Year: 2020

Xiaomi on Tuesday unveiled the global version of MIUI 12, the latest update to its Android -based operating system, for hundreds of millions of smartphones as the Chinese electronics giant pushes to broaden its services ecosystem.

The world’s fourth largest smartphone firm said it is delivering a range of new features to its overseas users with MIUI 12 including a revamped user interface, the ability to cast the phone screen without the need to connect it to a computer, improvement to multitasking support and battery life, and more privacy controls to users.

Chief among the new changes is how the software looks. A company executive said animation renders slightly differently after installing MIUI 12, stretching more naturally across the screen — especially on smartphones with rounded corners — as a user taps on an app.

Xiaomi has been able to deliver this graphical improvement thanks to what it calls “kernel-level innovation” that includes a new rendering engine, she said.

“With our rendering, we have enabled color blending and Gaussian blur. You can see various degrees of blurring happening in real time as light penetrates different materials,” explained Louisa Jia, head of marketing and operations of Global MIUI, at an event today.

MIUI 12, which is built atop Android 9 and Android 10 (depending on the device it will be rolled out on), also changes how storage, memory, and power consumption usage are displayed on the phone, making it easier for users to quickly understand the state of their device at a glance.

As part of the new coat of paint, Xiaomi is also deploying dark mode across all third-party apps, including those that have not introduced support for this feature yet.

Support for multitasking is also getting an improvement, popping any additional app on a floating screen that users can move around to any part of the screen and engage quickly without having to switch from the game or other app that they were focusing on. The company said it is also introducing “ultra battery saver” feature that kicks in when the level of phone charge hits 5%. The new feature shuts off every non-essential service to deliver an additional five hours of battery life.

Privacy

Another interesting feature the company is introducing grants more privacy control to users. MIUI 12 will allow users to easily monitor and restrict apps from using the camera, microphone, location, contacts, storage, call history, and calendar.

Whenever an app uses any of these, a persistent icon appears in the notification bar, tapping which will allow users to see which app is using this data and easily shut that access. Additionally, like with newer versions of Android and iOS, MIUI 12 gives users the ability to determine how often an app can access sensitive personal information.

Xiaomi said with MIUI 12, it is also providing users with the ability to strip off sensitive information such as location data from a photo before they share it with their friends. By default, the new operating system will strip off such data from photos — a feature that privacy advocates have long desired, and business communication app Slack recently introduced to its service.

MIUI 12 will roll out to select smartphones — Mi 9, Mi 9T, Mi 9T Pro, Redmi K20, and Redmi K20 Pro — at the end of June, and dozens of smartphone models including Poco F1 and Redmi 6 that were launched in 2018, “soon afterward,” said Jia. The company said it will make a beta version of MIUI 12 available to users next week for those who don’t want to wait for too long.

More than 300 million smartphones ran MIUI software at the end of last year, Xiaomi revealed in its most recent earnings call in late March. The company has previously stated that it is banking on MIUI to expand its services ecosystem as it looks to cut its financial reliance on sales of gadgets.

At its Build developer conference, Microsoft today put a strong emphasis on machine learning but in addition to plenty of new tools and features, the company also highlighted its work on building more responsible and fairer AI systems — both in the Azure cloud and Microsoft’s open-source toolkits.

These include new tools for differential privacy and a system for ensuring that models work well across different groups of people, as well as new tools that enable businesses to make the best use of their data while still meeting strict regulatory requirements.

As developers are increasingly tasked to learn how to build AI models, they regularly have to ask themselves whether the systems are “easy to explain” and that they “comply with non-discrimination and privacy regulations,” Microsoft notes in today’s announcement. But to do that, they need tools that help them better interpret their models’ results. One of those is interpretML, which Microsoft launched a while ago, but also the Fairlearn toolkit, which can be used to assess the fairness of ML models, and which is currently available as an open-source tool and which will be built into Azure Machine Learning next month.

As for differential privacy, which makes it possible to get insights from private data while still protecting private information, Microsoft today announced WhiteNoise, a new open-source toolkit that’s available both on GitHub and through Azure Machine Learning. WhiteNoise is the result of a partnership between Microsoft and Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science.

