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How Microsoft Is Making Big Impact With Machine Learning

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During the last two years, Microsoft has upped the ante on Machine Learning and Analytics. From hiring top notch data scientists to acquiring niche startups, Redmond has made all the right moves to transform Azure into one of the best analytics platforms. These investments have started to pay off for the company. It has been successful in articulating and demonstrating the value of data-driven insights to governments, medical institutions, and public sector organizations.

Emerging markets that are turning technology savvy are becoming the hotbed for evaluating the upcoming trends such as Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence.

With its strong presence in India, Microsoft is partnering with the state and central government to bring the benefits of technology to the masses. The company is making Cloud, Big Data, Machine Learning, and Analytics accessible to the government agencies.

Andhra Pradesh, one of the states in Southern India that were recently split from Telangana, is busy building its core infrastructure and the new capital city. Led by the chief minister, Chandrababu Naidu, who is considered to be a tech visionary, the state is gearing up to be the future technology hubs in India. The state government has signed a memorandum of understanding with Microsoft to use technology for addressing some of the complex challenges.

Minimizing the school dropouts and increasing the employability of students is essential for the growing state of Andhra Pradesh. One of the first initiatives of its partnership with Microsoft resulted in an application that helps the state education department in predicting the school dropouts. Based on Azure Machine Learning, this tool processes complex data consisting of student performance, school infrastructure, and teacher skills to find meaningful patterns. The outcome of the analysis is used by the government to align its schemes, programs, and investments in the most important areas. Over 10,000 schools in Andhra use the cloud-based solution to predict dropouts accurately for an academic year. This is enabling the state education department to intervene at the right time to reduce the number of dropouts.

Microsoft India has also applied the concept of Machine Learning to predict the regression rate in eye surgeries. Through a partnership with Hyderabad-based LV Prasad Eye Institute (LVPEI), Microsoft has built a solution that helped the hospital in gathering insights from millions of clinical data points collected from multiple locations where patients were treated for eye diseases. It contained the geographical mapping along with the demographic details of patients.

A group of doctors from LVPEI worked closely with Microsoft in building a predictive model for measuring the success of an eye surgery. This model will accurately predict the new "eye number" (Uncorrected Visual Acuity or UCVA) of patients. This solution will help doctors in making informed decisions while recommending the surgery, its outcomes, and more importantly in reducing the pain and cost for the patients.

Agriculture is another area where Microsoft Azure and Machine Learning are making an impact. International Crops Research Institute for Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) has adopted Azure ML to bring digital farming to thousands of farmers in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. The solution consists of a mobile application for farmers and a personalized village advisory dashboard. The sowing app exploits the power of machine learning to infer insights from weather forecasting models, historical data related to rainfall, and the past yield of crops. This data when combined with a machine learning algorithm, accurately predicts the ideal sowing week to get the maximum return for the farmers.

Source: ICRISAT

The village advisory dashboard delivers insights across several environmental factors that determine a healthy crop yield. This is combined with the data collected from farms in multiple districts of the state by ICRISAT is uploaded to Azure. Through visualization tools, this dashboard provides important metrics such as soil health, fertilizer recommendations, and seven days' weather forecast. In the recent pilot launched in Andhra, information was sent to farmers as text messages in their local language.

Cloud-based Machine Learning platforms are going to play a critical role in enabling governments to proactively address the issues related to governance and administration. The availability of abundant computing power, cheaper storage, and ubiquitous connectivity is making modern technology accessible to the masses.

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