Microsoft Excel Gains New AI-Powered Data Types

Microsoft has added new capabilities to Excel that infuse spreadsheets with artificial intelligence, opening up new and faster ways for users to churn out reports.

Excel's "new, cloud-connected data types" are being rolled out to Office 365 business users who also happen to participate in the Office Insider early-access program, announced Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate vice president of the Office group at Microsoft, on March 29. They build on the software's ability to automatically recognize text and number strings, helping users quickly arrive at the insights they're looking for.

"For example, Excel recognizes that 'France' is a country and automatically associates it with additional attributes such as population and gross domestic product, using the same technology that powers Bing answers," blogged the Microsoft executive. Bing answers is a collection of AI-assisted intelligent search capabilities that are powered by field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) from Intel. They enable Microsoft's search engine to decode jargon and generate multiple answers to how-to questions, among other skills.

In Excel, the technology helps keep business information up-to-date.

"These attributes can then be populated into different cells or used directly in formulas and stay updated with the latest data," Koenigsbauer said. "Based on machine learning, these new data types will simplify the process of working with real-world data."

More intelligent data types are in the works. Koenigsbauer's team is planning to incorporate organizational information from Microsoft Graph, data gathered from the company's business software ecosystem, including Office applications and content.

Microsoft also continues to narrow the features gap between the web and desktop versions of the software. Users can now insert images stored on a local machine, create duplicates of existing worksheets and insert pivot tables.

SharePoint Hub Sites for Intranets and Yammer Integration

SharePoint hub sites are now available to Office 365 customers in the Targeted Release update delivery schedule. Users who opt into Targeted Release receive feature updates ahead of their standard or general availability release. Used to build intranets, hub sites collect SharePoint news, activity feeds and other components, allowing organizations to share and manage content based on a project, business unit and other factors.

A new web part now allows users to add Yammer conversations to SharePoint webpages and sites, Koenigsbauer revealed. It can be used to display active conversations and the latest unread messages. For added control, the web part provides thread-curation capabilities that allow users to keep conversations on track.

Finally, Microsoft is rolling out new personalized search capabilities that help users discover information that is pertinent to their jobs and harmonize the SharePoint Online search experience with that of the broader Office 365 suite.

Gleaning insights from an employee's work patterns and signals from Microsoft Graph, the application's search function now delivers tailored results that include relevant contacts and shared Office files. A revamped results page allows users to stay on task by generating previews for more than 270 file types.

http://www.eweek.com

Microsoft Reorganization: Windows Out, Cloud In

Windows' reign as king at Microsoft has come to an end. Microsoft's latest reorganization, announced [last week], is a big one -- and its main function is to position the company's focus squarely on cloud technology. Windows has been relegated under the cloud umbrella, as has pretty much everything else in the big tech company's portfolio.

The Redmond company is undergoing a massive reorganization of its engineering teams, the most significant restructuring since CEO Satya Nadella took the helm four years ago.

The shifts de-emphasize the company's flagship operating software and put the spotlight on its growing businesses: Office productivity software, artificial intelligence and cloud technology, which allows users to tap into rented computer power and data storage over the internet.

The reorganization is not necessarily a surprise, said Gartner analyst and former Microsoft employee Ed Anderson. Rather, it's an acknowledgment of a shift that has been happening gradually for years.

"It does fundamentally elevate cloud to be the primary driver for Microsoft going forward," he said.

In a sign of the times, Windows devices chief and longtime Microsoft executive Terry Myerson will leave the company. Cloud boss Scott Guthrie, who has long been leading Microsoft's cloud-computing initiatives, will take over as chief of one of the two new engineering groups announced Thursday.

Myerson, who joined Microsoft after it bought his internet startup in 1996, will stay on for a few months to help with the transition. In a post on LinkedIn, Myerson called the day "emotional," and said he was enthusiastic about Microsoft's future.

Reorganizations are common within Microsoft's huge ranks, but this one marks the end of the long Windows-dominated era.

Nadella's shift in priorities mirrors the company's financial results: Its Azure cloud-computing division grew 98 percent during the second quarter, and Office 365 revenue increased 41 percent.

Windows, on the other hand, saw minimal increases. The division -- which, for accounting purposes, also includes Xbox and Surface revenue -- grew just 2 percent during the most recent quarter.

