Monthly Archives: May 2020

Innovaccer, a healthcare technology company, is focused on helping doctors, hospitals, and other players in healthcare talk to one another.

That's a tougher task than it might seem. The electronic medical records systems in use across the US often don't make it easy to transfer information, leaving physicians notoriously reliant on fax machines.

Innovaccer was started in 2014 to help solve this problem. The company provides platforms that help healthcare providers exchange information about their patients in real time. Its latest offering is called InAPI, and works by giving healthcare companies a common language to use for digital health information, which tends to vary across health records systems, hospitals, and doctors groups.

The technology is timely. The way hospitals handle data has proved inefficient for many, as the novel coronavirus flooded their emergency departments, labs, and critical care wings with patients, and they were asked to quickly report more data to regulators.

The US Department of Health and Human Services has also passed rules requiring providers to share health information with patients and health insurers, using a standard known as Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR, pronounced like fire).

It dictates how patient data should be coded in computers. Companies like Innovaccer, Change Healthcare, and Orion Health are helping with the transition.

"Left on its own, the industry will move at a slower pace," said Mark Hetz, a senior research director at the Advisory Board. "But when these things start to become a requirement, or it's clear that this is the standard that everyone should be adopting, that takes the risk out of it and people move more quickly."

Innovaccer's CTO Mike Sutten Innovaccer

Innovaccer's new platform uses FHIR give doctors and consensual third parties, including payers, app makers, and researchers, access to data that's all in the same place,according to Mike Sutten, the chief technology officer.

"We spent a decade digitizing the records," said Sutten.

The next challenge is "getting all those functions and people that are involved in caring for a person to operate as one," he said.

Read more: The US teamed up with Palantir on a secretive project to analyze coronavirus data. Now, they want to gather personal health information, too.

The San Francisco-based startup works with more than 25,000 providers typically mid-sized health systems like Connecticut's Hartford Healthcare and collaborates with cloud businesses like Microsoft Azure, according to the company.

To date, Innovaccer has raised $120 million from the likes of Microsoft's M12, Tiger Global, and Westbridge, a spokesperson told Business Insider.

The company deals with application programming interfaces, or APIs, which are common ways for applications to talk to one another. They're commonly used across the internet, for instance to let online shoppers buy merchandise through PayPal or view the weather on Google instead of a weather site.

But APIs can be messy in the world of healthcare, and Innovaccer's role is to make them more uniform.

Innovaccer's platform reaches into health systems' computers and pulls their patient data onto a cloud-based environment like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, where its APIs are wrestled into submission.

Once there, everything from simple details, like patients' birthdays, to more complex ones, like how blood sugar is recorded, is standardized and sent back to the providers' servers.

Through the platform, Innovaccer can make patients' comprehensive medical history available to providers, no matter what kind of electronic health records, claims systems, or insurance companies are used, Sutten said.

The data it collects on the cloud can be shared by patients with other doctors and hospitals, health insurers, or apps, as long as they give permission, Sutten said. Innovaccer is hoping that aggregation leads to public health benefits.

"After that is when the users get to take advantage of it. Whether they use some of the applications we have built for care management, or whether they could build their own applications," Sutten said.

Health insurers could use the platform to more efficiently determine what services a patient received and how sick they are, Sutten said. And Innovaccer has created tools that show doctors things like what a patients' insurance covers, according to Sutten.

But the implications extend beyond traditional stakeholders. Innovaccer is thinking of ways the data could help people lead healthier lifestyles through partnerships with apps or health systems.

"We make it very personal," Sutten said. "We find out, do they have care at home? Do they have transportation? Do they have access to healthy food? All those things go into caring for a population," he said.

While regulatory changes were also at play, the pandemic has underscored the need for greater interoperability, according to the Advisory Board's Hetz.

That's the ability for computer systems, in this case healthcare computer systems, to talk to each other and to external servers, broadly speaking.

"I think there are a lot of organizations out there that wish they had invested more in skills development and such around FHIR so they could respond more quickly," Hetz said in the interview.

Hospitals have been struggling to meet the coronavirus reporting requirements to health officials due to various technical challenges, including limited interoperability, as Business Insider reported.

Meanwhile, those that can help make sense of the data have been busier than ever.

