Windows 10: Microsoft announces Open Data Campaign to help address data divide

Brink · Apr 21, 2020

Today, Microsoft is launching an Open Data Campaign to help address the looming âdata divideâ and help organizations of all sizes to realize the benefits of data and the new technologies it powers. We believe everyone can benefit from opening, sharing and collaborating around data to make better decisions, improve efficiency and even help tackle some of the worldâs most pressing societal challenges.

The goal of our campaign is to advance a much-needed discussion about how the world uses and shares data. To start, today weâre announcing three steps:

First, weâre publishing new principles that will guide how Microsoft itself approaches sharing our data with others.

Second, weâre committing to take action by developing 20 new collaborations built around shared data by 2022. This includes work with leading organizations in the open data movement like the Open Data Institute and The Governance Lab (GovLab) at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering. And weâll seek to lead by example by making our Microsoft social impact initiatives âopen by default,â beginning with sharing data on broadband access from our Airband initiative and combining it with data from others to help accelerate improvements in broadband connectivity.

Finally, weâll invest in the essential assets that will make data sharing easier, including the required tools, frameworks and templates.

In recent months, weâve again seen the benefits that better data sharing can bring not just for companies and other organizations, but also in tackling the worldâs biggest challenges. From climate change to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is clear that data plays a critical role in helping us understand these challenges and in addressing them. To fully realize the benefit of data, we need to develop the ability to share data across organizational boundaries in a way that is safe and secure, and allows the data to be used effectively. If ever there was a time to accelerate the worldâs efforts around open data, it is now. We hope our steps today can contribute to these efforts. Weâre committed to the cause, and to learning from and working with others.

What do we mean by the âdata divideâ and why now?

Despite the enormous growth in data and AI, both are increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small number of companies. Indeed, fewer than 100 companies now collect more than 50% of the data generated by online interactions (based on analysis of similarweb.com, appfigures.com and alexa.com) and around half of all people with technical AI skills work in the technology sector (according to figures from LinkedIn). Not surprisingly, these businesses are then able to reap the enormous benefits of data and AI while others are left at a disadvantage. This data divide poses a serious challenge for society and, if left unaddressed, could lead to huge economic power flowing to just a few countries and companies. Based on current trends, for example, PWC predicts that around 70% of the economic value generated by AI will accrue to just two countries: the USA and China. But we do not believe that an ever-growing data divide is inevitable. By doing more to open up and share data, organizations can unlock value, share expertise and make data more useful for all, allowing everyone to benefit in ways they are not able to by going it alone. By acting now and joining together, more civil society organizations, governments and businesses of all sizes will be able to realize the full value of data.

Charting a principled course

To help guide our own efforts on open data, we are adopting a set of principles to inform how we at Microsoft open and share data in a responsible way. Weâve learned through our work on protecting privacy, responsible AI and sustainability that it is valuable to define a clear set of principles when engaging with important and complex societal issues. We hope these principles will inform the broader conversation on open data and that others can build on and improve them. The five principles that will guide our contributions to trusted data collaboration are:

Open â We will work to make data that is relevant to important social problems as open as possible, including by contributing open data ourselves

Usable â We will invest in creating new technologies and tools, governance mechanisms and policies to make data more usable for everyone

Empowering â We will help organizations generate value from their data according to their choices, and develop their AI talent to use data effectively and independently

Secure â We will employ security controls to ensure data collaboration is operationally secure where it is desired

Private â We will help organizations to protect individualsâ privacy in data-sharing collaborations that involve personally identifiable information

Each of these principles is important. However, as has become clear to us in our work in this area, one stands out as the most challenging but vital key to success: the need to make data more usable. Unless organizations are able to collect and categorize data in a standardized way, they will not be able to aggregate and analyze it in a manner that produces the transformative insights that shared data has the potential to unlock.

Committing to new collaborations

In addition to charting a principled course, we believe success will depend on building deep collaborations with others from across industry, government and civil society around the world. We want to try and lead by example and do more to learn firsthand about the challenges and solutions around open data. To this end, Microsoft is committing to launching 20 data collaborations by 2022, building partnerships to tackle the major challenges of our time. To help seed these collaborations, Microsoft will make its social impact initiatives âopen by defaultâ and explore whether our data related to initiatives such as Airband, AI for Good and our work on sustainability and accessibility might be able to be opened up and built on to help solve major challenges. We are excited to be partnering with the Open Data Institute in this effort, working together to develop our initial collaborations and share the lessons we learn with others so that they may also benefit. Our initial work will focus on:

Tackling connectivity challenges: Microsoft is publishing under open agreement on GitHub a small, but important, dataset around broadband usage in the United States, gathered as part of our Airband Initiative. We will be working with the Open Data Institute and BroadbandNow, a company that help consumers find broadband access in the U.S. to add to this dataset to help improve broadband availability. The BroadbandNow dataset provides county-level pricing and competition data.