The reorganization underscores Nadella's beliefs, which pushed him to prominence at the company, said Rob Helm, managing vice president at Directions on Microsoft. Nadella has been determined to make Microsoft a contender in the cloud services realm, an effort that could come at the expense of some of the company's legacy software businesses.

The effort is working: Azure is now solidly No. 2 behind Amazon's cloud computing division AWS, giving it a true rival.

The two new engineering teams being created by the reorganization are largely pieced together from what is now the Windows and Devices division headed by Myerson. Windows technology will no longer be in the spotlight, but broken up between teams within each group.

Rajesh Jha, who now leads parts of the Office team, will oversee a group called Experiences & Devices. It will focus on devices, such as Surface, as well as on the expansion of software such as Windows and Office to follow users wherever they go. As connected devices make their way further into homes and work, Microsoft plans to be there.

Jha has been at the company for 28 years and led much of the team that is credited with the success of the Office 365 cloud subscription service.

His group also includes part of the Windows business, led by Joe Belfiore.

Belfiore has worked on Windows in some form for decades, Helm pointed out, and its likely consumers and businesses won't see major changes to the subscription service Windows 10.

Guthrie will helm a second engineering group focused on cloud services and AI technology. That includes Azure, where boss Jason Zander has been promoted to executive vice president.

Guthrie's team, called Cloud + AI Platform, will also oversee Windows Server and mixed reality technology, including HoloLens, Microsoft's augmented-reality headset.

Azure has been driving the development of Windows Server -- the core part of Windows that runs email systems and corporate file storage -- for quite awhile, Helm said.

Windows Server used to be the fundamental platform Microsoft provided its business customers. But now, Anderson said, that relationship is grounded in Microsoft's cloud offerings, such as Azure, Office 365 and Dynamics 365.

Windows as it's used today has largely become a cloud subscription product. Windows 10 marked the evolution of the software -- from a singular product that people loaded on their computers and used until it went out of date, to software that is updated regularly with new features pushed online to customers.

"It is, in effect, a stake in the ground," Anderson said of Microsoft's concentration on cloud technology. "Microsoft is saying 'let's be very clear about this.' "

Or, to put it another way, we won't see Microsoft paying the Rolling Stones to launch another version of Windows as it did for the Windows 95 advertising.

A third engineering group focusing on AI and research, led by Harry Shum will remain after the reorganization, though some pieces have been siphoned off to Guthrie's newly created team. Still, Shum will oversee most AI technology that is deployed across Microsoft products.

Gaming, including Xbox, will be untouched in a separate division.

The reorganization news gave Microsoft's stock a boost, pushing it up $1.88, or 2.1 percent, to $91.27 per share Thursday.

https://www.newsfactor.com

Kotak launches first AI-powered voicebot in Indian banking

Kotak Mahindra Bank (Kotak) announced the launch of Keya – India’s first AI-powered voicebot in the banking sector. Keya comes integrated with Kotak’s phone-banking helpline and will augment the traditional interactive voice response (IVR) system. Keya ushers in a new era of customer interaction that combines conversational intelligence with human-like natural dialogue. A bilingual voicebot, Keya is available in English and Hindi.

This initiative is part of Kotak’s digital-first organic growth strategy that will be driven by its ABCD charter that focuses on AI enriched app, biometric enabled branch, context enhanced customer experience and data empowered design. Kotak’s ABCD charter seeks to make banking a more accessible and rewarding experience for customers by integrating technology, design and customisation across products and services.

Keya uses automatic speech recognition, natural language understanding and text-to-speech technology. Designed to help customers navigate smoothly and quickly through the IVR, Keya understands the caller’s intent, verifies it and then offers relevant solutions resulting in greater call routing accuracy, reduced call duration and improved customer satisfaction. Keya more than halves the time of delivering an accurate response to a customer’s query as he/she no longer has to go through the maze of options offered on the traditional IVR system. Additionally, customers who at times would get lost in the traditional IVR menu and abort the call, can now give a simple voice command to Keya and reach their destination. With faster discovery of services on IVR, Keya changes the nature of the engagement.

Keya also helps in efficient agent utilisation and better deployment at the Kotak contact centre as simpler calls get automated and complex calls get routed for human assistance.

Shanti Ekambaram, president – consumer banking, Kotak Mahindra Bank said, “Keya, our AI-powered voicebot, brings intelligent conversations to life and will help us deliver a transformative self‑service customer experience. It is one of the building blocks of Kotak’s ABCD charter unveiled last week that will drive the bank’s digital-first organic growth strategy.”