Orion Health, a healthcare software company, has been implementing FHIR-compliant telehealth, triage, and patient portals for hospitals across Europe as providers looked for ways to better handle so many coronavirus patients, according to Chris Lucas, vice president of Orion's clinical portals.

"Being able to enable an outcome where you can aggregate all this information is pretty powerful," Lucas said. "I do feel that the situation is changing people's perceptions as to how important it is to have that joined record," he said.

Change Healthcare offers similar services and recently shared its APIs free of charge to health plans, according to CEO Neil de Crescenzo and vice president of healthcare platforms, Gautam Shah.

Shah said the pandemic probably hasn't accelerated healthcare groups' transition to FHIR as much as it's increased their appreciation for data management in the long-term.

"They're still thinking about how to care for the patients that are coming through their doors," he said in an interview.

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A health startup backed by Microsoft has raised $120 million for a new approach to patient data, and the technology is poised to upend the way doctors...

Kissing and making up?

Fisticuffs can be far more energizing than everyone just getting along.

In recent times, therefore, it's been uplifting to see Google and Microsoft spitefully sniping at each other over the latter's new Edge browser.

Should you have been unaccountably detained by the nefarious authorities lately, you may not know that the minute Edge received praise, Google sniffed that it wasn't secure.

To which Microsoft offered this notice to Edge users who drifted to the Chrome Web Stor: "Extensions installed from sources other than the Microsoft Store are unverified, and may affect browser performance."

There was potential here for a few episodes of Real Browsers of Silicon Valley.

Suddenly, though, there appears to have been a disturbing rapprochement. Techdows spotted that Edge users are now being encouraged to go to the Chrome Web Store. Yes, the same place that apparently harbors extensions that are unverified and may give your browser indigestion.

I confess I'm especially disturbed by the wording that's now being tossed at Edge users: "You can also find great extensions at the Chrome Web Store."

Not merely extensions, but great extensions. I'm tempted to suspect a lawyer may have written that. Or at least someone in the Google marketing department.

Naturally, I asked Microsoft why it had suddenly lurched from prickly to cuddly. Could it be that Google and Microsoft had a kiss-and-make-up Zoom call -- I mean, a Microsoft Teams call? Or a Google Meet encounter? Microsoft declined to comment.

Perhaps, you might think, Microsoft has stopped to play nice merely because that's its brand image these days. Or perhaps some Redmonder stopped to think that, indeed, Edge doesn't currently enjoy enough of its own extensions.

My delvings into Redmond's innards suggest the latter may have driven the decision even more than the former. You really don't want to annoy your customers, do you? Especially when you can't currently offer them what they need.

Of course, Edge is based on Google's Chromium platform. In my own experimentations, I've found it to be a more pleasant experience than Chrome. Just that little bit more responsive and generally brighter -- though I can't quite cope with Bing as my default search engine.

Then again, I just looked at my Outlook email inbox and Microsoft is getting prickly again.

"The new browser recommended by Microsoft is here. Let's go," sniffs an oddly prominent banner above my emails.

Oh, let's stop.

I've already downloaded Edge. I still mostly use Firefox, though. Microsoft, if you can be nice to Google, can't you be nice to me and leave me alone?

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Microsoft is suddenly recommending Google products and I'm worried - ZDNet

Microsoft is rolling out a new reply-all protection feature for Office 365 and Exchange Online. Its designed to prevent email storms (reply allpocalypse), when hundreds or thousands of people start replying to an email thread after someone forgot to BCC everyone or a distribution list was misconfigured.

The new block feature will mostly benefit large organizations, and is initially being rolled out to detect 10 reply-all emails to over 5,000 recipients within 60 minutes. Over time, as we gather usage telemetry and customer feedback, we expect to tweak, fine-tune, and enhance the Reply All Storm Protection feature to make it even more valuable to a broader range of Office 365 customers, explains Microsofts Exchange transport team.

Reply-all email storms are a problem that affect businesses large and small, and have been occurring for decades. Microsoft had its own infamous incident back in 1997, which employees fondly refer to as Bedlam DL3. Around 25,000 people were on a distribution list and kept replying to the thread, generating 15,000,000 email messages and 195 gigabytes of data. The incident overwhelmed Microsofts own Exchange mail servers, and the company rolled out a message recipient limit in Exchange to try and tackle future problems.

