"Changes to Azure services and the Azure platform itself are both inevitable and beneficial, to ensure continuous delivery of updates, new features, and security enhancements. However, change is also a primary cause of service regressions that can contribute towards reliability issues--for hyperscale cloud providers, indeed for any IT service provider. As such, it is critical to catch any such problems as early as possible during the development and deployment rollout, to minimize any impact on the customer experience. As part of our ongoing Advancing Reliability blog series, today I've asked Principal Program Manager Jian Zhang from our AIOps team to introduce how we're increasingly leveraging machine learning to de-risk these changes, ultimately to improve the reliability of Azure."--Mark This post includes contributions from Principal Data Scientists Ken Hsieh and Ze Li, Principal Data Scientist Manager Yingnong Dang, and Partner Group Software Engineering Manager Murali Chintalapati.

The International Alliance for Mobility Testing & Standardization (IAMTS) announced three new members: NVIDIA, TNO and Smart Mobility Norway. The new members bring expertise in simulation, safety and proving ground operations that will benefit the ongoing work of the consortium. IAMTS is a global, membership-based alliance of stakeholders in the testing, standardization and certification of advanced mobility systems and services. "We are thrilled to have NVIDIA, TNO and Smart Mobility Norway add their expertise to build the best practices that support IAMTS," said Peter Doty, secretariat at IAMTS. "Each of these organizations understands that the correlation of virtual- and real-world-testing of connected and autonomous vehicles is key to efficient and safe deployment."

The Food and Drug Administration is sticking its toe in the water of artificial intelligence, providing its first guidance on the emerging development of applications for the technology in healthcare. The FDA released model 1.0 of its software precertification pilot Monday to provide an initial tool to test these programs. The agency noted that with AI and machine learning technology advancing rapidly, the health IT community must move quickly to ensure their safety in practical applications. "Software is increasingly used in healthcare to treat and diagnose conditions and diseases, aid clinical decision making and manage patient care," the FDA wrote in its working model (PDF). "Under this program, software developers would be assessed (by FDA or by an FDA-accredited third party) for the rigor of their practices in software design, testing, clinical assessment, and real-world performance monitoring, along with other appropriate capabilities."