May 15, 2018May 15, 201805/15/18In early 2018, Microsoft partnered with a successful international online fashion retailer to develop an efficient system for logging newly arrived apparel items and quickly determining whether the item is already in stock
May 7, 2018May 7, 201805/7/18Extracting general concepts, rather than specific phrases, from documents and contracts is challenging. It’s even more complicated when applied to scanned documents containing handwritten annotations. We describe using object detection and OCR with Azure ML Package for Computer Vision and Cognitive Services API.
May 1, 2018May 1, 201805/1/18We achieved zero-downtime reconfiguration and management of the Spark Streaming job used in Project Fortis with Azure Service Bus.
April 23, 2018Apr 23, 201804/23/18We worked with Aveva to build 3DToolkit, a toolkit for creating cloud-based 3D experiences that securely stream to low-powered devices using WebRTC.
April 18, 2018Apr 18, 201804/18/18We explored possible techniques to identify duplicate catalogue entries in fashion retail through image similarity with deep learning and computer vision.
April 17, 2018Apr 17, 201804/17/18We developed an Electron-based app using Microsoft Intune cloud service for management and distribution across a broad range of devices.
April 4, 2018Apr 4, 201804/4/18The ixo Foundation is building a decentralized impact evaluation protocol using blockchain and W3C decentralized identifier specification. We worked with them to develop a sample client in React Native, including a native Android plugin for app-to-app communication.
March 9, 2018Mar 9, 201803/9/18We developed a Voronoi selection feature to improve the node selection experience in a HoloLens app that enables physicians to visualize cancer drug networks in 3D.
March 6, 2018Mar 6, 201803/6/18We analyze how Hierarchical Attention Neural Networks could be helpful with malware detection and classification scenarios, demonstrating the usefulness of this approach for generic sequence intent analysis. The novelty of our approach is in applying techniques that are used to discover structure in a narrative text to data that describes the behavior of executables.
February 26, 2018Feb 26, 201802/26/18We developed a blockchain-based solution for storing, tracking, providing and validating pesticide level measurements.
Azure App Services
December 12, 2018Dec 12, 201812/12/18This code story describes CSE’s work with ZenCity to create a data pipeline on Azure Databricks supported by a CI/CD pipeline on TravisCI. The aim of the collaboration was to create a pipeline capable of processing a stream of social posts, analyzing them, and identifying trends.
January 29, 2018Jan 29, 201801/29/18We worked with Aveva to build 3DToolkit, a toolkit for creating powerful cloud-based 3D experiences that stream on low-powered devices with WebRTC.
November 20, 2017Nov 20, 201711/20/17The ability to correctly identify entities, such as places, people, and organizations, adds a powerful level of natural language understanding to applications. This post introduces a MIT-licensed one-click deployment to Azure for web services that lets developers get started with a wide range of natural language tasks in 5 minutes or less, by consuming simple HTTP services for language identification, tokenization, part-of-speech-tagging and named entity recognition.
September 26, 2017Sep 26, 201709/26/17We created an easy-to-use tool for visualizing data from Microsoft Azure Application Insights with a dashboard framework. Our solution can be applied to different bot scenarios as well as other scenarios involving the service.
July 1, 2017Jul 1, 201707/1/17We collaborated on an image classification pipeline to perform automatic face detection and matching using machine learning via Microsoft Cognitive Services Face API. Our project was built with Azure Functions to process images using message queues.
June 29, 2017Jun 29, 201706/29/17We use IoT sensors to collect positional and motion data from professional and amateur skiers to classify expertise and skill level through machine learning.
June 28, 2017Jun 28, 201706/28/17We partnered with the Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness to develop a Xamarin application, WeCount, for volunteers to use to collect survey data for the 2017 Point-In-Time Count.
June 6, 2017Jun 6, 201706/6/17Using Azure Functions and the open-source JavaScript library Compromise for inferring location in social media posts.
May 31, 2017May 31, 201705/31/17Designing and developing the badge builder for the Duke of York’s iDEA programme with responsive web design, web components and Azure.
May 10, 2017May 10, 201705/10/17Using GraphQL and Azure to create a data processing pipeline for identifying trends and providing insights about global humanitarian crises.
Big Data
February 5, 2019Feb 5, 201902/5/19Nestlé Skin Health partnered with Microsoft to develop a deep learning model powered mobile app able to assess acne severity using only uploaded selfie images as a source.
January 18, 2019Jan 18, 201901/18/19This article walks through the development of a technique for running Spark jobs in parallel on Azure Databricks. The technique enabled us to reduce the processing times for JetBlue’s reporting threefold while keeping the business logic implementation straight forward. The technique can be re-used for any notebooks-based Spark workload on Azure Databricks.
