Microsoft continues push in Open Source, Bots, AI & Deep Learning

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At Microsoft we have these fantastic moments where we deliver so much innovation at the same time that it becomes difficult to capture all the great things we are doing.  So here is just a small sample of some amazing things we announced in the last couple of weeks and at Connect today.

Open Source

Let me start with probably the biggest announcement we made today, Microsoft is joining the Linux Foundation as a Platinum member.  Read all about this incredible announcement here: https://bit.ly/2f4H69Z. 

This is fantastic news that fortifies our commitment to the Linux community.  Some important steps were already taken as we have open-sourced several core technologies such as .NET Core and PowerShell to make them available cross-platform. 

We have announced the public preview of SQL Server on Linux today at Connect.  SQL Server has been the leading operational database platform for the last couple of years and we are really excited to expand this beyond the Windows platform.  To learn more about SQL Server on Linux please visit https://bit.ly/2f0CsXu.

Both Google and Samsung announced that they will be joining the .NET Foundation, read their announcements here: https://bit.ly/2fFYHU6 and https://bit.ly/2ghjv7N.

Bots

We are really humbled by the number of people working on our Bot Framework announced earlier this year.  Bots allow you to interact with users where they are, whether it is your website or app, Facebook Messenger, Skype, Slack, Microsoft Teams or several other popular services.  In order to support everyone in this journey and making it easier for you to start, we have announced the industry’s first Cloud Bot-as-a-Service: https://bit.ly/2fwgEa4. 

AI / Deep learning / Big Data / Cognitive Services

Microsoft has always been about democratizing technology and for us AI should not be an exception to our mission.  Please read more about how Microsoft is enabling AI for every person and organization at https://bit.ly/2fEwpJB.

In order to push AI and machine learning forward we also understand the fundamental investments that are needed in Deep Learning.  Over the last couple of months we have announced several important advancements and partnerships in this area.

  • Microsoft expands artificial intelligence (AI) efforts with creation of new Microsoft AI and Research Group with 5000 engineers: https://bit.ly/2gg5mZp
  • How Bing and Azure are using an AI supercomputer in the cloud: https://bit.ly/2fU2LR8
  • The Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit is a free, open-source toolkit that trains deep learning algorithms: https://bit.ly/2fkaydw      
  • Leading genome research center migrates to DNANexus on Azure: https://bit.ly/2fw7Oc8
  • Microsoft and OpenAI are joining forces as OpenAI will run most of its large-scale experiments on Azure: https://bit.ly/2eX8jZ6
  • How Uber is using Cognitive Services to improve security: https://wapo.st/2cZDRzh

At Connect we also announced the general availability of our Azure Data Lake Services and R Server for HDInsight.  Azure Data Lake Store is the first cloud Data Lake store for enterprises that is secure, massively scalable and built on the open HDFS standard.  Azure Data Lake Analytics allows you to easily develop and run massively parallel data transformation and processing programs using U-SQL over petabytes of data.  Using R Server for HDInsight you can achieve incredible scale by combining the power and familiarity of R and power of Apache Spark.  The HDInsight family is also getting a new member with the preview of Kafka on HDInsight, the open source distributed streaming platform.  For more information about The Intelligent Lake and our HDInsight improvements check out https://bit.ly/2ghCq36. 

Enjoy!