Microsoft today announced the launch of the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, an industry-specific cloud solution for healthcare providers. This is the first in what is likely going to be a set of cloud offerings that target specific verticals and extends a trend we’ve seen among large cloud providers (especially Google), who tailor specific offerings to the needs of individual industries.

“More than ever, being connected is critical to create an individualized patient experience,” writes Tom McGuinness, Corporate Vice President, Worldwide Health at Microsoft, and Dr. Greg Moore, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Health, in today’s announcement. “The Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare helps healthcare organizations to engage in more proactive ways with their patients, allows caregivers to improve the efficiency of their workflows and streamline interactions with Classified as Microsoft Confidentialpatientswith more actionable results.”

Like similar Microsoft-branded offerings from the company, Cloud for Healthcare is about bringing together a set of capabilities that already exist inside of Microsoft. In this case, that includes Microsoft 365, Dynamics, Power Platform and Azure, including Azure IoT for monitoring patients. The solution sits on top of a common data model that makes it easier to share data between applications and analyze the data they gather.

“By providing the right information at the right time, the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare will help hospitals and care providers better manage the needs of patients and staff and make resource deployments more efficient,” Microsoft says in its press materials. “This solution also improves end-to-end security compliance and accessibility of data, driving better operational outcomes.”

Since Microsoft never passes up a chance to talk up Teams, the company also notes that its communications service will allow healthcare workers to more efficiently communicate with each other, but it also notes that Teams now includes a Bookings app to help its users — including healthcare providers — schedule, manage and conduct virtual visits in Teams. Some of the healthcare systems that are already using Teams include St Luke’s University Health Network, Stony Brook Medicine, Confluent Health, and Calderdale & Huddersfield NHSFoundationTrust in the UK.

In addition to Microsoft’s own tools, the company is also working with its large partner ecosystem to provide healthcare providers with specialized services. These include the likes of Epic, Allscripts, GE Healthcare, Adaptive Biotechnologies and Nuance.

Microsoft today announced that Azure Quantum, its partner-centric quantum computing platform for developers who want to get started with quantum computing, is now in limited preview. First announced at Microsoft Ignite 2019, Azure Quantum brings together the hardware from  IonQ, Honeywell, QEI and Microsoft, services from the likes of 1QBit, and the classical computing capabilities of the Azure cloud. With this move to being in limited preview, Microsoft is now opening the service up to a small number of select partners and customers.

At its current stage, quantum computing isn’t exactly a mission-critical capability for any business, but given how fast things are moving and how powerful the technology will be once it’s matured a bit over the next few years, many experts argue that now is the time to get started — especially because of how different quantum computing is from classical computing and how it will take developers a while to develop.

At Ignite, Microsoft also open-sourced its Quantum Development Kit, compilers and simulators.

With all of this, the company is taking a different approach from some of its competitors. In addition, Microsoft also currently has to partner with quantum hardware companies simply because its own quantum hardware efforts haven’t quite reached the point where they are viable. The company is taking a very different approach from the likes of IBM or Rigetti by betting on a different kind of qubit at the core of its machine. And while it has made some breakthroughs in recent months, it doesn’t yet have a working qubit – or if it does, it hasn’t publicly talked about it.

At its Build developer conference, Microsoft today announced that it has teamed up with OpenAI, the startup trying to build a general artificial intelligence with — among other things — a $1 billion investment from Microsoft, to create one of the world’s fastest supercomputers on top of Azure’s infrastructure. Microsoft says that the 285,000-core machine would have ranked in the top five of the TOP500 supercomputer rankings.

Since Microsoft doesn’t actually tell us much more than that, except for a few more specs that say it had 10,000 GPUs and 400 gigabits per second of network connectivity per server, we’ll just have to take Microsoft’s and OpenAI’s word for this.

To be in the top five of supercomputers, a machine would currently have to reach more than 23,000 teraflops per second. It’s also worth noting that the #1 machine, the IBM Power System-based Summit, reaches over 148,000 teraflops, so there is quite a wide margin here. Despite writing a four-page press release about its AI initiatives, Microsoft didn’t share any actual performance numbers.

The company is also not saying how long that machine actually ran — or if it’s still running — and who actually paid for it. Since Microsoft’s massive investment, though, OpenAI has made Azure its cloud of choice and this supercomputer was developed “with and exclusively for OpenAI.”

OpenAI has made a name for itself by training very large models. That’s obviously the purpose of a project like this, too.

