- [Woman] Innovation hinges on our ability
to see things differently, breaking boundaries
and looking between the lines in an effort
to solve some of the world's toughest challenges.
(steady electronic music)
(thoughtful music)
- Hi, I'm Mark Hammond,
General Manager for Autonomous Systems at Microsoft.
Last year we unveiled our autonomous systems platform
empowering engineers to apply state-of-the-art technology
to their physical systems and processes and showcasing
some of the amazing things they'd already created.
Today I'm excited to announce opening these capabilities
to anyone to try with the preview launch
of Microsoft Project Bonsai.
What exactly do we mean by autonomous systems?
And how does Project Bonsai help you realize them?
Let's consider the evolution of automation
where we can see a steady progression
from mechanized systems powered
first by steam, then by electricity
which were controlled by manual operation,
leading to increasingly capable systems
leveraging software to provide automated control
for fixed operations to today's systems
which are increasingly leveraging AI
to provide intelligent operation
in highly dynamic environments.
These systems include a wealth of scenarios
across industrial robotics, motion control,
machine tuning and calibration, smart buildings and homes,
process control and automation, and more.
As we look across all of these,
a few key common elements stand out.
For existing control systems, which are suboptimal,
data-centric approaches are proven
to not be enough to optimize them, rendering the majority
of machine-learning techniques insufficient.
Rather, deep subject matter expertise and experience
are the powerful ingredients that can be leveraged
to create successful solutions.
And all of these systems must be able to deploy
and scale in the real, physical world,
bridging from the world of bits to the world of atoms.
For example, chemicals business, SCG, has been able
to optimize their chemical production process,
minimizing loss and reducing calibration and tuning time
from months to days to better serve customers' demands.
And at Microsoft,
we're using our autonomous systems technology ourselves
to enhance the HVAC controllers for our campus.
To realize these state-of-the-art autonomous systems,
we are providing capabilities
across four essential dimensions.
First, we need to harness
that deep subject matter expertise and experience.
This is realized through a powerful technique
called machine teaching.
This is a fundamental and powerful shift in perspective.
Instead of focusing on how something like the brain
or a neural network works, we enable you to instead focus
on what you are trying to teach and how best to teach it.
This allows you to leverage your deep domain expertise
to efficiently and effectively guide the acquisition
of intelligence just as you would for a new employee
in terms that are understandable to you
and your colleagues instead of only data scientists
or machine learning practitioners.
You don't have to know how your team members' brains work
to train them, but you do have to use your organization's
hard-won knowledge and experience to teach them effectively.
Machine teaching gives you the ability
to do the same for machine learning.
For your system to safely and rapidly gain experience
following your machine teaching programs,
we bring together powerful,
professional simulation capabilities
from the likes of MathWorks and AnyLogic
with the massive scalability of Microsoft Azure,
allowing your system to learn across hundreds
or thousands of concurrent simulation instances
running in the cloud.
And we keep you focused on teaching these systems
by abstracting away and automating the low-level mechanics
associated with the underlying AI.
When your machine teaching program compiles and runs,
things like neural networks and reward functions
are generated automatically on your behalf.
And once you've built your controller,
we provide the runtime capabilities needed
to deploy and integrate it
with the rest of your software stack.
To help you get started on this journey, we have,
in conjunction with our growing ecosystem of partners,
created Project Moab,
an open source machine teaching robotics hardware kit
which allows you to quickly learn
via a fun desktop balancing platform.
It can quickly go from the seemingly straightforward,
but in actuality decidedly non-trivial,
to the exceedingly complex all while enabling you
to learn how to harness sophisticated simulation
and machine teaching capabilities for your own use cases.
The Microsoft autonomous systems platform
allows you to drive real-world innovation,
build trustworthy autonomy, and scale human expertise.
With the launch of Microsoft Project Bonsai,
I invite you to join us
during one of our Build deep-dive sessions
for an in-depth tour, get hands-on with the platform,
learn with Project Moab and its simulator
and sign up to be amongst the first
to get your own hardware kit,
connect with us and each other and learn more
with a wealth of materials at aka.ms/as
and most of all to start creating
your own autonomous systems.
(thoughtful music)
- [Woman] Innovation hinges on our ability
to see things differently, breaking boundaries
and looking between the lines in an effort
to solve some of the world's toughest challenges.
(steady electronic music)