Puneet Kapoor, senior executive vice president, Kotak Mahindra Bank said, “Voice commands form a significant share of search online. In addition, the nature of the call is changing with customers using voice as an escalation channel. Keya is an intelligent voicebot developed keeping in mind customers’ changing preference for voice over text. It is built on a technology that understands a customer’s query and steers the conversation to provide a quick and relevant response. Keya combines the benefits of virtual and human assistance and provides a differentiated customer experience. Further, this technology will also enable us to derive real customer insights and thereby, identify new automation opportunities.”

Kotak has developed Keya in partnership with Nuance, which is a Nasdaq listed firm based out of Massachusetts, USA. Nuance is a global leader that has pioneered conversational interfaces over the last 20+ years, evolving speech recognition to natural language understanding.

http://www.computerworld.in

What is GitHub? More than Git version control in the cloud

GitHub is at heart a Git repository hosting service, i.e. a cloud-based source code management or version control system, but that’s just the beginning. In addition, GitHub implements features for code review (pull requests, diffs, and review requests), project management (including issue tracking and assignment), integrations with other developer tools, team management, documentation, and “social coding.”

Something like a social networking site for programmers, GitHub is an open environment where programmers can freely share and collaborate (even ad hoc) on open source code. GitHub makes it easy to find useful code, copy repositories for your own use, and submit changes to others’ projects. As a result, GitHub has become home to virtually every open source project of any importance.

Whenever I want to explore an open source project, I start by searching for the project name. Once I find the project website, I look for its code repository link, and nine times out of 10 I wind up on GitHub.

Git version control

Before we can understand what GitHub does and how GitHub works, we need to understand Git. Git is a distributed version control system, originally written by Linus Torvalds in 2005 for and with help from the Linux kernel community. I’m not here to sell you on Git, so I’ll spare you the spiel about how fast and small and flexible and popular it is, but you should know that when you clone a Git repository (“repo,” for short) you get the entire version history on your own computer, not just a snapshot from one branch at one time.

Git started as a command-line tool, befitting its origin in the Linux kernel community. You can still use the Git command line, if you like, but you don’t have to. Instead of or in addition to the command line, you can use the free GitHub client on Windows or Mac, or any of a number of other GUIs for Git, or a code editor that integrates with Git. All of these options are initially easier to use than the command line. The Git command line comes pre-installed on most Mac and Linux systems and supports all operations; the GUIs typically support a frequently used subset of Git operations.

Git is different from older version control systems such as Subversion in that it is distributed rather than centralized. It’s also quite fast, especially since most operations happen on your local repository. Nevertheless, using Git adds a level of complexity: committing code to your local repository and pushing your commits to a remote repository are separate steps. When teams forget this (or weren’t taught about it) it can lead to situations where different developers are working with code bases that have diverged.

A remote Git repository can be on a server, or it can be on another developer’s machine. That enables many possible workflows for teams. One common workflow involves using a server repository as the “blessed” repository, to which only reviewed, well-tested code is committed, often through a pull request issued from a developer’s repository.

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GitHub functionality
I’ve already noted that GitHub is a cloud-based Git server for code hosting and social coding, and that it implements features for code review (pull requests, diffs, and review requests), project management (including issue tracking and assignment), integrations with other developer tools, team management, and documentation.

The latest innovation in social coding from GitHub is commit co-authors, which you accomplish by adding one or more “co-authored-by” trailers to the end of a commit message. This mechanism doesn’t affect the repo core per se, and doesn’t change how the repo looks on plain Git, but on GitHub the chrome will show multiple committers in the commit list, and give each co-author credit in his or her contribution graph.

If you wish, you can extend GitHub using the GitHub GraphQL API. This is a significant improvement over GitHub’s previous API, which was based on REST calls.

GitHub Enterprise
GitHub.com is a cloud hosting service that can handle a range of account types: free (public repos only) and paid ($7 per month) developer accounts, teams ($9 per user per month), and businesses ($21 per user per month). Should you wish to run GitHub Enterprise on-premises or in your own cloud instance on AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, or IBM Cloud, you can do so for the same $21 per user per month price as a hosted business account. GitHub Enterprise adds a few useful features, such as in-app messaging to users and access provisioning integrated with LDAP directories, but gives up GitHub.com’s 99.95 percent uptime SLA for hosted business accounts.