Addressing COVID-19: As one of the most pressing challenges today, we will contribute to the work being done to use data to address the COVID-19 crisis. This includes expanding work Microsoft is doing with partner Adaptive Biotechnologies to decode how the immune system responds to COVID-19 and share research findings via an open data access portal for any researcher to use in the fight against the pandemic. More broadly, Microsoft has also built a COVID-19 tracker on our Bing search engine and is releasing aggregated data to those in academia and research. We are also working with GitHub, which is hosting a range of collaborative COVID-19 projects, including open source software, hardware designs, models and many leading COVID-19 datasets.

Helping cities collaborate around data: Microsoft will partner with Arup and the Oliver Wyman Forum on the London Data Commission, an open data initiative run by London First working with the Greater London Authority and others, to lead a data collaboration project around city-based data that can help address social and economic challenges in London.

Helping governments collaborate around data: To help governments better open up and collaborate around data, we will co-launch the Open Data Policy Lab with The GovLab at NYU. The Lab will provide a live repository of best practices and resources with a focus on: 1) analysis, in the form of comparative research of data initiatives that contribute to economic development; 2) guidance, to include toolkits, frameworks and best practices to support data sharing and data-driven decision-making; 3) community, of data stewards and other data stakeholders within the public and private sectors; and 4) action, to implement proof-of-concept initiatives.

Advancing data-driven healthcare: This work will enable the first global data collaborative to improve cardiovascular health, bringing together data from a range of sources to help address one of the worldâs leading causes of death. Microsoft is working with the Novartis Foundation, Apollo Hospitals in India and Coala Life in Sweden to consolidate their respective cardiovascular datasets from hospitals and primary-care centers around the world. The collaborative aims to further develop and use the leading cardiovascular AI tool â AICVD Risk Score, created by Apollo Hospitals â to accelerate the use of data-driven decisions in tackling cardiovascular disease and informing the direction of health policy.

Making data sharing easier and safer

If data is open and available but unusable, it serves little to no purpose. We are therefore committing to helping tackle the problems created by the lack of easy-to-use tools and frameworks for sharing data to ensure that we are able to help make data more usable. One big challenge we have seen in our work on data sharing and the analysis weâve been doing to help fight the COVID-19 crisis is the difficulty around inconsistent data collection. Currently, data is collected in a variety of different formats and document types â some in Word documents, some in PDFs, some in spreadsheets, some still on paper. This makes it all but impossible to share and aggregate data in a way that is valuable and provides a huge barrier to collaboration. The campaign will work to address this challenge and also continue our work to develop scalable tools that any organization can utilize, reducing the friction around sharing.

In this work, there are valuable lessons to be taken from the world of open source software. While there are important differences between data and code, particularly around the steps needed to address privacy and security considerations when dealing with data, our experience with open source provides us with insights for enabling successful collaboration. A priority will be continuing our work on open data use agreements, providing templates that anyone can use to easily share data and continue to build on the governance, licensing and legal tools provided on the Open Data Campaign microsite. We will also continue to advance our work on differential privacy with Harvardâs IQSS, providing tools to allow people to extract useful insights from datasets in a way that safeguards the privacy of individuals.

Closing the data divide is a big challenge. But the benefits for organizations of all sizes, and the broader community are significant if we can work together to make progress on open data. Weâre committed to making our contribution, and we look forward to working with, and learning from, others so that everyone can realize the benefits of data.
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Source: https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-i...mpaign-divide/

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Brink · Apr 21, 2020

Adobe, Microsoft and SAP announce the Open Data Initiative

Industry leaders team up to help customers connect data across their organizations, find powerful insights and deliver intelligent services with AI

Shantanu Narayen, CEO, Adobe (left), Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft (center), and Bill McDermott, CEO of SAP (right), introduced the Open Data Initiative at the Microsoft Ignite conference.