January 2, 2019Jan 2, 201901/2/19This code story describes a collaboration with ZenCity around detecting trending topics at scale. We discuss the datasets, data preparation, models used and the deployment story for this scenario.
December 12, 2018Dec 12, 201812/12/18This code story describes CSE’s work with ZenCity to create a data pipeline on Azure Databricks supported by a CI/CD pipeline on TravisCI. The aim of the collaboration was to create a pipeline capable of processing a stream of social posts, analyzing them, and identifying trends.
July 30, 2018Jul 30, 201807/30/18A scalable unsupervised approach for driver safety estimation on Pointer Telocation’s dataset
May 1, 2018May 1, 201805/1/18We achieved zero-downtime reconfiguration and management of the Spark Streaming job used in Project Fortis with Azure Service Bus.
January 24, 2018Jan 24, 201801/24/18We created a solution to ingest Azure Event Hubs events at scale using Python and Kubernetes.
June 29, 2017Jun 29, 201706/29/17We use IoT sensors to collect positional and motion data from professional and amateur skiers to classify expertise and skill level through machine learning.
May 10, 2017May 10, 201705/10/17Using GraphQL and Azure to create a data processing pipeline for identifying trends and providing insights about global humanitarian crises.
April 12, 2017Apr 12, 201704/12/17We partnered with General Fusion to develop and deploy their new Pachyderm-based data infrastructure to Microsoft Azure. This post walks through General Fusion’s new data architecture and how we deployed it to Azure.
Blockchain
July 30, 2019Jul 30, 201907/30/19MOOG came to CSE in hopes of building a technology solution that would prove the provenance and transfer of digital assets securely between parties. Working together, Microsoft and MOOG set out to develop a demo of this solution that leverages Azure and blockchain technology.
March 29, 2019Mar 29, 201903/29/19Food ingredients travel thousands of miles along logistics chains. One bad batch of produce can ruin a restaurant’s reputation, but it’s hard to identify who’s at fault. CSE has worked with Hitachi to build a sample infrastructure leveraging blockchain – thus achieving a new level of accountability for those producing, storing and serving food.
June 1, 2018Jun 1, 201806/1/18Over the past two years, Microsoft and Webjet have collaborated to build a blockchain-based solution, Rezchain, to help travel companies reduce payment disputes. In this code story, we’ll share the lessons learned in creating the Rezchain consortium. In particular, we’ll focus on how we solved the challenges involved with enabling Ethereum nodes to peer across virtual networks.
April 4, 2018Apr 4, 201804/4/18The ixo Foundation is building a decentralized impact evaluation protocol using blockchain and W3C decentralized identifier specification. We worked with them to develop a sample client in React Native, including a native Android plugin for app-to-app communication.
February 26, 2018Feb 26, 201802/26/18We developed a blockchain-based solution for storing, tracking, providing and validating pesticide level measurements.
February 9, 2018Feb 9, 201802/9/18We recently worked with Webjet to migrate their deployment from IaaS to Kubernetes and used Helm to deploy a private Ethereum network to Kubernetes.
April 18, 2017Apr 18, 201704/18/17This walk-through shows how to use a Layer 7 proxy on Azure to protect an Ethereum Blockchain client’s JSON-RPC endpoint and provide additional capabilities, such as secure channels, tracking, and even analytics.
April 10, 2017Apr 10, 201704/10/17Creating an add-in for Microsoft Office to certify and verify documents using the Stampery APIs and blockchain technology.
Bots
February 5, 2018Feb 5, 201802/5/18A common use case in the bot-verse is the ability to hand over a customer conversation from a bot to a human, and the vital need for a feedback loop for this kind of scenario. From this, we developed a Hand-off Dashboard Template that can be used within the Ibex dashboard to provide users with important information about how their bot and agents are working with customers.
September 28, 2017Sep 28, 201709/28/17We share how we built a flexible data visualization dashboard by leveraging the GraphQL stack.
September 26, 2017Sep 26, 201709/26/17We created an easy-to-use tool for visualizing data from Microsoft Azure Application Insights with a dashboard framework. Our solution can be applied to different bot scenarios as well as other scenarios involving the service.
September 15, 2017Sep 15, 201709/15/17With our solution, users can publish bot dialogs from any backend directly to MIcrosoft Bot Framework channels, with custom Navigator logic if needed.
August 7, 2017Aug 7, 201708/7/17We address the challenge of creating a custom search experience for a specific domain area. We also provide a guide for creating your own custom search experience by leveraging Azure Search and Cognitive Services and sharing custom code for iterative testing, measurement and indexer redeployment.