Microsoft still suffers from reply-all email storms, though. Last year a GitHub notification triggered an email storm for thousands of Microsoft employees. Back in March, thousands of Microsoft employees were also caught in a reply-all email thread that was quickly shut down within 30 minutes.

Microsofts new reply-all email block feature will stay in place for four hours after its automatically triggered, enough time to stop people from asking why am I on this email thread? hundreds of times. The new feature appears to be working for Microsofts own employees. Humans still behave like humans no matter which company they work for, says the Exchange team. Were already seeing the first version of the feature successfully reduce the impact of reply-all storms within Microsoft.

See the article here:

Microsoft now blocks reply-all email storms to end our inbox nightmares - The Verge

As the pandemic began to spread across the globe, it has changed the way millions of us consume content and work. Cloud-based working platforms like Microsoft Teams and Slack have seen a massive surge in users, and gaming platforms like Xbox Live and PlayStation Network have also seen record growth.

One other area that has seen record numbers is video game streaming platforms. A recent report from StreamElements detailed how various platforms such as Facebook Gaming, YouTube Gaming, Twitch, and others, have reported triple-figure year-over-year growth, owing in part to pandemic. One very notable elephant in the room is Microsoft's Mixer platform, which remains utterly, tragically flat.

While the industry as a whole effectively doubled year-over-year, Mixer's own growth remained flat, at a measly 0.2 percent year-over-year. Without the pandemic, it's not hard to envision that Mixer would have shrunk during this period instead, suggesting to me that the platform has a serious issue retaining users.

Microsoft may need a miracle here.

Mixer was always the underdog going into this battle. Facebook and YouTube have utterly massive established audiences they can leverage to soak up users, and Twitch remains the dominant force in the space, with the lion's share of the industry's "celebrities." Mixer also has a fair amount of systemic problems, with platform instability anecdotally often cited to me as a reason people don't stick around.

Pulling in big names like Ninja and Shroud doesn't seem to have helped the platform grow as a whole, particularly when you consider the fact other platforms are also splashing the cash around. YouTube brought up exclusive rights to the entire Activision-Blizzard streaming esports operation, alongside etching a deal with YouTube heavyweight Pewdiepie for streaming shows.

The future of Mixer truly remains uncertain. As anyone following Microsoft for any length of time will know, the company generally doesn't stick it out with a failing product for very long. Microsoft may be able to turn the tide, particularly if future games like Halo Infinite manage to rack up a healthy exclusive esports presence. That said, typically Xbox has been putting its shows across all platforms, rather than on Mixer exclusively.

Will Mixer survive? Right now, it's not looking great, but who knows? As a fan of the service, I hope it does, but Microsoft may need a miracle here.

Related: Best Webcams for Streaming in 2020

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As the streaming industry booms, Microsoft's Mixer remains dead in the water - Windows Central

There are many things that are ironic in the IT business. Too many to count, some days. And maybe it is just because many of us are attending the virtual Open Compute Summit driven in large part by Facebook and Microsoft (still). But it looks like momentum is building for the SONiC network operating system, launched four years ago at the Open Compute Summit by Microsoft and open sourced under the auspices of what had been, until that moment, an organization largely devoted to open source hardware. Not software.

The world is a funny place, indeed. Incumbent switch makers created the most recent iterations of their network operating systems from Unix kernels and, later, Linux kernels. IOS from Cisco Systems dates back more than three decades and is its own beast, but its follow-on, NX-OS for the Nexus line of switches, is based on Linux, just like Arista Networks EOS network operating system is. JunOS from Juniper Networks is based on FreeBSD, but has its own hooks to Linux. And of course, Cumulus Networks, which was just acquired by Nvidia in the wake of its $6.9 billion acquisition of switch, NIC, and chip maker Mellanox Technologies at the end of April, is based on Linux and so are the Mellanox MLNX-OS and Onyx switch operating systems. The hyperscalers and large cloud builders have created their own NOSes as well, as far as we know all based on Linux, and finally there is Arrcus, which has created a homegrown routing and switch operating system called ArcOS from scratch with its own kernel.

