Ignite 2017 Wrap Up

While I’m not in Orlando with our Microsoft teams this week, watching them from a distance gives me an interesting perspective on the raft of great stuff that we’ve just announced. But the thing that has me sitting up in my chair is seeing Satya's clear vision and the progress our teams are making on Artificial Intelligence, quantum computing and augmented reality in ways that make all of this goodness accessible to world's developers.

If you missed the preview of new updates to Azure Machine Learning, go back and watch it. We’re making it possible for AI developers and data scientists to develop and manage machine learning and AI models anywhere — in the cloud, on-premises or on the edge – with a new set of tools. These new updates will also make AI developers and data scientists more productive by leveraging the most popular open source frameworks, tools and runtimes, and by giving engineers and scientists the control that they need to work at the state-of-the-art.

We're making some exciting improvements to Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit, a collection of intelligent APIs that allows developers to easily add AI capabilities to their applications. The updates include the general availability of text analytics, a cloud-based service for language processing, such as sentiment analysis, key phrase extraction and language detection of text. Next month, we will also make generally available Bing Custom Search, a customized search experience for developer defined subsections of the Web, and Bing Search v7, which will provide more relevant results using Bing Web, news, video, image search, as well as a new version of autosuggest and spellcheck.

In 2017 developers have unprecedented power at their fingertips waiting to be leveraged to build great applications. Harnessing all of this power can be a real challenge, and we must continually focus on making it easier for developers to quickly bring their ideas to life. One of the most exciting trends on this front are serverless functions, and at Ignite, we're combining the power of Azure CosmosDB with Azure Functions in a way that I think will allow developers to achieve new levels of productivity. Writing apps with just a few lines of code to leverage the planetary data scaling of CosmosDB will allow developers to innovate more quickly, whether their applications are processing huge streams of IoT sensor data, processing billions of online transactions per day, or anything in between.

Perhaps one of the most exciting frontiers in technology is Quantum Computing. In contrast to classical computers where k bits can represent one of 2^k states at a time, a quantum computer with k bits can represent 2^k states simultaneously. Using quantum mechanical properties of superposition and entanglement, quantum computers will be able to perform calculations in short periods of time that classical computers could not finish even if given until the end of time itself. 

If this sounds miraculous and you're waiting for the "but", there is one. Quantum computers with large numbers of bits are extraordinarily difficult to build. Microsoft is taking a unique approach to the construction of a quantum computer, with innovations in mathematics, physics, engineering, and software that we believe will allow us to build a quantum computer with real scale over the coming years. A big part of our approach revolves around topological qubits, and work done by Microsoft Technical Fellow and mathematician Michael Freedman. Dr. Freedman is a Fields Medalist, mathematics' equivalent of the Nobel Prize, and has been focused on encoding quantum information using topological properties of Majorana particles, fractionalized electrons that can only exist in matter at extremely low temperatures. 

We believe that these topological qubits are the key to building a practical, large-scale quantum computer. We also believe that quantum computing is on the cusp of becoming a practical technology that we can put into the hands of developers. Consequently, we've designed a new quantum computing programing language that will allow developers to exploit the power of scalable quantum computers for solving a very wide range of problems. These tools will be available in free preview by the end of the year, and you can sign up to participate in that preview now. We want to be ready for a quantum computing world and this new set of tools with deep integration of the programming language into Visual Studio will provide developers with debugging, state-of-the-art simulators, and other tools that can run locally or on Microsoft Azure.

All of these new developments are directly aligned with Microsoft’s mission of empowering every person and organization the panel to achieve more. It is our passion to provide you all with tools and technology to help unlock your creativity and to allow you to make your vision a reality.