Research

Data centers are growing worldwide due to the need for cloud services. The operator’s goal is to use environmentally friendly energy and sustainable concepts. Microsoft tested “Project Natick” for two years in the waters of Orkney Islands in North Scotland. More than two years ago, the Microsoft Project Natick team deployed the container 35 meters deep to the seafloor. At the test site, the grid there is supplied 100% by wind and solar. The project also aims at how data centers can use energy more sustainably. Another goal is the need to have smaller data centers closer to the customer, at least where this is technically possible. ...

Microsoft AI Labs has some nice projects to try out on their website. One is the Sketch2Code project. “Sketch2Code uses AI to convert hand-written drawings to working HTML prototypes.” Let´s try it out! The Microsoft AI Lab projects website shows a bunch of interesting projects. Some of them are probably known, others are worth to explore. The Sketch2Code website informs about the project: Transform any hands-drawn design into a HTML code with AI. Kindly, there´s also a lab that demonstrates how to use Azure Custom Vision to create an application that is capable of transforming a hand-drawn user interface into valid HTML markup available at Sketch2Code Lab! ...

Microsoft’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) allows to analyze large amount of data, even interpreting and indexing handwritten documents and learning key topics. In the Microsoft AI.Lab, engineers combined Azure Search and Cognitive Services to analyze more than 34,000 pages and scanned evidence photos related to the assassination of US president John F. Kennedy in 1963 that went public. Read more about burning questions and see the results online. Many secret JFK files have been released in 2017, but there were too much information and too much unstructured data to go through. So, modern technology helps to analyze the data and to deliver relevant details. The Microsoft AI.Lab project is using Cognitive Search that is powered by Azure Search with built in Cognitive Services: “It pulls data from almost any data source and applies a set of composable cognitive skills which extract knowledge”. This approach allows to get answers and relationships in context with the original documents. ...