End of Year Recap: Top Posts of 2017
I would like to share my most popular LinkedIn posts of 2017. I much shared this year about artificial intelligence, digital transformation, hololens, computer vision, gaming. Will the trend continue next year? Only time will tell.
January
Uber, Airbnb, Amazon, Apple, PayPal. All of these companies disrupted their markets when they launched, what’s the secret to their success? these cutting-edge businesses are built on platforms: two-sided markets that are revolutionizing the way we do business.
Are we ready for Artificial Intelligence?
The new era has started: cloud and machine learning technologies are making our collaboration with “computers” more intuitive, more conversational, more intelligent, and ultimately much more embedded in all our lives. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is already centered around advancements in AI. And all companies are becoming digitally AI-enabled, or they will soon be.
An amazing future is therefore ahead of us, where AI will create new businesses in ways previously unimaginable and will help us to solve some of the planet’s biggest challenges. It is just amazing, wonderful, and sometimes overwhelming, but… are we ready for Artificial Intelligence?
February
Technology comes to the rescue in migrant crisis
An increasing number of refugees and migrants need international protection, fleeing war, violence and persecution, and this is echoed in the numbers recorded in Italy. Last year, more than 180,000 refugees arrived in Italy by sea alone, with, sadly four percent of total asylum requests coming from unaccompanied minors. On the back of a wave of strong emotion in this post I’m investigating the possibility of using the cognitive service for humanitarian purposes. In this scenario I used a Microsoft Cognitive Service, in details I tried the Face recognition to help a national coastguard to identify the number of migrants arriving in boats. Face recognition service identifies the number of faces contained in an image.
Microsoft House, the new address for innovation in Italy
The big day is coming! Tomorrow, February 15th, in the heart of Milan, we will officially open our new home: Microsoft House.
March
Canonical and Microsoft have been working closely for the last few years, the engineering teams at both the entities are already collaborating on many fronts. Ubuntu was one of the first Linux distributions to get an official endorsement to run on Azure.
So since Windows 10 Anniversary Update among the new features it brings is Bash for Windows, an Ubuntu-based tool that lets you run familiar Linux apps on Windows natively.
IBM Watson Services vs Microsoft Cognitive Services
Might be the greatest match ever IBM Watson Services vs Microsoft Cognitive Services. I would like to take the liberty of mentioning a personal view concerning the innovative use of these services.
HoloLens transform your business
HoloLens has sensors capable of capturing information about what you are doing and about the environment in which it is located. It is capable of real-time mapping the physical environment around the wearer to it is able to interact directly with it. To activate, grab and resize virtual objects, you need to reach out and bend your index finger in a very specific way to air-tap them. You can also just speak to the headset, issuing voice commands and Microsoft’s Cortana personal assistant recognizes your command.
HoloLens allows you to enter the world of Mixed Reality where people, places and objects of the physical and virtual world to come together in a single mixed environment.
April
The Surface Laptop is basically Microsoft’s direct competitor to the MacBook Air and lower-end Mac Book Pros
Microsoft’s Build Developer’s conference will be a showcase for its AI technologies.
May
In the AI wars, Microsoft now has the clearer vision. Microsoft held its Build developer conference in its backyard in Seattle. Microsoft’s event felt like it embodied the resurgence of the company under the leadership of Satya Nadella.
Microsoft’s Linux strategy is based on 3 points:
1) developer platform: Windows10
2) cloud: Azure
3) data center: Windows Server
Deep learning has revolutionized artificial intelligence (AI) over the past few years. Following Microsoft’s vision that AI shall be accessible for all instead of a few elite companies, we created the Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit (CNTK), an open source deep learning toolkit free for anyone to use. Today, it is the third most popular deep learning toolkit in terms of GitHub stars, behind TensorFlow and Caffe, and ahead of MxNet, Theano, Torch, etc.
June
Xbox One X, Microsoft’s new and most powerful console for gaming, has finally been revealed at the E3 !
Microsoft is sponsoring Pride events in 29 cities this year — the most to date — from Charlotte to Copenhagen, Toronto to Tokyo.
How Microsoft researchers used AI to master Ms. Pac-Man
Microsoft researchers have created an artificial intelligence-based system that learned how to get the maximum score on the addictive 1980s video game Ms. Pac-Man, using a divide-and-conquer method that could have broad implications for teaching AI agents to do complex tasks that augment human capabilities.