GitHub vs. Bitbucket
GitHub isn’t the only hosted enhanced Git service, and GitHub Enterprise isn’t the only on-premises product for companies. Atlassian Bitbucket competes with both of them, with slightly lower pricing and with a free five-member team level that includes unlimited private repos and the use of Bitbucket Pipelines for continuous integration. GitHub is a more popular site for open source projects and it has a much larger pool of open source developers. Bitbucket’s pricing is more favorable for small startups.

GitHub vs. GitLab
GitLab competes with both GitHub and Bitbucket, both hosted and on-premises. On the surface, GitLab appears to have more lifecycle functionality than the others, but the difference from Atlassian mostly disappears if you include Jira when you evaluate Bitbucket. GitLab offers Gold-plan cloud features to open source projects for free, but that additional functionality doesn’t really compensate for the larger open-source developer community on GitHub.

GitHub Desktop
GitHub Desktop, shown below, makes it easy to manage your GitHub.com and GitHub Enterprise repositories. While it doesn’t implement all the features of the Git command line and the GitHub web GUI, it does implement all the operations you’ll do on a daily basis from your desktop while contributing to projects. Typically, you will clone repos from GitHub to GitHub Desktop, sync them as needed, create branches for your work, commit your work, and occasionally revert one or more commits.

To work with repos for which you lack commit and collaborate privileges, you typically start by forking the repo on GitHub and cloning the fork to your desktop. Then you add any branches you need in GitHub Desktop, commit any changes you wish, test your work, push the commits back to your remote forked repo, and finally generate a pull request to the parent project.

You can see the Pull Request button at the upper right of the GitHub Desktop interface. You can also see many commits in the Neo4j project that were merges of branches or pull requests. That’s typical of open source projects with few committers and many contributors.




Atom editor
You can use any programming editor you like to edit code, including GitHub’s free, open source, hackable Atom editor (shown below), which integrates well with GitHub and GitHub Desktop. You can use Atom on MacOS, Windows, or Linux. You can open Atom from GitHub Desktop by right-clicking on the repository you wish to browse or edit.

Atom ships with about 90 packages, four UI themes, and eight syntax themes. You can add any of 7,000 packages and 2,000 themes to your installation of Atom. Packages can support specific programming languages, such as TypeScript, or add functionality, such as Hydrogen, an interactive coding environment that supports Python, R, JavaScript and other Jupyter kernels.

Atom is built with HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and Node.js integration. It runs on Electron, a framework for building cross platform apps using web technologies. GitHub Desktop also runs on Electron.

GitHub projects
Open source software projects often need ways to enforce quality control while still accepting contributions from outside the core team of committers. The need for contributors is huge, but bringing new contributors into the project while maintaining the integrity of the codebase is a difficult and potentially dangerous undertaking. At the same time, the need for feedback from users of the project is also huge.

GitHub has a number of mechanisms that can help grease the wheels of open source projects. For example, users can add issues to the project on GitHub to report bugs or request features. Some other systems call these tickets. Project managers working with issues can generate task lists, assign issues to specific contributors, mention other interested contributors so that they are notified of changes, add labels, and add milestones.

To contribute to a project, you basically start from a topic head branch that contains the committed changes that you want added to the project base branch and initialize a pull request from the head branch, as shown below. Then you push your commits and add them to the project branch. Other contributors can review your proposed changes, add review comments, contribute to the pull request discussion, and add their own commits to the pull request.

Once everyone involved is happy with the proposed changes, a committer can merge the pull request. The merge can preserve all the commits, squash all changes into a single commit, or rebase the commits from the head branch into the base branch. If the merge generates conflicts, you can resolve them on GitHub or using the command line.

Code reviews on GitHub allow a distributed team to collaborate asynchronously. Useful GitHub tools for reviewers include diffs (the lower half of the screenshot below), history (the upper half), and blame view (a way to view the evolution of a file commit by commit). Code discussions on GitHub go into comments that are presented inline with your code changes. If the built-in tools don’t suffice for your project, you can add code review and continuous integration tools from the GitHub marketplace. Marketplace add-ons are often free for open source projects.

GitHub gists
Gists are special GitHub repositories for sharing your work (public) or for saving work for later reuse (secret). They can contain single files, parts of files, or full applications. You can download gists, clone them, fork them, and embed them.

Public gists can be discovered and found in searches. You can use keywords to narrow down what you find, including prefixes to restrict the results to gists from specific users, gists with at least N stars, gists with specific filenames, and so on.