Microsoft created SONiC not because it wanted to embrace Linux on its switches, but because it had no choice. There was no real benefit to trimming down a Windows Server kernel to be the heart of a switch operating system and there was every reason to use the substantial Linux expertise in the world to make a NOS that could run all of its Azure cloud infrastructure connectivity. And that, according to Dave Maltz, distinguished engineer at Microsofts Azure Networking division, is what has finally happened. At the virtual Open Compute Summit today, Maltz said that the Azure Networking service is now running SONiC top to bottom, and significantly it can run not just top of rack switches, but modular rack switches that are used to create a giant logical switch out of line cards that are essentially the same as a top of racker but with a backplane lashing them all together.

According to Maltz, more than ten of the hyperscalers and cloud builders and a number of large enterprises have all adopted SONiC as their switch operating system, with Microsoft and Alibaba being the two biggies that are on the record.

When Microsoft launched SONiC and its companion Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI) back in 2016, it started out with modest Layer 2 and Layer 3 switching functions running in containers atop a Linux kernel with a Redis database for telemetry. The software ran on several ASICs, including Broadcoms Trident 2, Mellanoxs Spectrum, Caviums XPliant (now part of Marvell), and Centec Networks GoldenGate; these were used predominantly for 40 Gb/sec switches, and there were a handful of options. In the following year, Broadcoms Tomahawk and Tomahawk 2 ASICs were added as well as Marvells Prestera and Barefoot Networks Tofino, and these additions were for 100 Gb/sec switches and there were around 16 different platforms available. RDMA and QoS features were added to the SONiC stack as was management via Swarm (the old Docker tool). In 2018, there was another big jump with SONiC as virtualization was added to container support and warm reboot (in under 1 second) was added along with streaming telemetry and a new config database. Arm compute support was added, and the platform list grew to 31 unique machines, including those based on the Taurus chip from Nephos, the Helix 4, Trident 2, and Tomahawk 3 chips from Broadcom, and the Lacrosse chip from Cisco (used in the high-end Nexus 9000 switches). Last year, support for SONiC on the Broadcom Jericho and Jericho 2 deep buffer switch ASICs was added, as was support for Innoviums Teralynx 7, Marvells Falcon, and Mellanoxs Spectrum 2 ASICs. The base of platforms grew to 69 different machines, and significantly, Microsoft worked with the SONiC community to add in support for modular switches, which Maltz calls chassis switches. Cisco has added its Silicon One merchant router chip to this list earlier this year, and there are no doubt others we have not heard about as yet.

This is an incredible ramp when you consider that Cumulus Networks only supported Broadcom and Mellanox ASICs and Arrcus is focusing on the Broadcom families at this point. Granted, the Broadcom ASICs get you something on the order of 65 percent of the datacenter switch market share at this point, so you have to be making money or be a highly motivated open source collective to add all of these other ASICs to the hardware abstraction list.

Of course, that was precisely the point when Microsoft created SONiC and SAI and then turned around and open sourced it and donated it to the Open Compute Project community. And today, according to Maltz, there are 3.84 million ports in the worldwide base of Ethernet ports that are being driven by SONiC. Thats many billions of dollars worth of switches, any way you want to cut it.

And now the telcos, service providers, and enterprises are probably going to follow suit. Maltz says that eBay is evaluating the use of SONiC in its networks, and Comcast is looking at using SONiC-based gear at the datacenter core. French Internet advertising broker Criteo is going to be using SONiC switches exclusively in 2020 and beyond, and retailer Target (which has had famous network security issues in the past that hammered its stock) is going to adapt SONiC network gear as well.

It is not surprising, then, that someone is stepping up to offer a supported SONiC distribution. And in fact, Dell Technologies and Apstra both announced formal SONiC distributions and enterprise support engagements today at the virtual Open Compute event.

In January 2016, only months before Microsoft dropped the SONiC bomb, Dell open sourced its own FTOS OS10 network operating system, which it got by virtue of its acquisition of switch maker Force10 Networks in the summer of 2011. Dell kept its hand in the OpenSwitch (OPX) project it spawned; it also participated in the SONiC community started by Microsoft and was an early adopter of Cumulus Linux on its switch gear.