“As we’ve learned more and more about what we need and the different limits of all the components that make up a supercomputer, we were really able to say, ‘If we could design our dream system, what would it look like?’” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman . “And then Microsoft was able to build it.”

Microsoft today announced a major new initiative that will finally alleviate some of the persistent confusion around Windows app development. Project Reunion, as it is called, is meant to unify the Windows developer platform, which is currently broken up between Win32, which was long the standard way of building Windows app, and the Universal Windows Platform (UWP), which Microsoft started betting on during the ill-fated Windows 8 era (you may remember UWP under the “Metro-style apps” monicker).

This is a move the company signaled at its 2019 developer conference when Microsoft developer platform chief Kevin Gallo already talked about how developers had to Microsoft that they would like it to “decouple many parts of the Universal Windows Platform so that you can adopt them incrementally.” And that’s pretty much what the company is now doing with Project Reunion.

The idea here is to unify access to the existing Win32 and UWP APIs and decouple them from the operating system, using tools like the .NET package manager NuGet.

“This will provide a common platform for new apps,” Gallo writes in today’s announcement for Project Reunion. “Plus, it will help you update and modernize your existing apps with the latest functionality, whether they’re C++, .NET (including WPF, Windows Forms and UWP) or React Native.”

For now, Project Reunion consists of two components that you’ll be able to get your hands on soon. The first is WinUI 3 Preview 1, the latest preview version of Microsoft’s user interface framework for Windows.  “WithWinUI apps can have modern UI that adapts and scales across devices, regardless of whether building a new project or modernizing an existing app (including C++, WPF, and Windows Forms) incrementally,” explains Gallo.

The second is a new preview of WebView2, which now makes it easy to embed a Chromium-based WebView into Windows Forms, WPF, and UWP/ WinUI 3 apps. WebView 2 is decoupled from the operating system and “will bring the power of the Web to the full spectrum of Windows apps.”

It looks like Microsoft will do most of the work on Project Reunion out in the open by using a GitHub repo to share more about the project and to engage with the developer community.

Microsoft’s strategy around Windows app development has remained a bit chaotic over the last few years.

With UWP, Microsoft also hoped to emulate the app store model that had worked so well on mobile platforms. At the beginning of the Store, apps had to be written with UWP, but if you’re anything like me, you never bothered with the Microsoft Store because except for a few marquee apps and maybe a few games, there wasn’t really any reason to use it (and a lot of apps in it were of questionable quality), so last year, Microsoft already relaxed the requirements and allowed Win32 apps. If anything, today’s announcement is Microsoft’s way of salvaging some of the work on UWP and to bring some of the ideas from that framework to the broader Windows developer platform.

As part of today’s announcements around Windows, Gallo also noted that Windows Terminal 1.0, which allows developers to quickly run any executables — no matter whether it’s from a Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) distro or the Azure Cloud Shell — is now available for enterprise use.

Talking about the Windows Subsystem for Linux, Microsoft also today announced support for GPU compute workflows for Linux tools and support for Linux graphical user interface apps, so you can run a Linux GUI app directly on your Windows Machine without the need for a third-party X server, which was the case until now. Soon, WSL will also feature a simplified install experience that will let you use the ‘wsl.exe – install’ command to install Linux apps on Windows.

Microsoft’s Edge browser is getting a bunch of new features soon. Some of these are for casual users while others are aimed at business users, IT admins and developers, but they all demonstrate that after releasing the first stable version of the browser only recently, the team is now starting to build in new features that it surely hopes will set Edge apart from its competition.

One new feature for more casual users is an integration with Pinterest and Edge’s collections feature. There is an obvious overlap here, since both Pinterest and collections are about allowing people to save links to the research they’ve done online about virtually any topic. Now, Edge will feature a Pinterest-powered tool that will show suggestions from Pinterest at the bottom of a collection. Clicking on that, Microsoft says, will take users to a Pinterest board “of similar, trending Pins so users can quickly find and add ideas relevant to their collection.” Users will also be able to export collections to Pinterest. I’m sure this will prove useful to some, but I personally hope it’s something you can turn off, too.

In addition to the Pinterest integration, collections is also getting the ability to send items to Microsoft’s OneNote note-taking tool, which is in addition to its existing Word and Excel integrations.

