind the music of Microsoft

SEATTLE — Matthew Bennett has one of the world’s most important ears, “More people will hear the sounds I design for Microsoft then will ever hear anything else I will ever compose or design, and that’s OK.”

As in billions of people … every day.  Many times a day. A composer since he was 7, Matthew now makes the music of Microsoft.  You know these sounds.  The sound your Windows Computer makes when you logon, the notification sounds when you get an email or a text.  He created those sounds.

 From his soundproof, floating studio in Redmond, he carefully crafts the “surround sound” of life.

“It blows my mind so I can’t think about it too directly. But we do take the responsibility very seriously.”

Microsoft composer Matthew Bennett Microsoft composer Matthew Bennett

Microsoft composer Matthew Bennett shows us his process from his Redmond studio.

KING

He was part of the Windows 7 team, and has pioneered the new approach of Windows 10, “The old sounds are very designed to be heard, and to capture your attention. These are designed to be felt and not really to be consciously heard.”

He basks in the subtleties of sound like a “new email” alert, “It’s designed to sit in the background because most people don’t want to feel like there’s an emergency when they get an email dozens of times a day.”

The sound you hear when a text message arrives is purposefully different. “Our messaging sound is designed to pull you forward a little bit, a little more alert, a little more energetic because it’s if it’s an IM or text, you want to know that.”

The calendar reminder will always be controversial, “Some people have told me that no matter how beautiful the sound is, it makes them feel like they’re responding to a fire alarm all day, and I can’t fix people’s lives and their next appointment, but I can try to design a sound that alerts them in a beautiful way.”

Microsoft composer Matthew Bennett Microsoft composer Matthew Bennett

Microsoft composer Matthew Bennett has created sounds that billions of people hear every day.

KING

As an ethnomusicologist, he studied how music affects culture at the University of Washington. His background is in psychology, “We try not to provoke people’s startle response.”

These are not trivial tones to his ear, “I don’t think people realize how much the sounds, even the quiet sounds around us, affect our emotional experience.”

We don’t even realize how much sound is a part of our everyday lives, “There isn’t a moment in our lives when we’re not surrounded by sound. That includes before we are born.”

When he’s surrounded by his own work, he still gets a thrill, “It’s awesome. I love walking around and hearing sounds I created in real life because it’s a great opportunity to see what they feel like in real life.” 

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