ORLANDO, Fla. — Sept. 24, 2018 — On Monday, the CEOs of Adobe (Nasdaq: ADBE), Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) and SAP (NYSE: SAP) introduced the Open Data Initiative at the Microsoft Ignite conference. Together, the three longstanding partners are reimagining customer experience management (CXM) by empowering companies to derive more value from their data and deliver world-class customer experiences in real-time.

In today’s world, data is a company’s most valuable asset. However, many businesses struggle to attain a complete view of their customer interactions and operations, because they are unable to connect information trapped in internal silos. At the same time, important customer information also resides in external silos with intermediary services and third-party providers, limiting a company’s ability to create the right connections, garner intelligence and ultimately extract more value from its own data in real time to better serve customers.

Companies around the world use software and services from Adobe, Microsoft and SAP to run product development, operations, finances, marketing, sales, human resources and more. Today, Adobe, Microsoft and SAP are joining forces to empower their mutual customers with the Open Data Initiative, which is a common approach and set of resources for customers based on three guiding principles:

Every organization owns and maintains complete, direct control of all their data.

Customers can enable AI-driven business processes to derive insights and intelligence from unified behavioral and operational data.

A broad partner ecosystem should be able to easily leverage an open and extensible data model to extend the solution.

Based on these principles, the core focus of the Open Data Initiative is to eliminate data silos and enable a single view of the customer, helping companies to better govern their data and support privacy and security initiatives. With the ability to better connect data across an organization, companies can more easily use AI and advanced analytics for real-time insights, “hydrate” business applications with critical data to make them more effective and deliver a new category of AI-powered services for customers.

“Adobe, Microsoft and SAP are partnering to reimagine the customer experience management category,” said Shantanu Narayen, CEO, Adobe. “Together we will give enterprises the ability to harness and action massive volumes of customer data to deliver personalized, real-time customer experiences at scale.”

“Together with Adobe and SAP we are taking a first, critical step to helping companies achieve a level of customer and business understanding that has never before been possible,” said Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. “Organizations everywhere have a massive opportunity to build AI-powered digital feedback loops for predictive power, automated workflows and, ultimately, improved business outcomes.”

“Microsoft, Adobe and SAP understand the customer experience is no longer a sales management conversation,” said Bill McDermott, CEO of SAP. “CEOs are breaking down the silos of the status quo so they can get all people inside their companies focused on serving people outside their companies. With the Open Data Initiative, we will help businesses run with a true single view of the customer.”

To deliver on the Open Data Initiative, the three partners are enhancing interoperability and data exchange between their applications and platforms — Adobe Experience Cloud and Adobe Experience Platform, Microsoft Dynamics 365, SAP C/4HANA and S/4HANA — through a common data model. The data model will provide for the use of a common data lake service on Microsoft Azure. This unified data store will allow customers their choice of development tools and applications to build and deploy services.

With the Open Data Initiative, companies will be able to:

Unlock and harmonize siloed data to create new value

Bi-directionally move transactional, operational, customer or IoT data to and from the common data lake based on their preference or needs

Create data-powered digital feedback loops for greater business impact, while also helping to enable their security and privacy compliance initiatives

Build and adopt intelligent applications that natively understand data, relationships and metadata spanning multiple services from Adobe, SAP, Microsoft and their partners

Technology leaders at top retail and consumer products companies, such as The Coca-Cola Company, Unilever and Walmart, have expressed support and excitement about the Open Data Initiative.

“This initiative from Adobe, Microsoft and SAP is an important and strategic development for the Coca-Cola System,” said Barry Simpson, chief information officer at the Coca-Cola Company. “Our digital growth plans centered around our customers are fueled by these platforms and open standards. A more unified approach to the management and control of our data strengthens our ability to support our growth agenda and our ability to satisfy security, privacy and GDPR-compliance requirements. The industry needs to follow these leaders.”

“Every day, 2.5 billion people use a Unilever product in over 190 countries around the world,” said Jane Moran, CIO, Unilever. “The Open Data Initiative from Adobe, Microsoft and SAP is an important undertaking that will help us reimagine customer experience management by bringing together data across our entire organization to build more direct, meaningful relationships with consumers in real time.”

“We’re excited about the Open Data Initiative and the value it will unlock for Walmart,” said Clay Johnson, executive vice president and enterprise chief information officer, Walmart Inc. “With greater ability to connect and harness the power of our data, we can enhance the associate experience and create entirely new ways to serve our customers online and in our stores.”

More information is available at Open Data Initiative | Microsoft, https://www.adobe.com/experience-pla...nitiative.html and The Open Data Initiative | SAP.
Click to expand...