Artificial Intelligence: its best usage to improve our world
Thanks to Artificial Intelligence, it is now possible to create solutions where technology understand the real world, by making it intelligent and teaching it how to interact in more human and personal ways, thus facilitating the daily interactions of blind or partially sighted people
July
Growth Mindset Introduction: What it is, How it Works, and Why it Matters
Challenges are what make life interesting. Overcoming them is what makes life meaningful
From banks and hospitals to smart cities and manufacturing – there’s a digital transformation for all of us
August
Microsoft unveils Project Brainwave for real-time AI
Internet giants like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon are exploring a wide range of chip technologies that can drive AI forward based on chip produced by Intel and nVidia.Microsoft announced Brainwave, Brainwave consists of a high-performance distristributed system architecture; a hardware deep-neural network engine running on customizable chips known as field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs); and a compiler and runtime for deployment of trained models.
Technology meets football: from tracking players’ movements across the pitch, to using data to analyze opponents game plans, or using the cloud to make sure fans across the globe never miss a moment.
We are living in a golden age of AI advances. Every day, it seems like computer scientists are making more progress in areas such as computer vision, deep learning, speech and natural language processing, areas of AI research that have challenged the field’s foremost experts for decades.
The world’s largest technology companies hold the keys to some of the largest databases on our planet. Much like goods and coins before it, data is becoming an important currency for the modern world.
The data’s value is rooted in its applications to artificial intelligence. Whichever company owns the data, effectively owns AI.
Companies like Facebook, Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, DeepMind and Apple have a ton of data.
These companies announced the launch of the new Partnership on AI.
September
Subsea cable across the Atlantic
More than 17,000 feet below the ocean’s surface providing up to 160 terabits of data per second, beating Google’s alternative !!! The cable is the handiwork of Facebook, Microsoft, and Spanish telecommunication company Telxius. Construction on the cable, which stretches 4,000 miles from Virginia Beach, Virginia to Bilbao, Spain, began in August 2016. Microsoft announced its completion on Thursday.
Microsoft’s Digital Advisory Team story & experience
At the 3rd Communication & PR Summit in Barcelona, we had the chance to share with 40 Top Executive in the Communication coming across the world our Microsoft’s Digital Advisory Team story and experience as a sort of startup.
The Artificial Intelligence applied to the Internet of Things
The Artificial Intelligence applied to the Internet of Things creates intelligent worlds from the physical world. Internet connectivity can be coupled with p2p connectivity, where the intelligent objects talk, chat, agree, implement distributed algorithms. To manage the decentralization of connectivity comes into play the blockchain.
October
The biggest open source company
Yes, that’s right: Microsoft is the world’s biggest open source company measured by contributors and by a wide margin
The Xbox One X is finally here. It’s the world’s most powerful console !
November
The adoption of AI in business and society is being spurred on by tech giants with resources to design, build and roll out services affordable and simple enough for everyday use. Microsoft is one of those at the forefront. This year, the words Artificial Intelligence appeared in a vision statement for the first time, reaffirming that smart, learning machines are considered central to everything they do.
I fell in love with “ikigai”, so I did a little recon, gathered a little intel. Find your “ikigai” and you will never work a day in your life
It was kicked off by launching a video of Stephen Hawking talking about how computing power is growing each day and quantum computing is starting to become a next computing phenomenon.
At International VDI Conference
Smart Construction Equipment 2017 (held at Munich, Germany) myself had one conference speech, focused on how the AI is able to increase the safety on construction sites. So here are the main concepts
December
The most cool “Hello World” sample ever! Learn about the structure of a Q# project and how to write the quantum equivalent of “Hello, world!” a quantum teleport application
The new Microsoft Translator advances build on last year’s switch to deep neural network-powered machine translations, which offer more fluent, human-sounding translations than the predecessor technology known as statistical machine translation
Don’t know if you heard, Microsoft users have been able to use their bitcoin to purchase content in the Windows and Xbox stores. Microsoft was also behind the launch of Azure Blockchain as a service platform that allowed large-scale businesses to use blockchain to facilitate the settlement of financial data. More recently, Microsoft announced that it was adapting Excel 2017 so users can calculate, format, and analyze bitcoin on the platform.
Microsoft supports Ethereum Blockchain
Microsoft has decided to support the Ethereum Blockchain by launching its own new framework called the Confidential Consortium (COCO) Framework. The framework is based on the Ethereum protocol and will allow large companies and organizations to operate on the Ethereum Blockchain. link in the comments
Thank you, all, for sharing your thoughts and helping drive the conversation on how to advance the digital transformation in the world. I know that many of you are on the front lines of this topic and that it’s something you work on, live through, and think about every day. Your feedback is invaluable, and I look forward to reading each of your comments, I hope you have a great New Year.
“If you want something you’ve never had, You must be willing to do something you’ve never done.”
