Microsoft's Decisive: Hold the Cloud and the Future of AI
Microsoft's Decisive: Hold the Cloud and the Future of AI



After splitting the Windows division, what does "Microsoft's determination" mean?
 
Less than two months ago, Microsoft announced the cancellation of the “Windows and Devices” division, a flagship product team that had contributed a quarter of Microsoft’s revenue. Instead, it was divided into “experience and equipment” and “cloud computing.” With the artificial intelligence "two divisions.

As a member of the reorganization of Norit, Guo Yuting recently transferred from the "Microsoft AI and Research Division" headed by Shen Xiangyang to the "Cloud Computing and Artificial Intelligence Department" and served as senior vice president of the world. In the interview, Guo Yuting repeatedly stressed that such adjustments are intended to demonstrate Microsoft's determination to embrace cloud computing and artificial intelligence, not to give up Windows.
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What does "Microsoft's determination" mean here?

For a large organization that covers more than 100,000 employees worldwide, Microsoft has maintained a rhyth of organizational change once every three years, and in the past three years, since Nadella took office, all efforts have been for artificial intelligence and The core of cloud computing is closer.

In September 2016, Microsoft merged the "Technology and R&D Department" with the "AI Research Department" to form a new "Microsoft AI and Research Group" (Microsoft AI and Research Group). Shen Xiangyang, the vice president and head of the technology and R&D department, took the lead.

In July 2017, Microsoft laid off 3,000 employees, cut other departmental expenses, and strengthened Microsoft's cloud computing division (Azure). This year, the setting of the "Cloud Computing and Artificial Intelligence" department means more obvious. Microsoft also became more focused.
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Behind the series of organizational and business reorganizations is Microsoft's top research institute resources for nearly 20 years. Since the establishment of the 1990s, it will focus on the core research direction of artificial intelligence, and these technological accumulations and research results urgently need to be productized. The current opportunity in the era of artificial intelligence will be the best window.

From Seattle to Beijing


Image form google

Following 12 days of the Build 2018 conference held early in the month, Microsoft moved the new vision of “Intelligent Cloud and Intelligent Edge” from Seattle to Beijing.

There were 1,000 developers gathered in the venue that day and there were 150,000 online viewers—this is the first time that Microsoft held such a large-scale artificial intelligence theme conference in China.

Shen Xiangyang carried a passionate speech from a number of executives, including Microsoft Technical Fellow Huang Xuedong, Global Senior Vice President of Cloud Computing and Artificial Intelligence Division of Microsoft Guo Yanting, and Vice President of Microsoft (Asia) Institute of Internet Engineering Li Di, etc., which fully demonstrated Microsoft's smart cloud. The latest technologies, resource services, and collaborative deployments in computing and smart edge computing.
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Although some of the technical achievements have already been introduced in the Build conference, but for the Chinese market, Microsoft still brings the expected localized products. Interactive artificial intelligence is one of the directions promoted by Microsoft. It has also become the most important intelligent application on Azure. It not only includes Microsoft sisters' development of "Ice Ice" and "Xiao Na" in voice interaction and emotional communication. It also includes the upgrade of many business scenarios, such as the demonstration of "full martial arts" of the AI ​​conference system and the application of drones equipped with computer vision modules to investigate pipeline conditions.

In the industry application market, the demand for smart customer service is the strongest. In a geek park interview, Kang Rong, vice president and general manager of marketing and operations at Microsoft Greater China, said: “Basically, all companies have expressed interest in this service. For example, in the financial industry, customers have proposed digitalization. The customer's needs are not to replace people completely, but they still have to be taken over by people for the purpose of acquiring customer data more systematically.”

In addition, Kang Rong mentioned that among the series of "AI+ cloud" solutions for Microsoft's industry application market, the first will be manufacturing, new retail and financial industries, and medical care.
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"Many factory customers use machine learning to make predictions about production plans, reduce delays in their production lines, and increase their efficiency," explains Kang Rong.

For the new retail sector, which is now very hot in China, especially considering the business collaboration, Alibaba Cloud is currently in a stage of force. Kang Rong said that whether it is old or new, the essence is retail. “Our observations are that the traditional industries are very motivated by the digital transformation, otherwise they cannot survive. Therefore, we attach great importance to this business.”

Kang Rong also mentioned that the demand for data online and structured in the medical field is also extremely strong. At present, Microsoft Asia Research Institute has reached a cooperation with pharmaceutical company Pfizer to promote the establishment of a disease knowledge map and diagnostic question answering system.

Through the speeches of Shen Xiangyang on the day, we can see that public cloud, hybrid cloud, Internet of Things (IoT Edge), and Azure Sphere are considered as the four cores of the current Microsoft cloud computing business matrix.
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There is no doubt that public cloud has always been the foundation of cloud computing, and hybrid cloud service solutions with both public and private clouds are gradually becoming more flexible market trends. Azure IoT Edge is Microsoft's focus on end-to-end intelligence, which is the key business model proposed by Edge Computing.