We had our feet in two different puddles, Drew Schulke, vice president of networking at Dell Technologies, tells The Next Platform. What it really comes down to, as is the case with a great many open source projects, is that you look and see who has the gravitational pull, who gets the customer adoption, who gets the ecosystem support. And our call about a year ago was that SONiC was winning that battle and was going to be declared the victor. We didnt drop OpenSwitch like a bad habit, but spun it into the Linux Foundation and made it part of the broader Open Networking Linux project. But our focus going forward is very much going to be on the SONiC side.

One of the selling points of SONiC, says Schulke, is that it is container friendly from the get-go, which means that companies can add their own secret sauce to it without mucking about in the base NOS kernel and having to upstream code into the Linux kernel. (Imagine that.) And based on its Azure heritage, it is very good at Layer 3 underlays and Layer 3 fabrics using an EVPN overlay. But Dell will be working on adding more Layer 2 functionality in the coming months as well as Multicast, IGMP snooping, Uplink Failure Detection, and eventually the Open Shortest Path First routing protocol. These additions to SONiC will be open sourced by Dell, incidentally. The Enterprise SONiC Distribution by Dell Technologies is the formal name of the Dell rollup of SONiC that is sanctioned by Microsoft, and it will be generally available in the third quarter with those additional Layer 2 features with support contracts of one, three, or five years. Pricing will scale by the bandwidth of the switch, with it costing in the range of a couple of thousand dollars per switch per year.

The rest of the SONiC community has its own ideas about what to do in the future.

We are working on deploying SONiC at the edge for 5G deployments to places where we need to put computing right up next to the wireless edge so it can be close to the consumers and producers of that information, Maltz explained in his keynote address. SONiC will be there offering a trusted base platform that can be used to bootstrap securely all the other infrastructure necessary at the edge. Were doing SONiC-based load balancers rather than having a proprietary load balancer that has to be a specialized box in your network architecture. Running SONiC on top of existing network ASICs you probably already have can to offer Layer 4 load balancing, again bringing load balancers into the same network management framework you already have for the rest of your network devices. We have ideas about managing SONiC via Kubernetes, which is a great platform for deploying cloud services, and managing SONiC through Kubernetes means you can leverage the abilities already present in your software team, enabling you to deploy new containers to those switches so you can innovate faster and more safely and using the frameworks that your engineers are already used to. Were looking at how we can take machine learning and apply that to Sonic into the management of networks. One of the hardest problems every network operator has to deal with determining whether their network is healthy or not. And if its not, whats the problem? Leveraging the ability of SONiC to expose new telemetry from the switches to do flexible computation on those switches themselves and send that data back to larger networks and systems which can then do machine learning and analysis. Other communities working to build better network management solutions that will make it easier to have a healthy and reliable network. Were also taking Sonic, the other team, and running it open to some of the biggest switches in the network. Were taking it down onto the individual servers using Sonic as a management platform for SmartNICs, providing flexible ways of offloading network transformation from the server to the SmartNIC, but yet still managing that SmartNIC as if it was a network switch something that many of us are. Companies already have software automation systems that can handle. And of course, one of the challenges weve talked about in the past was making good on now is taking Sonic out to the very largest switches is in the network those that run the wide area network so SONiC can truly be the one network operating system from backbone switches down through our datacenters to the 5G edge and all the way onto our servers as part of that SmartNIC solution.

That sounds like a pretty comprehensive strategy to us. The wonder is that Microsoft doesnt roll up support for its own SONiC distribution, or IBMs Red Hat division doesnt. Or both, for that matter.

See more here:

Is Microsofts SONiC Winning The War Of The NOSes? - The Next Platform

Microsoft is working on a new text prediction feature for Outlook thats similar to Gmails Smart Compose. The text predictions will allow Outlook.com and Outlook on the web to write emails for people using predictive tech that offers up suggestions while you type. A support document reveals that Outlook users will be able to accept suggestions with tab or right arrow on a keyboard, or just keep typing to ignore them.

Microsoft is currently planning to roll this out later this month, and its marked as in development on the companys Microsoft 365 feature roadmap. Microsoft is also working on a send later feature for Outlook on the web that will allow users to schedule when to send an email message.