July 19, 2017Jul 19, 201707/19/17We built a bot with Microsoft Bot Framework (MBF) to tap into a multitude of channels, including a client’s existing Android app, and implemented localization features, to connect with potential customers on their preferred online platforms.
June 30, 2017Jun 30, 201706/30/17When considering bots, it’s often important for organizations to have the ability to “hand off” a customer from a bot to a human agent seamlessly. We implemented an unopinionated e-2-e solution called Handoff for bot authors to implement a variety of scenarios, using the Microsoft Bot Framework Node.js SDK.
June 1, 2017Jun 1, 201706/1/17Microsoft partnered with MaaS Global to build a bot using the Microsoft Bot Framework Node.js SDK that can be deployed with the Serverless framework.
February 14, 2017Feb 14, 201702/14/17This post outlines the steps of creating a bot that interacts with a user to collect missing LUIS entity data before processing their request.
January 21, 2017Jan 21, 201701/21/17Using Microsoft Bot Framework, we were able to create an easy to maintain “Orchestration Bot” that can both manage sub-bots and provide multilingual support.
Cognitive Services
December 12, 2018Dec 12, 201812/12/18This code story describes CSE’s work with ZenCity to create a data pipeline on Azure Databricks supported by a CI/CD pipeline on TravisCI. The aim of the collaboration was to create a pipeline capable of processing a stream of social posts, analyzing them, and identifying trends.
July 18, 2018Jul 18, 201807/18/18Golf performance tracking startup Arccos joined forces with Commercial Software Engineering (CSE) developers in hopes of unveiling new improvements to their “virtual caddie” this summer.
May 7, 2018May 7, 201805/7/18Extracting general concepts, rather than specific phrases, from documents and contracts is challenging. It’s even more complicated when applied to scanned documents containing handwritten annotations. We describe using object detection and OCR with Azure ML Package for Computer Vision and Cognitive Services API.
December 7, 2017Dec 7, 201712/7/17When it comes to identifying and understanding influential voices in social media, context is key. See how we used topic detection, sentiment analysis, and Azure Functions to automate context-aware social media insights.
December 5, 2017Dec 5, 201712/5/17This story covers how to get started with transfer-learning and build image classification models in Python with the Custom Vision Service. We compare the results with the popular Tensorflow-based models Inception and MobileNet.
November 1, 2017Nov 1, 201711/1/17This post describes in detail the Azure Cognitive Services speech-to-text WebSocket protocol and shows how to implement the protocol in Java. This enables us to transcribe audio to text in near real-time. We then show how to feed the transcribed radio into a pipeline based on Spark Streaming for further analysis, augmentation, and aggregation. The Java client is reusable across a wide range of text-to-speech scenarios that require time-efficient speech-to-text transcription in more than 10 languages including English, French, Spanish, German and Chinese.
September 15, 2017Sep 15, 201709/15/17With our solution, users can publish bot dialogs from any backend directly to MIcrosoft Bot Framework channels, with custom Navigator logic if needed.
August 7, 2017Aug 7, 201708/7/17We address the challenge of creating a custom search experience for a specific domain area. We also provide a guide for creating your own custom search experience by leveraging Azure Search and Cognitive Services and sharing custom code for iterative testing, measurement and indexer redeployment.
July 5, 2017Jul 5, 201707/5/17Claiming expenses is usually a manual process. This project aims to improve the efficiency of receipt processing by looking into ways to automate this process. << You need to include a little more context here. I understand that you don’t want to name the partner,
Containers
May 7, 2019May 7, 201905/7/19Peace Parks Foundation partnered with Microsoft to build a scalable alerting system that helps to fight rhino poaching in South Africa.
January 10, 2019Jan 10, 201901/10/19Deep learning algorithms capable of learning and predicting customer behavior are allowing businesses to intervene with the right retention offers at the right time. CSE recently partnered with Majid Al Futtaim Ventures (MAF) to design and deploy a machine learning solution to predict attrition.
October 25, 2018Oct 25, 201810/25/18The Commercial Software Engineering team (CSE) partnered with Axonize to automate the process of deploying apps to Kubernetes, and expose these apps to the internet via a single IP.
This post is about enabling applications in your Kubernetes cluster to programmatically install helm charts and expose them through a single public facing IP.
August 9, 2018Aug 9, 201808/9/18Developing robust algorithms for self-driving cars requires sourcing event data from over 10 billion hours of recorded driving time. CSE worked with Cognata, a startup developing simulation platforms for autonomous vehicles, to build a Jenkins pipeline and Terraform solution that enabled our partner to dynamically scale GPU resources for their simulations.
