In the News

Dartmouth College computer science professor Hany Farid, using funding from Microsoft, has developed technology to help scrub extremist content from the internet. Working with the nonprofit think tank Counter Extremism Project, Farid built software capable of identifying and tracking photo, video and audio files, even if they’ve been altered. The unveiled software would allow websites such as Facebook to automatically catch flagged content and remove it or prevent it from being uploaded.

Microsoft has opened its largest centre of excellence for the oil & gas industry in Dubai, to assist organizations in the sector to drive digital transformation, cut costs and optimization of their operations. The new centre will help companies in the sector take advantage of the latest trends such as the Internet of Things, advanced analytics, modern productivity and cloud computing using Microsoft technologies like Microsoft Azure and Office 365. “Digital transformation is top of mind for Executives in the oil and gas industry, which is why we built the centre of excellence in the Middle East,” said Omar Saleh, Director for Oil and Gas, Microsoft, Middle East and Africa.

The list of Xbox 360 games backwards compatible with the Xbox One has now reached 200 titles with the addition of fan favorites Portal 2 and Left 4 Dead. Additionally, support was also added for Flashback, Brain Challenge and Babel Rising. Support for multi-disc games was added last month, starting with Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Since Project Scorpio will be compatible with all Xbox One titles, it’s very likely that backwards compatible 360 games will carry over as well.

Microsoft has been selected as the technical partner for HRD ministry’s SWAYAM (Study Webs of Active-Learning for Young Aspiring Minds) platform that will launch 2,000 massive open online courses (MOOC) for over three crore students this year. Sources said the technology giant will deploy a team of dedicated people to set up the state-of-the-art application for which Microsoft and All India Council of Technical Education has signed a deal of Rs 38 crore. Microsoft will be running the app for three years after which it will be taken over by AICTE.

Microsoft has released a new research project called Checked C that extends the existing C language. The new offering emerges as an open source solution to detect and prevent common programming errors. Unlike developing an all new language for the developer world, Microsoft Research has modified the original C to offer programmers some new pointer and array types through its Checked C extension. The project itself is written in C language and is available under the MIT License.

Microsoft acquired California-based Wand Labs, a start-up which builds messaging technology for apps. It was founded in 2013 by IIT-Delhi alumnus Vishal Sharma. David Ku, Corporate Vice President, Information Platform Group, Microsoft, said, “This acquisition accelerates our vision and strategy for ‘Conversation as a Platform’ which Satya Nadella introduced at our Build 2016 conference.”

Xbox head, Phil Spencer spoke about the future of the console, gaming on Windows and the role that Steam plays on Windows. Speaking of Steam, Spencer said that Steam has seen incredible growth and that he foresees the growth of the platform even 5 years hence. When asked about publishing games on Steam however, he said that eventually, some more Microsoft games might end up on it.

Microsoft announced that it has acquired three-year-old messaging-app maker Wand Labs. The company said that the acquisition would “accelerate its vision and strategy for Conversation as a Platform.” Unveiled at the company’s Build 2016 conference in March, Conversation embeds AI bots into Cortana to let users access third-party services within a chat. Wand Labs would boost Microsoft’s ability to offer more in this space, given the former’s experience with “third-party developer integration and conversational interfaces”.

Microsoft is partnering with a startup that makes software for the booming legal cannabis industry. Los Angeles-based Kind Financial said that Microsoft will help it market its software to local and state government agencies that monitor marijuana growers or distributors for compliance with regulations governing pot production and sales. Kind’s software will run on Microsoft’s “Azure Government” cloud, a network that provides online services for public agencies.

At a White House event honoring clean energy innovators, Primus Power and Microsoft announced a program to advance energy storage at datacenters globally. The program will be carried out in collaboration with NRG Energy, the University of Texas at San Antonio, and battery technology providers, including Primus Power. Robert Bernard, Chief Environmental Strategist, Microsoft, said, “Datacenters are the engine that drives the Microsoft Cloud, and we are committed to investing in innovation breakthroughs at our datacenters that can help improve energy efficiency. By using high performance batteries, we can improve both energy efficiency, as well as our ability to use variable energy sources like wind and solar power.”