These new features for collections are scheduled to launch in the Edge pre-release channels within the next few days.

Also new in Edge is Sidebar Search. This, as the name implies, will allow you to do your searches in the sidebar without having to open a new tab in your main browser window. That sidebar will also be persistent as you move between tabs, making this a nifty idea and something that others will surely emulate over time.

For those of us who often mix business and personal accounts on the same machine and in the same browser, Edge is now introducing automatic profile switching, which can automatically switch your browser profile to your work settings when it detects a link that needs your work credentials.

In a related announcement, Microsoft also said that Edge will now support Windows Information Protection on Windows 10, which separates personal and corporate data and includes audit reporting for compliance. Microsoft says this has been a “top ask by many customers.”

For developers, Microsoft is also launching a couple of new features and tools. One of these is Origin Trials, which will allow developers to test experimental web features on their websites for a set time period with Edge users. These are essentially “prototypes that we haven’t enabled for the general web yet will work on your site for a selection of your visitors in Microsoft Edge, enabling you to gather and provide early feedback which can influence the final API,” Microsoft explains.

Windows developers can also start testing the new WebView2 preview, which now also supports .NET and UWP apps, while it was previously restricted to Win32 programs.

In addition, progressive web apps in Windows are now getting a boost. Users will be able to manage these web apps, when installed from Edge, from the Windows settings, use them to share content and even receive content from other apps. They will also now be included in the Start Menu. For now, this feature is only available to users on the Windows Insider builds and the Edge Canary preview builds — and even then, users have to toggle the “Web Apps Identity Proxy” flag in the browser.

Overall, these are some interesting new additions to Edge’s feature set. Most importantly, though, they show that the team is now starting to release features that go beyond the core browser tools and looking to offer tools that differentiate Edge from its competitors — something it currently doesn’t really do, despite being a very competent Chromium-based browser.

At its (virtual) Build developer conference, Microsoft today announced a slew of updates for its Teams collaboration and communications platform. Given that Microsoft now sees Teams as its hub for teamwork and collaboration through calls, chats, and audio and video meetings, it’s no surprise that it would highlight Teams across today’s announcements.

For the most part, the new features the company is adding to Teams are pretty straightforward.

For users, most of the important updates are around meetings in teams, where you’ll soon be able to schedule, manage and conduct virtual appointments through the Bookings app, for example. On the scheduling side, Teams is also getting new capabilities in the Shifts app, including new triggers and templates to enable auto-approvals for shift requests, for example, when a managers approval isn’t needed.

In the near future, Microsoft will also add a number of customizable templates to Teams to help new users get started. These include many standard business scenarios like event management and crisis response, as well as industry-specific templates for hospitals and bands, for example. The templates include pre-set channels, apps and guidance, the company says.

Soon, Microsoft will also make Power Virtual Agents chatbots available in the Teams app store, which will make creating and managing these bots easier.

Microsoft will also soon enable a new feature that makes it easier to integrated Power Apps and Power Automate business process templates into Teams, and Power BI users will soon be able to quickly share reports to Teams with the click of a single button.

Another new feature that will have a bit more of a niche audience is Network Device Interface (NDI) support – but that niche will be very happy to hear it’s coming. Currently, you can enable a similar feature in Skype, where it allows you to stream Skype interviews with multiple participants through your favorite streaming software and platform (think OBS, Wirecast, etc.). It allows you to receive separate video streams for every participant (though for reasons only known to the Skype team, you only get one audio feed, which makes dealing with any audio delays a nightmare).

Now, this is also coming to teams so that it’ll be easier for companies to create public or private broadcasts based on Teams chats. Teams will also get integrations with Skype TX, the hardware-based Skype solution that’s used by many broadcast networks to conduct remote interviews. NDI support should go live in Teams next month.

It wouldn’t be a Microsoft Build without a bunch of new capabilities for Azure Cognitive Services, Microsoft’s cloud-based AI tools for developers.

The first new feature is what Microsoft calls the “personalized apprentice mode,” which allows the existing Personalizer API to learn about user preferences in real time and in parallel with existing apps, all without being exposed to the user until it reaches pre-set performance goals.