Source: Adobe, Microsoft and SAP announce the Open Data Initiative to empower a new generation of customer experiences - Stories

Brink · Apr 21, 2020

Adobe, Microsoft and SAP announce the Open Data Initiative

Industry leaders team up to help customers connect data across their organizations, find powerful insights and deliver intelligent services with AI

Shantanu Narayen, CEO, Adobe (left), Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft (center), and Bill McDermott, CEO of SAP (right), introduced the Open Data Initiative at the Microsoft Ignite conference.

ORLANDO, Fla. — Sept. 24, 2018 — On Monday, the CEOs of Adobe (Nasdaq: ADBE), Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) and SAP (NYSE: SAP) introduced the Open Data Initiative at the Microsoft Ignite conference. Together, the three longstanding partners are reimagining customer experience management (CXM) by empowering companies to derive more value from their data and deliver world-class customer experiences in real-time.

In today’s world, data is a company’s most valuable asset. However, many businesses struggle to attain a complete view of their customer interactions and operations, because they are unable to connect information trapped in internal silos. At the same time, important customer information also resides in external silos with intermediary services and third-party providers, limiting a company’s ability to create the right connections, garner intelligence and ultimately extract more value from its own data in real time to better serve customers.

Companies around the world use software and services from Adobe, Microsoft and SAP to run product development, operations, finances, marketing, sales, human resources and more. Today, Adobe, Microsoft and SAP are joining forces to empower their mutual customers with the Open Data Initiative, which is a common approach and set of resources for customers based on three guiding principles:

Every organization owns and maintains complete, direct control of all their data.

Customers can enable AI-driven business processes to derive insights and intelligence from unified behavioral and operational data.

A broad partner ecosystem should be able to easily leverage an open and extensible data model to extend the solution.

Based on these principles, the core focus of the Open Data Initiative is to eliminate data silos and enable a single view of the customer, helping companies to better govern their data and support privacy and security initiatives. With the ability to better connect data across an organization, companies can more easily use AI and advanced analytics for real-time insights, “hydrate” business applications with critical data to make them more effective and deliver a new category of AI-powered services for customers.

“Adobe, Microsoft and SAP are partnering to reimagine the customer experience management category,” said Shantanu Narayen, CEO, Adobe. “Together we will give enterprises the ability to harness and action massive volumes of customer data to deliver personalized, real-time customer experiences at scale.”

“Together with Adobe and SAP we are taking a first, critical step to helping companies achieve a level of customer and business understanding that has never before been possible,” said Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. “Organizations everywhere have a massive opportunity to build AI-powered digital feedback loops for predictive power, automated workflows and, ultimately, improved business outcomes.”

“Microsoft, Adobe and SAP understand the customer experience is no longer a sales management conversation,” said Bill McDermott, CEO of SAP. “CEOs are breaking down the silos of the status quo so they can get all people inside their companies focused on serving people outside their companies. With the Open Data Initiative, we will help businesses run with a true single view of the customer.”

To deliver on the Open Data Initiative, the three partners are enhancing interoperability and data exchange between their applications and platforms — Adobe Experience Cloud and Adobe Experience Platform, Microsoft Dynamics 365, SAP C/4HANA and S/4HANA — through a common data model. The data model will provide for the use of a common data lake service on Microsoft Azure. This unified data store will allow customers their choice of development tools and applications to build and deploy services.

With the Open Data Initiative, companies will be able to:

Unlock and harmonize siloed data to create new value

Bi-directionally move transactional, operational, customer or IoT data to and from the common data lake based on their preference or needs

Create data-powered digital feedback loops for greater business impact, while also helping to enable their security and privacy compliance initiatives

Build and adopt intelligent applications that natively understand data, relationships and metadata spanning multiple services from Adobe, SAP, Microsoft and their partners

Technology leaders at top retail and consumer products companies, such as The Coca-Cola Company, Unilever and Walmart, have expressed support and excitement about the Open Data Initiative.

“This initiative from Adobe, Microsoft and SAP is an important and strategic development for the Coca-Cola System,” said Barry Simpson, chief information officer at the Coca-Cola Company. “Our digital growth plans centered around our customers are fueled by these platforms and open standards. A more unified approach to the management and control of our data strengthens our ability to support our growth agenda and our ability to satisfy security, privacy and GDPR-compliance requirements. The industry needs to follow these leaders.”