This year, Microsoft announced that it will open source Azure IoT Edge resources, allowing developers to modify, debug, extend, and add features to the edge applications in multiple environments such as Linux and Windows, and allow developers to have higher peer devices. Transparency and control.

As one of the exemplary cooperation cases, Microsoft announced cooperation and exploration with DJI in the application field of drone industry, including scenarios in agriculture, construction industry, public safety, and the launch of specific solution FarmBeats.

In addition, at Azure IoT Edge, Microsoft and Qualcomm have launched a customized visual service that allows drones or other industrial equipment to respond quickly without having to connect to the cloud.
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Azure Sphere is an industrial-level IoT solution that Microsoft proposed in consideration of the issues of IoT security and networking, including specially designed security chips, security operating systems, and cloud security.

Especially at the chip level, Microsoft has developed "brand-new" micro-controllers (MCUs) that have five times the performance of older MCUs, use a Linux kernel optimized for IoT, and use cloud-based security services.

These designs will be freely licensed to cooperating vendors. The first vendor to adopt this solution is MediaTek, the first Azure Sphere chip MT3620 developed by MediaTek and expected to be available for sale in the third quarter of 2018.

Shen Xiangyang said that currently, 9 billion microcontrollers are installed in various machines worldwide every year - from home appliances to factory equipment, but only 1% have networking capabilities. Azure Sphere is trying to open this market.
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Under the theme of smart cloud computing, cognitive services are the focus of Microsoft's business sector, but also a concentrated demonstration of the research results of Microsoft Research and Artificial Intelligence team.


Image from google

Microsoft's Cognitive Services was formally launched at the Build Conference three years ago. It provides developers with AI capabilities in the form of APIs, covering 24 services including voice, vision, language, machine translation, and OCR recognition, 17 of which are commercially available. Today, 1 million developers already use this service.

In the live demonstration session, OCR optically identifies graphic text, handwritten text, Captionbot.ai's automatic text description function after AI picture recognition, and Visual Studio Tool for AI (hereinafter referred to as VS for AI) visual model customization function, etc. The on-site developers were surprised and applause continued.

Among them, the function implementation of VS for AI is that the developer only needs to upload a group of pictures, then import tags, and then the system will automatically generate a customized machine learning model. This is similar to the Cloud AutoML launched by Google Cloud’s Li Feifei team earlier this year.
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In this regard, Guo Yuting said in an interview that the logic behind this set of products is Microsoft's customized customer-oriented service thinking. As early as the two-year front-end Customer Service, Microsoft has already launched the Pre-train service. The reason is that many customers need more matching models in specific usage scenarios, but at the same time they do not have the deep technical capabilities of artificial intelligence, so Microsoft Cloud introduced a customized service.

"Including voice services and visual services, Microsoft has adopted this custom logic," said Guo Yuting.

Outside the visual field, Microsoft has no need to go into details about its core technology advantage—the technical accumulation of voice level. Because Microsoft recently cited the "first" full-duplex technical advocacy by Microsoft at the I/O conference, it also thrown out a full-fledged open-source plan at this conference - this autumn, it will go to China and Japan. Partners and developers open "Full Duplex" technology.

These include four-layer technology structure such as voice awakening, group chat identification (basic identity and voiceprint), controller response, and multiple rounds of conversational memory. Developers can incorporate this dialogue into their own applications.

In August 2016, Microsoft (Asia) Internet Engineering Institute conducted a human-machine dialogue with Xiao Bing through the initiative initiated by human users. Now Microsoft has let Xiao Bing and human users complete a total of more than 600,000 telephone exchanges.
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Landing in China, helping the sea

At the business cooperation level, Microsoft has always emphasized the identity and role as a platform, and expressed that it is upholding a more open attitude. In order to further expand the territory of the Chinese market, Microsoft's cooperative customers went up to China Mobile, Huawei, Lenovo and other first-line brands, down to Xiaomi's ecological chain companies, AI startup companies and other small and medium-sized teams.

It is worth noting that in the process of Microsoft's cooperation with the entrepreneurial team, it not only provided cloud-level technical services, but also laid the foundation for opening up overseas market resources.

As the world's largest telecom operator, China Mobile’s telephone and online online service services cover 1/6 of the Earth's population (9 billion). The demand for digital customer service can be imagined. Microsoft expressed great pleasure in winning the cooperation of the world's largest voice data company. At the same time, it also stated that it is in deep cooperation with China Mobile for voice recognition and machine translation technology applications.

In addition, at the event, Microsoft partner Caiyun Technology also demonstrated the use of Azure Batch AI services to develop a containerized artificial intelligence solution for Vipshop, increasing the efficiency of its overseas business team by 85% to 1 million images. The time required for analysis tagging was shortened to 1% before, and the speed of iteration of the AI ​​system was greatly improved.
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In addition to doing its own smart speakers, Microsoft has also empowered Yeelight smart speakers from Xiaomi's ecological chain company, Yililight. The soon-to-be-opened Xiao Bing “full duplex” and “artificial intelligence creativ” features will be available on this speaker. Show.

