Microsoft's Ignite event traditionally attracts more from the developer ranks, but the technologies on display are increasingly of relevance to CIOs developing cloud strategies today. At Ignite 2019 in Orlando last week, Microsoft unveiled a new approach to analytics and data warehousing, Azure Synapse Analytics, and a new way to run Azure data services in anyone's cloud, Azure Arc. Get the latest cloud computing insights by signing up for our newsletter. With Azure Synapse Analytics Microsoft takes its Azure SQL Data Warehouse and turns up the volume to handle petabytes of data in its cloud. Some of the features -- such as dynamic data masking and column- and row-level security to provide granular access control -- are already generally available, while others -- notably integrations with Apache Spark, Power BI and Azure Machine Learning -- are still in preview.

Microsoft participates in Artificial Intelligence Week Middle East (AIWEEKME) 2019 showcasing the power of Microsoft AI (Artificial Intelligence). The 2nd edition of AIWEEkME took place in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Bringing together an ecosystem to understand how AI can transform their industries. Helping business leaders understand why their organizations need to take the AI journey was one goal of the event. Microsoft's booth at the exhibition area showcased some of the many technologies the company boasts of in AI.

At its big conference for developers on Monday, Microsoft executives were showing what it will be like to live in a world infused with artificial intelligence. Cortana, the company's digital assistant and its rival to Amazon Alexa and Apple's Siri, is at the heart of Microsoft's effort to embed voice and image recognition into more of its services. Microsoft representatives demonstrated how artificial intelligence could help drones spot anomalies they see from above and recognize the people who come into a conference room for a meeting, speedily transcribing what they say. Four years into his gig running Microsoft -- and after initially proclaiming that the world is primarily mobile-first and cloud-first -- CEO Satya Nadella is focused on expanding the powers of Cortana, which is embedded into Windows 10 and has nearly 150 million people using it every month. But there are limitations, and among them is Alexa's popularity in the home through the Amazon Echo.

Tech company developer conferences always feature a wacky demo or three. But at Build 2017 in Seattle Wednesday, Microsoft went for the waterworks at the conclusion of CEO Satya Nadella's keynote address: it showcased a prototype watch that eliminated the arm shaking that often plagues those suffering from the neurological disease Parkinson's. After a speech that both heralded and warned about coming leaps in technological power, Nadella screened a video that told the story of two British Microsoft researchers, Haiyan Zhang and Nicolas Villa, who decided to launch an independent project to create a tremor-eliminating device for a BBC documentary, The Big Life Fix. The Emma Watch, a prototype that was shown at Microsoft Build 2017, can still the trembling arms of those suffering from Parkinson's. Working with graphic designer and Parkinson's sufferer Emma Lawton, 32, the researchers developed a watch -- which they named Emma -- that, according to Microsoft, "vibrates in a distinctive pattern to disrupt the feedback loop between brain and hand."

Microsoft is pushing its analytics credentials by detailing how its platforms can be used together to produce output in a way that chief information officers and others can act on, specifically using Power BI to visualise results from the Azure Machine Learning service, now part of the broader Cortana Intelligence Suite. The company said that there has been a lot of interest among customers in using Power BI to visualise the output of an Azure Machine Learning model, and the firm recently published a tutorial showing exactly how this can be accomplished, providing useful pointers for Microsoft customers looking to make the best use of such tools to analyse data. "Imagine if you could have Power BI regularly bring in the latest output of your fraud model or the sentiment for recent tweets about your products," said Justyna Lucznik, programme manager for Microsoft's Power BI team. Microsoft's tutorial naturally assumes that customers are already using multiple Microsoft platforms, such as a cloud-hosted Azure SQL database instance as the source of their data and subscriptions to the PowerBi and Azure ML services, and also use the R language, one of Microsoft's favoured tools for statistical computing, to script all the actions together. The tutorial walks customers through the process of using an R script to extract data from Azure SQL, then calling the Azure ML web service to score the data and write the output back to the SQL database.

If it wasn't already clear that Microsoft learned a few hard lessons after its Tay AI went off the deep end with racist and sexist remarks, it is now. The folks in Redmond have posted reflections on the incident that shed a little more light on both what happened and what the company learned. Believe it or not, Microsoft did stress-test its youth-like code to make sure you had a "positive experience." However, it also admits that it wasn't prepared for what would happen when it exposed Tay to a wider audience. It made a "critical oversight" that didn't account for a dedicated group exploiting a vulnerability in Tay's behavior that would make her repeat all kinds of vile statements.