Secret gists are not searchable, but anyone with the URL can see them. If you really want your code to be protected, use a private repository.

As we’ve seen, GitHub provides Git repositories as a service, along with features for code review, project management, integrations with other developer tools, team management, social coding, and documentation. While GitHub is not the only product in its category, it is the dominant repository for open source software development.

https://www.infoworld.com

Blockchain may have a bigger impact than the internet, say IT leaders

With its features of cryptography, distributed sharing and decentralization of data, blockchain technology is rapidly impacting business operations across the world. Although its impact is yet to be seen, IT leaders are extremely optimistic about the technology, touting it to have a bigger impact than what Internet had back in the 90s.

"We are getting into a phase where blockchain would have a higher impact than internet had on our industry in the 90s. We are seeing blockchain in day-to-day operations and also in software development. Real-time transfer of funds without the intermediary, preventing duplication or manipulation of data provides a strong use case for the financial sector. I think the PNB fraud case could have been easily prevented using blockchain," told Sheenam Ohrie, VP, Enterprise Data & Mobility Engineering, Dell during an event in Bangalore. 

Smart contracts

One of the most effective use case of blockchain are smart contracts which are extremely useful for all sectors, believe experts. Smart contracts give entities the ability to share any value-based asset or transaction without a middleman. Unlike a normal contract, the rules and obligations of a smart contract are executed automatically which can be of great use for organizations relying on condition-based exchange of information.

"Another strong use case is smart contracts which can be very useful for sectors such as manufacturing, banking, finance, insurance and logistics to automatically execute transactions in a secure manner in each step of the contract. When you have a transaction that can only go through with the consensus of all members in a network, it enhances the security and integrity of data," said Ohrie. 

Decentralized applications

IT leaders believe millions of software applications today will be strengthened using blockchain. Unlike a centralized network, decentralized apps will be distributed across thousands of nodes which prevents tampering of app data, speed up transactions and lead to far better network security. This is a critical feature lacking in today's infrastructure, where most networks are centralized and can be brought down by attackers.

"We will see decentralized applications and smart contracts on public and private blockchains, which will be extremely helpful for companies in coming times," says Chris Zhong, Cloud Solution Architect, Microsoft. "In addition to that, we will see a decentralized marketplace where data can be safely exchanged and monetized. Blockchain will directly impact data-centric sectors like insurance, banking, healthcare and all industries based on supply chains," added Zhong.

http://www.cio.in

This new privacy tool would speed up your internet, too

These days, you may wish you had a magic switch you could flip to keep your data more secure.

The misuse of Facebook user data by Cambridge Analytica is only the latest consumer privacy flap to create outrage. Remember the Equifax hack? That affected more than 230 million people. And in 2017, US lawmakers reversed Obama-era rules that forbade your internet service provider from making money off your web-browsing history.

Suddenly internet users are realizing that their internet service providers have been amassing huge troves of data on all the websites they visit. People aren't happy about that, and it seems there's nothing we can do about it.

So a magic switch would be nice. And that's essentially what website performance and security giant Cloudflare set out to create, starting with its new tool called 1.1.1.1. Announced Sunday, 1.1.1.1 aims to speed up your internet connection and make it harder for your ISP to collect your browsing history. In combination with a potential change in the way your browser works, the tool could eventually stop your ISP from accessing that information altogether. That's big news at a time when consumers are demanding more control of their data.

That other key change needed to make your data private is called DNS over HTTPS, a proposed standard being shepherded by the Internet Engineering Task Force that would hide information about your web browsing activity under a shroud of encryption. It's not built into the systems you use to go online yet, but Cloudflare is hoping that will change soon.

With 1.1.1.1, internet users can let Cloudflare take over the process of resolving requests to the DNS or Domain Name System. That's the crucial process of matching up a URL -- like facebook.com -- with a website's true location on the internet, called an IP address (for Facebook, that's 157.240.18.35).

Usually your internet service provider takes care of DNS for you. This also happens to be a great way to log every website you visit. Taking that out of your ISP's hands, then, makes it harder for the company to collect your browsing history.

"What many Internet users don't realize is that even if you're visiting a website that is encrypted -- has the little green lock in your browser -- that doesn't keep your DNS resolver from knowing the identity of all the sites you visit," wrote Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince in a blog post Sunday.