“Every day, 2.5 billion people use a Unilever product in over 190 countries around the world,” said Jane Moran, CIO, Unilever. “The Open Data Initiative from Adobe, Microsoft and SAP is an important undertaking that will help us reimagine customer experience management by bringing together data across our entire organization to build more direct, meaningful relationships with consumers in real time.”

“We’re excited about the Open Data Initiative and the value it will unlock for Walmart,” said Clay Johnson, executive vice president and enterprise chief information officer, Walmart Inc. “With greater ability to connect and harness the power of our data, we can enhance the associate experience and create entirely new ways to serve our customers online and in our stores.”

More information is available at Open Data Initiative | Microsoft, https://www.adobe.com/experience-pla...nitiative.html and The Open Data Initiative | SAP.
Click to expand...

Source: Adobe, Microsoft and SAP announce the Open Data Initiative to empower a new generation of customer experiences - Stories

Brink · Apr 21, 2020

Announcing Microsoft Research Open Data

The Microsoft Research Outreach team has worked extensively with the external research community to enable adoption of cloud-based research infrastructure over the past few years. Through this process, we experienced the ubiquity of Jim Gray’s fourth paradigm of discovery based on data-intensive science – that is, almost all research projects have a data component to them. This data deluge also demonstrated a clear need for curated and meaningful datasets in the research community, not only in computer science but also in interdisciplinary and domain sciences.

Today we are excited to launch Microsoft Research Open Data – a new data repository in the cloud dedicated to facilitating collaboration across the global research community. Microsoft Research Open Data, in a single, convenient, cloud-hosted location, offers datasets representing many years of data curation and research efforts by Microsoft that were used in published research studies.

Why we are investing in this

The goal is to provide a simple platform to Microsoft researchers and collaborators to share datasets and related research technologies and tools. Microsoft Research Open Data is designed to simplify access to these datasets, facilitate collaboration between researchers using cloud-based resources and enable reproducibility of research. We will continue to shape and grow this repository and add features based on feedback from the community.

We recognize that there are dozens of data repositories already in use by researchers and expect that the capabilities of this repository will augment existing efforts.

Figure 1 – Dataset in Microsoft Research Open Data
“This is a game changer for the big data community. Initiatives like Microsoft Research Open Data reduce barriers to data sharing and encourage reproducibility by leveraging the power of cloud computing”
-Sam Madden, Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
With data growing at an exponential rate, perceived to be over 150 ZB of data available by 2025, it is now recognized that we need to prioritize bringing processing to data versus relying on data movement through Internet bandwidth that is growing at a much slower pace. We believe that there is real utility in providing an option to bring the processing to the data. Therefore, in addition to providing an option to download the data assets, users can also copy datasets directly to an Azure based Data Science virtual machine, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2 – Data copied from microsoftopendata.com to an Azure based Linux virtual machine

The Data Science virtual machine comes preloaded with a variety of development tools popular with researchers and practitioners as can been seen in Figure 3.

Figure 3 Linux Data Science virtual machine
“I am often asked to share my research data and the public sharing I have done in the past has been popular. Coordinating and cataloging these datasets in one place with Azure will be helpful for both internal and external researchers, giving them easy access, encouraging collaboration, and providing convenient cloud-based access to the wealth of Microsoft Research shared data.”
-John Krumm, Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research AI
Datasets in Microsoft Research Open Data are categorized by their primary research area, as shown in Figure 4. You can find links to research projects or publications with the dataset. You can browse available datasets and download them or copy them directly to an Azure subscription through an automated workflow. To the extent possible, the repository meets the highest standards for data sharing to ensure that datasets are findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable; the entire corpus does not contain personally identifiable information. The site will continue to evolve as we get feedback from users.

Figure 4 – Dataset Categories

Microsoft Research Open Data is an outcome of the Microsoft Research Outreach Data science program and was made possible by a collaboration between many teams at Microsoft, Microsoft researchers, our industry partners, and our academic advisors.

We would love to hear your comments and feedback! Please send us a note via the Feedback feature on the site Microsoft Research Open Data and tell us what you think.
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Source: Announcing Microsoft Research Open Data - Datasets by Microsoft Research now available in the cloud - Microsoft Research

Windows 10: Microsoft announces Open Data Campaign to help address data divide

Microsoft announces Open Data Campaign to help address data divide

Microsoft announces Open Data Campaign to help address data divide

Microsoft announces Open Data Campaign to help address data divide

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