Thats particularly useful if you wake up from a deep sleep at 5AM and remember you need to email your boss, but dont want it to look like youre eagerly sending emails at early hours of the morning. Microsoft says the send later feature should arrive before the end of June, and text predictions will appear in May.

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Microsofts Outlook on the web is getting a Gmail-like text prediction feature - The Verge

WASHINGTON In an effort to free up space in your inbox and stop you from slowly going mad, Microsoft is introducing a new feature to curb those annoying reply-all email threads.

Microsoft says a new Office 365 feature will focus on those massive company email threads to try and block reply-all messages that are sent to large distribution lists. The company is calling the feature Reply-All Storm Protection.

Microsoft says that if a sender tries to send 10 reply-all emails to over 5,000 recipients within a 60-minute time frame, the feature will block any subsequent replies to that thread for the next four hours. Your co-workers who try to respond will then see a message telling them their email was not sent because the exchange has become too busy.

The company announced the feature last year and has now begun to roll it out to Office 365.

The feature, which is trying to keep those annoying reply-all emails from angering your co-workers, will suggest that they try and reply to a smaller group of people. It comes during the massive paradigm shift that is seeing teams around the world working from home amid the global coronavirus pandemic.

Popular advice is that one really should only hit the reply-all button if you're sure everyone on that distribution list needs to see the email. Business Insider found that in 2019 over 11,000 workers said they were caught in what Microsoft is calling a "reply-all storm."

Google's Gmail service also has a feature that will allow users to keep their reply-all anxiety down. The feature allows users to mute conversations that they no longer find relevant to them. When a user mutes the conversation, it is removed from the inbox and archived.

Microsoft says the feature is still in beta and they plan to keep fine tuning it in the coming weeks and months.

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New Microsoft feature may save you from 'Reply All' anxiety - WTHR

New Delhi, May 12, 2020: Microsoft has announced the launch of the Back2Business Solution Boxes for helping Indian small and medium businesses (SMBs) maintain business continuity and embark on their cloud adoption journeys. Curated for specific scenarios in different organization sizes, they bring together offerings across Azure and Modern Workplace.

Indian SMBs are facing multiple challenges in running their operations seamlessly during the current crisis, including access to remote working solutions in a secure and scalable environment, disaster recovery, and advanced security with device management and threat protection. To provide support in keeping businesses running through any outages and reducing on-premise infrastructure management costs, these offerings are tailored to boost employee productivity and improve customer engagement.

Small and medium enterprises are an integral part of the Indian economy. Weve witnessed their resilience and entrepreneurial energy in action as we build the new normal in these difficult times. In our efforts to support these businesses operate today without constraints and be future-ready with the best-in-class technological platform and solutions, the Back2Business Solution Boxes offer speed in deployment and usage and flexibility with pay-as-you-go pricing, along with our commitment to privacy and security, said Harish Vellat, Senior Director, Small and Mid-Corporate Business, Microsoft India.

Besides catering to near-term challenges through COVID-19 offerings around Windows Virtual Desktop and Microsoft Teams, there are solution packages designed to accelerate the cloud adoption journeys of SMBs. These are curated to help ramp up legacy systems, migrate workloads to Azure or modernize apps and websites. Standard yet easy to customize according to requirements of customers, the solution boxes come in four variants.

Microsoft partners have the additional flexibility of customizing the boxed packages with their own value offerings for migration and deployment. Microsofts partner ecosystem is at the center of delivering technologies and driving business transformation for its customers. Together with its partners, Microsoft is committed to helping the small and medium business community in India navigate the current challenges and scale up their operations seamlessly.

About Microsoft India:

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq MSFT @microsoft) is the leading platform and productivity company for the mobile-first, cloud-first world, and its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Microsoft set up its India operations in 1990. Today, Microsoft entities in India have over 11,000 employees, engaged in sales and marketing, research, development and customer services and support, across 11 Indian cities Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Chennai, New Delhi, Gurugram, Noida, Hyderabad, Kochi, Kolkata, Mumbai and Pune. Microsoft offers its global cloud services from local data centers to accelerate digital transformation across Indian start-ups, businesses, and government organizations.