July 9, 2018Jul 9, 201807/9/18Microsoft and Land O’Lakes partnered to develop an automated solution to identify sustainable farming practices given thousands of satellite images of Iowan farms. Our primary goal was to reduce the reliance on manual interviewing of farmers and make it more profitable for farmers to follow sustainable farming practices. To tackle this issue our team deployed a highly scalable Batch AI cluster on Azure and then performed distributed deep learning model training with Horovod.
June 1, 2018Jun 1, 201806/1/18Over the past two years, Microsoft and Webjet have collaborated to build a blockchain-based solution, Rezchain, to help travel companies reduce payment disputes. In this code story, we’ll share the lessons learned in creating the Rezchain consortium. In particular, we’ll focus on how we solved the challenges involved with enabling Ethereum nodes to peer across virtual networks.
April 17, 2018Apr 17, 201804/17/18We developed an Electron-based app using Microsoft Intune cloud service for management and distribution across a broad range of devices.
February 9, 2018Feb 9, 201802/9/18We recently worked with Webjet to migrate their deployment from IaaS to Kubernetes and used Helm to deploy a private Ethereum network to Kubernetes.
January 29, 2018Jan 29, 201801/29/18We worked with Aveva to build 3DToolkit, a toolkit for creating powerful cloud-based 3D experiences that stream on low-powered devices with WebRTC.
January 24, 2018Jan 24, 201801/24/18We created a solution to ingest Azure Event Hubs events at scale using Python and Kubernetes.
CSE
August 20, 2018Aug 20, 201808/20/18Earlier this year, Dataiku and Microsoft joined forces to add extra flexibility to DSS on HDInsight, and also to allow Dataiku customers to attach a persistent edge node on an HDInsight cluster – something which was previously not a feature supported by the most recent edition of Azure HDInsight.
April 23, 2018Apr 23, 201804/23/18We worked with Aveva to build 3DToolkit, a toolkit for creating cloud-based 3D experiences that securely stream to low-powered devices using WebRTC.
DevOps
January 10, 2019Jan 10, 201901/10/19Deep learning algorithms capable of learning and predicting customer behavior are allowing businesses to intervene with the right retention offers at the right time. CSE recently partnered with Majid Al Futtaim Ventures (MAF) to design and deploy a machine learning solution to predict attrition.
December 12, 2018Dec 12, 201812/12/18This code story describes CSE’s work with ZenCity to create a data pipeline on Azure Databricks supported by a CI/CD pipeline on TravisCI. The aim of the collaboration was to create a pipeline capable of processing a stream of social posts, analyzing them, and identifying trends.
August 9, 2018Aug 9, 201808/9/18Developing robust algorithms for self-driving cars requires sourcing event data from over 10 billion hours of recorded driving time. CSE worked with Cognata, a startup developing simulation platforms for autonomous vehicles, to build a Jenkins pipeline and Terraform solution that enabled our partner to dynamically scale GPU resources for their simulations.
April 17, 2018Apr 17, 201804/17/18We developed an Electron-based app using Microsoft Intune cloud service for management and distribution across a broad range of devices.
February 15, 2018Feb 15, 201802/15/18We created an azure-cli extension to simplify the process of distributing VM images globally.
January 29, 2018Jan 29, 201801/29/18We worked with Aveva to build 3DToolkit, a toolkit for creating powerful cloud-based 3D experiences that stream on low-powered devices with WebRTC.
January 18, 2018Jan 18, 201801/18/18This article describes how to use GitHub, Travis CI and Docker Compose to build a simple continuous delivery pipeline to deploy Linux Docker containers to a Service Fabric cluster of Linux hosts.
January 9, 2018Jan 9, 201801/9/18This article covers how to take a standard Python web service consisting of an application tier, a WSGI server, and a Nginx reverse proxy and deploy it via Linux containers to a Linux cluster managed by Azure Service Fabric using only simple tooling like Docker Compose.
October 24, 2017Oct 24, 201710/24/17We demonstrate how to train Object Detection models using CNTK and Tensoflow DNN frameworks. Azure ML Workbench is used as the main training and model hosting infrastructure.
October 9, 2017Oct 9, 201710/9/17We demonstrate how we migrated the compute resources of a genomics intelligence platform to Azure, transferring more than 100 TB of blob storage and handling application secrets without embedding the Azure SDK.
Frameworks
March 19, 2019Mar 19, 201903/19/19Microsoft recently partnered with AVEVA, an engineering, design and management software provider to the Power, Oil & Gas and Marine industries. AVEVA’s challenge is one that is becoming more and more common in the construction visualization space: ever increasing complexity of 3D data that needs to be highly interactive to a customer base that operates on mobile platforms (smartphones,
April 17, 2018Apr 17, 201804/17/18We developed an Electron-based app using Microsoft Intune cloud service for management and distribution across a broad range of devices.