That's what Cloudflare's pitching with its new service, which is free and can be used by changing the settings in your web browsers or operating systems. You can use it on computers, routers and phones. If you type 1.1.1.1 into your web browser, you'll find a website that gives you instructions.

Swearing off data collection

animated gif shows how to point your iPhone toward 1.1.1.1 on a specific Wi-Fi network.

This gif shows how to point your iPhone toward 1.1.1.1 on a specific Wi-Fi network.

Cloudflare

But wait, if Cloudflare is directing your website queries, then can't it collect your browsing history for itself? Actually, they're not going to keep that data at all, Prince said.

"At no time will we record the list of where everyone is going online," Prince said. "That's creepy."

Cloudflare is working with third-party auditors at KPMG to examine their systems and guarantee they're not actually collecting your data. That privacy commitment, Prince said, is what separates Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 from other DNS services that are free and open to the public.

Other services include OpenDNS (owned by Cisco) and open-source project TentaDNS. Google also provides a DNS resolver, called Google Public DNS. Google does limit the kinds of information it saves when you use its DNS service, but it keeps anonymized lists of all the web addresses users search for in permanent logs, along with other information. The company says it doesn't correlate web browsing activity with Google accounts.

Cloudflare's promise to keep your data private is impressive, said Heidi Shey, a privacy and security expert at business analyst firm Forrester. "It's a great thing that they're coming out of the gate and being up front about that," Shey said. Still, she added, "You're kind of taking what they're saying at face value."

The company will need to continue to be transparent, showing what the auditors find in their logs, for consumers to continue to trust the service, Shey said.

That might be especially important because of a coding flaw, dubbed Cloudbleed, that in 2017 afflicted websites using Cloudflare's products. That led to the potential exposure of usernames, passwords, messages and other important information. Cloudflare fixed the problem, and there aren't any indications that hackers used the flaw to steal anyone's information.

Taking it one step further

Prince acknowledges that 1.1.1.1 is no silver bullet. Internet service providers still have other tools for sniffing out which websites you visit. That's because some key information about your web-browsing habits is encoded into the bits and bytes that travel over the internet, and ISPs can intercept that information and read it.

Cloudflare is hoping to help solve that problem, too. It's promoting the implementation DNS over HTTPS, which encrypts that data about your web browsing as it flows online.

It'll be up to the makers of web browsers, operating systems and devices to build in support for DNS over HTTPS. If that becomes standard practice, using a DNS service like 1.1.1.1 will cut off your internet service provider from your browsing history for good.

Mozilla is looking into making DNS over HTTPS a feature of its Firefox browser.

"Firefox is the most privacy-centric browser, and we are always looking for new technologies like DNS over HTTPS to ensure we're at the cutting edge of speed, privacy and making life online better," Selena Deckelmann, a senior director of engineering at Mozilla who focuses on Firefox, said in a statement.

What's the catch?

Lest you think this is an April Fools' joke too good to be true, Prince said there's something in it for Cloudflare, too. The company's main business is making its customers' websites run fast. While Cloudflare has an array of services to make this happen, Prince said, he realized that creating a free DNS service could speed things up on the user's end.

So if you use 1.1.1.1, there should be a combined effect when you visit the websites of Cloudflare customers. "It's going to be even faster," Prince said.

https://www.cnet.com

Microsoft adds AI course to its certification program

Microsoft is adding a new online AI course to its list of Professional Program modules, enabling participants to receive a certificate.

Microsoft's new Professional Program in AI is open to the public. The new course is aimed at developers looking to expand their AI capabilities as well as anyone interested in general AI education.The AI track includes 10 required courses which take between eight and 16 hours per course. Technologies covered in the AI courses include Python, math/statistics, ethics, data analysis, Azure Machine Learning, computer vision, natural language processing and speech recognition.

Those completing the course receive a digitally-sharable Microsoft Professional Program Certificate in Artificial Intelligence.

The courses aren't free. Participants need to buy certificates from edX.org for each course. However. Microsoft also allows those interested to sign up and audit them for free, but they won't get the completion credit if they do this. More specifics are available via the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) site.

The new AI program is one of several tracks offered under the Microsoft Professional Program name. Others include Big Data, Cloud Administration, Data Science, Front End Web Development, IT Support, DevOps and more.

When Microsoft originally announced its plans for these types of courses in 2016, the program was known as the "Microsoft Professional Degree" program.

http://www.zdnet.com