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Microsoft introduces Back2Business Solution Boxes for small and medium businesses in India - Microsoft News Center India - Microsoft

Image: Microsoft

Microsoft and Intel have recently collaborated on a new research project that explored a new approach to detecting and classifying malware.

Called STAMINA (STAtic Malware-as-Image Network Analysis), the project relies on a new technique that converts malware samples into grayscale images and then scans the image for textural and structural patterns specific to malware samples.

The Intel-Microsoft research team said the entire process followed a few simple steps. The first consisted of taking an input file and converting its binary form into a stream of raw pixel data.

Researchers then took this one-dimensional (1D) pixel stream and converted it into a 2D photo so that normal image analysis algorithms can analyze it.

The width of the image was selected based on the input file's size, using the table below. The height was dynamic, and resulted from dividing the raw pixel stream by the chosen width value.

After assembling the raw pixel stream into a normal-looking 2D image, researchers then resized the resulting photo to a smaller dimension.

The Intel and Microsoft team said that resizing the raw image did not "negatively impact the classification result," and this was a necessary step so that the computational resources won't have to work with images consisting of billions of pixels, which would most likely slow down processing.

The resized images were then fed into a pre-trained deep neural network (DNN) that scanned the image (2D representation of the malware strain) and classified it as clean or infected.

Microsoft says it provided a sample of 2.2 million infected PE (Portable Executable) file hashes to serve as a base for the research.

Researchers used 60% of the known malware samples to train the original DNN algorithm, 20% of the files to validate the DNN, and the other 20% for the actual testing process.

The research team said STAMINA achieved an accuracy of 99.07% in identifying and classifying malware samples, with a false positives rate of 2.58%.

"The results certainly encourage the use of deep transfer learning for the purpose of malware classification," said Jugal Parikh and Marc Marino, the two Microsoft researchers who participated in the research on behalf of the Microsoft Threat Protection Intelligence Team.

The research is part of Microsoft's recent efforts of improving malware detection using machine learning techniques.

STAMINA used a technique called deep learning. Deep learning is a subset of machine learning (ML), a branch of artificial intelligence (AI), which refers to intelligent computer networks that are capable of learning on their own from input data that is stored in an unstructured or unlabeled format -- in this case, a random malware binary.

Microsoft said that while STAMINA was accurate and fast when working with smaller files, it faultered with larger ones.

"For bigger size applications, STAMINA becomes less effective due to limitations in converting billions of pixels into JPEG images and then resizing them," Microsoft said in a blog post last week.

However, this most likely doesn't matter, as the project could be used for small files only, with excellent results.

In an interview with ZDNet earlier this month, Tanmay Ganacharya, Director for Security Research of Microsoft Threat Protection, said that Microsoft now heavily relies on machine learning for detecting emerging threats, and this system uses a different machine learning modules that are being deployed on customer systems or Microsoft servers.

Microsoft now uses client-side machine learning model engines, cloud-side machine learning model engines, machine learning modules for capturing sequences of behaviors or capturing the content of the file itself, Ganacharya said.

Based on the reported results, STAMINA could be very well one of those ML modules that we may soon see implemented at Microsoft as a way to spot malware.

Currently, Microsoft can make this approach work better than other companies primarily because of the sheer data it possesses from the hundreds of millions of Windows Defender installs.

"Anybody can build a model, but the labeled data and the quantity of it and the quality of it, really helps train the machine learning models appropriately and hence defines how effective they are going to be," Ganacharya said.

"And we, at Microsoft, have that as an advantage because we do have sensors that are bringing us lots of interesting signals through email, through identity, through the endpoint, and being able to combine them."

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Microsoft and Intel project converts malware into images before analyzing it - ZDNet

Yammer connects people across departments and across the organization, enabling you to build communities, share knowledge and engage employees. At Microsoft Ignite, we announced an entirely redesigned Yammer experience, with new capabilities and integrations that drive employee engagement throughout Microsoft 365. Now, the new Yammer is available to organizations in public preview. Heres a quick look at whats new and how to get access to the new Yammer.