Image from google

In order to further optimize the voice interaction experience, Microsoft has also begun to extend its reach to the bottom layer of hardware, such as the multi-MIC speech development board MSDDK (Microsoft Speech Device SDK) jointly developed by ROOBO, a Chinese startup team.

This is an integrated software and hardware solution for far-field speech recognition. ROOBO provides developers with hardware, and Microsoft provides a voice service development platform. The cognitive service running on Microsoft Smart Cloud Azure can provide multiple languages and knowledge skills for the development of smart devices that are widely used in different scenarios such as smart home appliances, robots, smart audio, and set-top boxes.
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Both customers and partners.


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Regardless of whether it was at the Burid Congress in Seattle or the artificial intelligence conference in Beijing, Microsoft spent a short period of time demonstrating the case of pipeline inspections based on the Dagong Mavic Air drone platform, which is enough to show that it is for the Chinese new partner. Pay attention.

According to Kang Rong, vice president and general manager of marketing and operations at Microsoft Greater China, DJI is not only a Microsoft customer, but also an important partner.
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The contents of the cooperation included DJI's selection of the Microsoft Azure Intelligent Cloud Platform as the preferred cloud computing partner, the release of the Software Development Kit (SDK) for Windows, and the expansion of commercial drone technology into the world's largest corporate developer community. Applications written for Windows 10 computers can be used to customize the flight and control of UAV drones for various application scenarios in different industries, including complete flight control functions and real-time data transfer.

"This kind of cooperation is more like the joint efforts of both parties to launch a specific solution to customers. Rather than simply saying, Dajiang uses Microsoft Cloud to promote its own business. We are facing customers that include both DJI and Microsoft customers. , and our common customers.” Xie Zheng, director of public relations in Xinjiang, said.

Today, the visible direction of collaboration includes a solution called FarmBeats on the Azure platform, based on a variety of advanced sensors to detect conditions such as temperature, humidity, and light, with intuitive graphical insigh that will be relevant to farm crops, livestock, and soil Information is presented.

This integrates DJI's PC ground station professional software and mapping algorithms to generate real-time heat maps on the Azure IoT Edge, helping farmers to detect as early as possible the slow growth of crops, diseases, pests and diseases that may affect the harvest.

Xie said that since the Build Conference, nearly 30 customers in the United States have already expressed interest in the program, and DJI is also actively following up on the needs of these projects.
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However, the two parties also stated that the plan is still at a very early stage and "is equivalent to a preview version." Because for enterprise-level customers, the needs of different customers vary widely in detail, requiring detailed and customized communication and cooperation with specific customers.

Kang Rong said that because many underlying functions and technologies can be reused in the development process, the same basic solution can be applied to different scenarios. For example, FarmBeats can be applied not only to agriculture but also to disaster relief scenarios.

As the leader in the field of drones, DJI has the largest group of drone development companies in the world, but this number is also less than 100,000. Microsoft's number of enterprise software developers is 700 million.

This is a completely unequal size of users, and it is also a deeper reason that DJI needs to be associated with Microsoft - allowing more developers to expand and extend the application areas of drone platforms.
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DJI revealed that the official version of the solution will be introduced in October this year, and at the same time it will be able to see specific customer application cases. "The case will be forward-looking," Xie added.

Giant turned


Image from google

In the era of big data, more and more workloads are entering the cloud, and the market's demand for top-tier suppliers and the corresponding speed are also rising. Globally, competitions such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, IBM, and Google Cloud have intensified. At home, cloud computing has also become an important channel for Internet giants to lay out their infrastructure and output AI capabilities.(For more information, please pay attention to our  JackTelecom www.jacktelecom.com)

Cloud computing and artificial intelligence have become inseparable double ringers. It is also the main track where technology giants are not allowed to fall behind. However, for the large-scale and sophisticated Microsoft, it is not easy to switch to the new track by saying goodbye to the brilliant personal computing era and gradually dropping the burden of the desktop, mobile, and windows.

Fortunately, Nadella did it.

In the second quarter of fiscal year 2018, the gap between the second-ranked Azure and AWS narrowed, resulting in a 98% increase in earnings. According to analyst data, AWS’s share dropped from 68% to 62%, and Microsoft’s share rose from 16% to 20%.

After Nadella, Microsoft's third CEO took office, he continued to strengthen the link between Microsoft Research Institute's technology and products. More research projects were converted into real applications or products, and Azure won more competition in the highly competitive cloud computing market. The large-scale value-added service market, and Microsoft has accumulated deep corporate customer resources have been further consolidated.
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"Azure brought together all of Microsoft's investment and technology accumulation in the field of artificial intelligence," Shen Xiangyang said at the address. As colleagues in the cloud computing sales department are delighted, "You see that Dr. Shen and several of his top generals have come to support us. We can see how important it is."

Of course, more importantly, such determination is being seen by more and more people.


The Article from GeekPark.
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