Tay had its day back in March, when it was touted as a millennial-minded AI agent that could learn more about the world through its conversations with users. It learned about human nature all too well: Mischief-makers fed its artificial mind with cuss words, racism, Nazi sentiments and conspiracy theories. Within 24 hours, Microsoft had to pull Tay offline.
Other technological missteps were rated as fails because they didn’t take off as expected, as was the case for Apple’s smartwatch; or because they took off in flames, like the batteries in the Samsung phone.
Microsoft executive Todd Holmdahl is leading the effort to create scalable quantum hardware and software. (Red Box Pictures via Microsoft / Scott Eklund)
Microsoft says it’s moving ahead from just talking about quantum computing to building an actual quantum computer, based on the physics that won a Nobel Prize this year.
The project will be headed by longtime Microsoft executive Todd Holmdahl, who previously played key roles in developing the Xbox gaming console, the Kinect motion sensor and the HoloLens augmented-reality system. Now he’s corporate vice president of Microsoft’s quantum program.
“I think we’re at an inflection point in which we are ready to go from research to engineering,” Holmdahl said in a Microsoft blog posting about the project on Nov. 20.
Microsoft isn’t alone in the field: For several years, Google has been working with NASA and a Vancouver-area company called D-Wave to evaluate quantum computer designs.
Microsoft’s “cancer moonshot” effort aims to program cells like computers. (Credit: Microsoft)
Microsoft researchers are doing a bug bash on cancer, complete with software code names like “Project Hanover.”
Some of them are actually drilling down into our genetic code, looking for ways to reprogram the immune system to combat cancer cells more effectively.
“If you can do computing with biological systems, then you can transfer what we’ve learned in traditional computing into medical or biotechnology applications,” Microsoft’s Neil Dalchau says in the company’s in-depth report about its cancer moonshots.
Others are enlisting the power of cloud computing to identify which treatment would work best for a particular cancer patient, based on his or her personalized medical profile.
Takei, who played Mr. Sulu in the “Star Trek” original series 50 years ago, makes his debut as an Actiongram character just in time for today’s release of an open beta version of the app for developers.
Like Actiongram’s other characters, Takei’s 3-D projected image can be inserted into the HoloLens view of a real-world environment. You can record the video of the resulting interactions, and share it with your friends and the rest of the world.
Microsoft’s aim is to give HoloLens users the ability to wield computer-generated video effects as adroitly as a bare-chested Sulu wielded a rapier in “The Naked Time.” As Takei would say: Oh myyyyy!
A mixed-reality view through a Microsoft HoloLens headset shows a Charizard taunting a Pokemon Go player. (Credit: Koder via YouTube)
Millions of Pokémon Go players are peering into smartphones to look for animated characters in an augmented-reality world, but what if they could look for them wearing Microsoft’s HoloLens headset instead?
That’s not commercially available at this point, but a couple of coding teams thought it would be cool to work up prototypes for a Pokeman/HoloLens mash-up – and now they’re sharing their results.
California-based Koder developed one such prototype. “My colleague [Paul Nguyen] and I built it over a 2-day period and made a video to show the experience,” Elmer Morales, Koder’s founder and CEO, told GeekWire in an email.
The pink smear of DNA at the end of this test tube can store incredible amounts of encoded digital data. (Credit: Tara Brown Photography / University of Washington)
Computer scientists from Microsoft and the University of Washington say they’ve set a new standard for DNA storage of digital data – but they acknowledge that the standard won’t last long.
But Karin Strauss, the principal Microsoft researcher on the project, acknowledges that so much more is theoretically possible.
“You could pack an exabyte of data in an inch cubed,” she told GeekWire. An exabyte is equal to 8 quintillion bits of information, which is much more information than is contained in the Library of Congress. (Exactly how much more? That’s a matter of debate.)
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella lays out his vision for ethical AI research. (Credit: Microsoft)
Taking a page from Isaac Asimov’s famous Three Laws of Robotics, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has drawn up six “musts” for the revolution in artificial intelligence that he sees coming, plus four musts for the humans living in the AI age.
Nadella’s deep dive into the philosophical underpinnings of AI research comes as Microsoft is turning its attention toward AI tools with a vigor reminiscent of billionaire co-founder Bill Gates’ pivot to the internet in the mid-1990s. In his own essay, published today online on Slate, Nadella refers not only to Asimov’s laws, but also to Gates’ 1995 “Internet Tidal Wave” memo.
The essay also comes amid a debate over whether AI could pose a “Terminator”-level threat to humanity’s long-term future. Just this week, for example, British physicist Stephen Hawking warned about the rise of an “AI arms race” in autonomous weapons. Over the past month, the White House has been conducting a nation-spanning series of workshops focusing on the promise and potential peril of intelligent machines.
Nadella says humans and machines could work together to address society’s greatest scourges, including disease, ignorance and poverty.
“Doing so, however, requires a bold and ambition approach that goes beyond anything that can be achieved through incremental improvements to current technology,” he writes. “Now is the time for greater coordination and collaboration on AI.”
Last week, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory showed off its ProtoSpace application, which superimposes a computer-generated version of space hardware over your field of view in the headset.
The application lets JPL’s engineers size up how components fit together in the design of the 2020 Mars rover, which is currently under development at the lab in Pasadena, Calif. They can also take real-world hardware and compare it against the ghostly design that’s floating before their eyes.
The beauty of the system is that they can push through the virtual parts on the outside and get into the guts of the rover, in what appears to be real physical space.
Dedicated wind farms are an increasingly important source of energy for data centers.
REDMOND, Wash. – Microsoft is kicking up its targets for environmentally sustainable cloud computing by pledging that half of the electricity to power its data centers will come from renewable sources by 2018.
The bar will be raised to 60 percent for the early 2020s. “And then we’ll just keep on getting better from there,” Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president and chief legal officer, told energy executives today at a gathering of the Renewable Energy Buyers Alliance, or REBA.
Smith’s announcement provided a timely kickoff for this week’s REBA Summit on the Microsoft campus in Redmond. More than 300 representatives of companies that produce, sell and buy electrical power are meeting to trade information, recap successes and failures, and make deals.
The stakes are high, especially due to the rapid rise of cloud computing. Analysts say the data centers that provide the infrastructure for the cloud could consume almost 50 gigawatts of power this year. By 2030, communication technology could account for as much as 51 percent of global electricity usage – and be responsible for as much as 23 percent of the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions.
“Our data centers, for each company, consume as much electrical power as a small state,” Smith said at the summit. “And there is going to come a time in the future, some decades ahead, when each of these companies will consume as much electrical power as a medium-sized nation.”
Rolls-Royce’s Trent XWB jet engine is prepared for delivery. (Credit: Rolls-Royce)
Soon the “Internet of Things” will be keeping watch on jet engines, refrigerators and freezers, factory floors and more, thanks to a series of partnerships announced by Microsoft at the Hannover Messe industrial fair in Germany.
The applications will take advantage of the Microsoft Azure IoT Suite to gather data from industrial products, and the Cortana Intelligence Suite to look for trends and figure out how to improve performance.
For example, Rolls-Royce will incorporate those software tools into its TotalCare maintenance services for its aircraft engines. The data sets will include engine health readings, air traffic control information, route restrictions and fuel usage.
Cortana will look for anomalies and trends in the data, and provide feedback that should help Rolls-Royce improve the engines’ performance and increase fuel efficiency.