Yammer powers leadership engagement, corporate communications and knowledge sharing in Microsoft 365. Here are some of the new capabilities were introducing to make communities and conversations more impactful:

Add a custom cover photo, avatar, and name to your All Company

Engage with Q&A in live events across devices

The Feed showing company branding and a variety of conversations in their new styling

There are even more new features and integrations coming to Yammer as we approach general availability, such as suggested communities, bookmarks, and additional admin and user controls. We will update this article as we launch new features and post on the Admin Message Center whenever we have any majorannouncements.

Microsoft 365 Global Admins canconfigureaccess to the new Yammer previewthroughtheYammer admin portal.Admins can enable the preview toggle in the suite header and choosethe default experience for their network: classic Yammer the new Yammer.Learn more about enabling the new Yammer preview for your organization.

Once enabled by an admin, users will access the new Yammer or switch back to classic using the toggle in the navigation bar.

Once enabled by a Microsoft 365 Global Admin, people in your organization will be able to view thetoggle to opt-in to thenew experience. This will be available for canonical (home) networks only. You will still see the classic Yammer experience in external networks. If your organization wants to remove all access to the new Yammer during the preview phase,youwillneed tocontactMicrosoft support.

The new Yammer is available worldwide on mobile, for iOS and Android. The new Yammer app for Teams lets you stay connected to company communications, live events and communities inside the hub for teamwork. And in Outlook on the web, you can now engage with Yammer conversations directly from your Outlook inbox. Soon, well be bringing inbox integration to Outlook desktop and mobile apps, and well bring the new Yammer experience to SharePoint, with an updated web part.

Feature requests and feedback on the product during preview should be submitted through the in-product feedback dialogboxes.Feedback can also beprovided with peersthroughthe new Yammer preview community on the Microsoft Tech Community.

Q: When will the new Yammer come out of preview and be generally available?

A: We are continuing to test and improve the new Yammer to ensure it delivers the experience our customers expect. We are currently targeting worldwide availability in July.

Q:Can we opt out of the preview at any time?

A:You can remove the preview toggle for your entire network through the new Yammer preview setting in the Yammer admin portal. Any users who have selected the new Yammer experience will remain in that experience until they choose to go back to the classic experience. For more information about the available options, see opt-in settings.

Q: Do SLAs apply to the new Yammer preview?

A: The Service Level Agreement for Microsoft Online Services does not apply to this preview.

Q:How do I open a support case?

A: Please see the help page in the for general information. Your organization may have specific guidance for opening support cases, so you may need to talk with your IT team.

Q:Is the new experience available forcustomers that have Yammer networks with data stored in the EU geo?

A:Yes!

Q:We have Yammer embedded in various places in our Intranet (i.e.Yammer tab in Microsoft Teams,Yammer web part for SharePoint, Yammer embed). How will those be impacted by the new Yammer?

A:Initially there will not be any change to these experiences. Eventually,these experiences will have the samedesign as the new Yammer.

Q:What aboutguestusersin external groups?

A:Users will see the new Yammer or the classicYammer experience depending on the state of theirhomenetwork. If your network hosts an external group, people within your network that are opted-in to the new experience in their home network will see that group in the new Yammer experience.Any guest users within the external group will seethe classicYammer experience if their network is not yet enabled for the new experience.

Q:What aboutexternal networks?

A:Users can continue to access external networks using the NetworkSwitchericonavailable on the integrated tool bar at the top of every page. On switching, users will see these external networks in the classic experience.

Q:Are all languages supported in the new Yammer?

A:All languages available in classic Yammer are available in the public preview.

Q:Can users get to the new Yammer previewwithoutadministrator changes?

A:YourMicrosoft 365 admin controls whetherusers seethetoggleto switch to the new Yammerexperience.Butusers will always be able to access web.yammer.comwhile the new Yammer is inthe public preview phase.If your organization wants to remove all access to the new Yammer during the preview phase,youwill needtocontactMicrosoft support. More details on this can be foundhere.

Q:I dont want to enable the next experience for my production Yammer network yet. How can I test out thenewtoggle?

A:You can try out theopt-intoggles in your test tenant. If you dont have a test environment, create a new trial tenantfor testing and enable thetogglethere.

-Murali Sitaram

Murali is the General Manager for Yammer and Microsoft 365 Groups

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Get your hands on the new Yammer. - Microsoft