With this update, the Cognitive Services Speech Service, the unified Azure API for speech-to-text, text-to-speech and translation, is coming to 27 new locales and the company promises a 20 percent reduction in word error rates for its speech transcription services. For the Neural Text to Speech service, Microsoft promises that it has reduced the pronunciation error rate by 50 percent and it’s now bringing this service to 11 new locales with 15 new voices, too. It is also adding a pronunciation assessment to the service.

Also new is an addition to QnA Maker, a no-code service that can automatically read FAQs, support websites, product manuals and other documents and turn them into Q&A pairs. In the process, it creates something akin to a knowledge base, which users can now also collaboratively edit with the addition of role-based access control to the service.

In addition, Azure Cognitive Search, a related service that focuses on — you guessed it — search, is also getting a couple of new capabilities. Using the same natural language understanding engine that powers Bing and Microsoft Office, Azure Cognitive Search is now getting a new custom search ranking feature (in preview), that allows users to build their own search rankings based on their specific needs. As Microsoft notes, a home improvement retailer could use this to build its own search ranking system to augment the existing Cognitive Search results.

At its Build developer conference, Microsoft today announced Azure Synapse Link, a new enterprise service that allows businesses to analyze their data faster and more efficiently, using an approach that’s generally called ‘hybrid transaction/analytical processing’ (HTAP). That’s a mouthful, it essentially enables enterprises to use the same database system for analytical and transactional workloads on a single system. Traditionally, enterprises had to make some tradeoffs between either building a single system for both that was often highly over-provisioned or to maintain separate systems for transactional and analytics workloads.

Last year, at its Ignite conference, Microsoft announced Azure Synapse Analytics, an analytics service that combines analytics and data warehousing to create what the company calls “the next evolution of Azure SQL Data Warehouse.” Synapse Analytics brings together data from Microsoft’s services and those from its partners and makes it easier to analyze.

“One of the key things, as we work with our customers on their digital transformation journey, there is an aspect of being data-driven, of being insights-driven as a culture, and a key part of that really is that once you decide there is some amount of information or insights that you need, how quickly are you able to get to that? For us, time to insight and a secondary element, which is the cost it takes, the effort it takes to build these pipelines and maintain them with an end-to-end analytics solution, was a key metric we have been observing for multiple years from our largest enterprise customers,” said Rohan Kumar, Microsoft’s corporate VP for Azure Data.

Synapse Link takes the work Microsoft did on Synaps Analytics a step further by removing the barriers between Azure’s operational databases and Synapse Analytics, so enterprises can immediately get value from the data in those databases without going through a data warehouse first.

“What we are announcing with Synapse Link is the next major step in the same vision that we had around reducing the time to insight,” explained Kumar. “And in this particular case, a long-standing barrier that exists today between operational databases and analytics systems is these complex ETL (extract, transform, load) pipelines that need to be set up just so you can do basic operational reporting or where, in a very transactionally consistent way, you need to move data from your operational system to the analytics system, because you don’t want impact the performance of the operational system in any way because that’s typically dealing with, depending on the system, millions of transactions per second.”

ETL pipelines, Kumar argued, are typically expensive and hard to build and maintain, yet enterprises are now building new apps — and maybe even line of business mobile apps — where any action that consumers take and that is registered in the operational database is immediately available for predictive analytics, for example.

From the user perspective, enabling this only takes a single click to link the two, while it removes the need for managing additional data pipelines or database resources. That, Kumar said, was always the main goal for Synapse Link. “With a single click, you should be able to enable real-time analytics on you operational data in ways that don’t have any impact on your operational systems, so you’re not using the compute part of your operational system to do the query, you actually have to transform the data into a columnar format, which is more adaptable for analytics, and that’s really what we achieved with Synapse Link.”

Because traditional HTAP systems on-premises typically share their compute resources with the operational database, those systems never quite took off, Kumar argued. In the cloud, with Synapse Link, though, that impact doesn’t exist because you’re dealing with two separate systems. Now, once a transaction gets committed to the operational database, the Synapse Link system transforms the data into a columnar format that is more optimized for the analytics system — and it does so in real time.

For now, Synapse Link is only available in conjunction with Microsoft’s Cosmos DB database. As Kumar told me, that’s because that’s where the company saw the highest demand for this kind of service, but you can expect the company to add support for available in Azure SQL, Azure Database for PostgreSQL and Azure Database for MySQL in the future.