April 4, 2018Apr 4, 201804/4/18The ixo Foundation is building a decentralized impact evaluation protocol using blockchain and W3C decentralized identifier specification. We worked with them to develop a sample client in React Native, including a native Android plugin for app-to-app communication.
March 9, 2018Mar 9, 201803/9/18We developed a Voronoi selection feature to improve the node selection experience in a HoloLens app that enables physicians to visualize cancer drug networks in 3D.
September 28, 2017Sep 28, 201709/28/17We share how we built a flexible data visualization dashboard by leveraging the GraphQL stack.
June 28, 2017Jun 28, 201706/28/17We partnered with the Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness to develop a Xamarin application, WeCount, for volunteers to use to collect survey data for the 2017 Point-In-Time Count.
June 28, 2017Jun 28, 201706/28/17As Unity applications become more complex, the need arises to extend Unity to provide additional capabilities. In our work with Aveva, we used Unity’s plugin architecture to utilize the workstation and server GPU, while still leveraging the Unity runtime for input and display.
June 27, 2017Jun 27, 201706/27/17We recently worked on developing “unbundle” support for react-native-windows to reduce launch times and memory usage for React Native Windows apps.
June 23, 2017Jun 23, 201706/23/17We recently worked to bring greater parity to react-native-windows by building cross-platform layout library Facebook.Yoga for UWP and WPF as the React Native framework for iOS and Android switched to use Yoga.
May 10, 2017May 10, 201705/10/17Using GraphQL and Azure to create a data processing pipeline for identifying trends and providing insights about global humanitarian crises.
Internet Of Things
October 25, 2018Oct 25, 201810/25/18The Commercial Software Engineering team (CSE) partnered with Axonize to automate the process of deploying apps to Kubernetes, and expose these apps to the internet via a single IP.
This post is about enabling applications in your Kubernetes cluster to programmatically install helm charts and expose them through a single public facing IP.
January 24, 2018Jan 24, 201801/24/18We created a solution to ingest Azure Event Hubs events at scale using Python and Kubernetes.
June 29, 2017Jun 29, 201706/29/17We use IoT sensors to collect positional and motion data from professional and amateur skiers to classify expertise and skill level through machine learning.
Machine Learning
May 7, 2019May 7, 201905/7/19Peace Parks Foundation partnered with Microsoft to build a scalable alerting system that helps to fight rhino poaching in South Africa.
February 5, 2019Feb 5, 201902/5/19Nestlé Skin Health partnered with Microsoft to develop a deep learning model powered mobile app able to assess acne severity using only uploaded selfie images as a source.
January 10, 2019Jan 10, 201901/10/19Deep learning algorithms capable of learning and predicting customer behavior are allowing businesses to intervene with the right retention offers at the right time. CSE recently partnered with Majid Al Futtaim Ventures (MAF) to design and deploy a machine learning solution to predict attrition.
January 2, 2019Jan 2, 201901/2/19This code story describes a collaboration with ZenCity around detecting trending topics at scale. We discuss the datasets, data preparation, models used and the deployment story for this scenario.
December 19, 2018Dec 19, 201812/19/18Over the course of twelve months Microsoft and BMW partnered three different times to help BMW with its vision for technical transformation. An open-source package called ROS-Industrial was used to help provide the building blocks for the robotics work.
November 6, 2018Nov 6, 201811/6/18CSE teamed up with Conservation Metrics to use Active Learning to allow for more efficient data labeling for object detection projects.
July 30, 2018Jul 30, 201807/30/18A scalable unsupervised approach for driver safety estimation on Pointer Telocation’s dataset
July 18, 2018Jul 18, 201807/18/18Golf performance tracking startup Arccos joined forces with Commercial Software Engineering (CSE) developers in hopes of unveiling new improvements to their “virtual caddie” this summer.
July 9, 2018Jul 9, 201807/9/18Microsoft and Land O’Lakes partnered to develop an automated solution to identify sustainable farming practices given thousands of satellite images of Iowan farms. Our primary goal was to reduce the reliance on manual interviewing of farmers and make it more profitable for farmers to follow sustainable farming practices. To tackle this issue our team deployed a highly scalable Batch AI cluster on Azure and then performed distributed deep learning model training with Horovod.
July 5, 2018Jul 5, 201807/5/18Can Machine Learning help with detecting sustainable farming practices? In this blog post inspired by our collaboration with Land O’Lakes we share the lessons we learned in the image segmentation space.
