Microsoft’s AI is helping farmers and weavers

As you know Microsoft has always taken a keen interesting in Artificial Intelligence and where it can be used to simplify the day-to-day work. On the same lines, the company introduced many bots that helped people do a certain task or a series of tasks.

Satya Nadella recently wrote a post on LinkedIn titled ‘The people and projects that inspired me in 2017’. He said:

What’s incredible is that the team discovered how ‘Ruuh’ can help handloom weavers in rural communities create new economic opportunities by generating design patterns, inputting pictures and colours with the help of neural networks. By creating new designs they’re able to grow their markets and generate new revenue, helping to preserve this ancient art form and carry on a family business that spans generations. Not just ‘Ruuh,’ social chatbots built by Microsoft have over 100 million users with 30 billion conversation sessions across five countries. Three years ago in China, our team built and introduced our first social chatbot called Xiaoice, which has the ability to chat in natural language, as well as create content ranging from art to poetry.

He termed stories from different teams working in Microsoft as the people and projects that inspired him this year. Nadella’s list included some amazing work done by Microsoft’s teams around the globe.

He says:

An amazing collaboration – called Project Premonition – between Microsoft researcher Ethan Jackson, a team from Microsoft Research, the University of Pittsburgh, Johns Hopkins University, University of California Riverside, and Vanderbilt University is utilizing the Microsoft Cloud and our AI platform to detect pathogens before they cause outbreaks. Using drones and machine learning algorithms like the SNAP alignment tool, they are helping public health organisations get the data they need with a more time and labour-efficient means of collecting data from potential disease sources in the environment.

He also mentions another project that is helping farmers understand their soil and increase productivity. Nadella says:

In this case, data from low-cost sensors in soil and drones with machine learning algorithms work with farmers’ knowledge and intuition to help them gather and parse data about their farms – informing what, when, and where to plant in order to drive the highest-possible yields and reduce costs.

Lastly, he mentions all the innovative technologies Microsoft has worked upon this year like Seeing AI, Eye Control, Learning Tools and accessibility advancements for Office 365, etc. He ended by saying he’s proud of the different teams that worked hard to make these technologies a reality.

Via: Thehansindia

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