June 2017

Bot to Human Handoff in Node.js

Lilian Kasem (she/her) June 30, 2017 Jun 30, 2017 06/30/17

One common request from companies and organizations considering bots is the ability to "hand off" a customer from a bot to a human agent as seamlessly as possible. To solve this problem, we implemented an unopinionated e-2-e solution called Handoff, which enables bot authors to implement a wide variety of scenarios with minimal changes to the...

IoT Sports Sensor Machine Learning Helps Amateurs Up Their Game

Patty Ryan June 29, 2017 Jun 29, 2017 06/29/17

Recently, Microsoft partnered with the Professional Ski Instructors of America and the American Association of Snowboard Instructors, (PSIA-AASI) to use wearable IoT sensors in order to develop a machine learning model of skiing skills and expertise levels. PSIA-AASI continually evaluates new technology and methods for nurturing learning ...

Youth Homelessness Survey App with Xamarin.Forms and HockeyApp

Eric Rozell June 28, 2017 Jun 28, 2017 06/28/17

The Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness recently concluded the 2017 PIT survey, which is a one-day unduplicated count of sheltered and unsheltered homeless individuals and families across the United States. In addition to the nationwide PIT survey, CCEH conducted a specialized survey to collect data about homeless youth (ages 13 to 25). ...

Scaling UDP Workloads with Kubernetes

Jason Poon June 28, 2017 Jun 28, 2017 06/28/17

Background We recently worked with Situm, a company that offers high precision indoor navigation. Situm's platform is able to ascertain the position of a user inside a building by relying on a smartphone’s sensors: WiFi, Bluetooth, magnetometer, gyroscope, and the accelerometer. Their platform is now being used in a variety of scenarios, ...

Revisiting InterOp with Unity, UWP and DirectX

Ritchie Lozada June 28, 2017 Jun 28, 2017 06/28/17

In the last few years — particularly with the release of new 3D-focused devices in Virtual Reality (VR), New User Input, and Mixed Reality — we've seen Unity grow from an easy platform for game developers into one of the main development tools for graphical 2D/3D, simulation, visualization and cross-platform software solutions. Unity ...

Hacking React Native Unbundles into UWP

Eric Rozell June 27, 2017 Jun 27, 2017 06/27/17

We recently wrapped up development on "unbundle" support for react-native-windows. An unbundle is an optimized packaging mechanism for React Native that supports on-demand, lazy loading of JavaScript modules. Our goal was to reduce launch times and memory usage for React Native Windows apps. The Problem We've been working with BlueJeans ...

Building Facebook.Yoga for UWP and WPF

Eric Rozell June 23, 2017 Jun 23, 2017 06/23/17

We've been working with BlueJeans to port react-native-windows to WPF to complement the existing support for UWP. Facebook recently open-sourced Yoga, a cross-platform layout library that implements a subset of CSS, namely flexbox. The React Native framework for iOS and Android switched to use Yoga; we saw this as an opportunity to bring ...

Learning Image to Image Translation with Generative Adversarial Networks

Olga Liakhovich June 12, 2017 Jun 12, 2017 06/12/17

We recently worked with our partner Getty Images, a global stock photo agency, to explore image to image translation on their massive collection of photos and art. The ability to use Deep Learning to change the aesthetics of a stock image closer to what the customer is looking for could be game-changing for the industry. With recent ...

Geocoding Social Conversations with NLP and JavaScript

Anastasia Zolochevska June 6, 2017 Jun 6, 2017 06/6/17

Partner Scenario The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs OCHA is responsible for planning aid responses to humanitarian crises across the world. The idea for Project Fortis, an early detection system for such crises, came about as part of a collaboration between OCHA and Microsoft. One of OCHA’s main ...

Deploying bots using the Serverless framework

Ville Rantala June 1, 2017 Jun 1, 2017 06/1/17

Introduction Microsoft recently partnered with the makers of the Whim service to experiment with conversational user interfaces. Whim is a Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) solution that allows people to leverage multiple kinds of transportation options with a single monthly fee. The makers of Whim found conversational interfaces interesting...

CSE Developer Blog

June 2017 - CSE Developer Blog