Saving the Planet One Hard Drive at a Time

At the 2022 Microsoft Global Hackathon, Principal Data Scientist Ranganathan Srikanth led the Secure and Sustainable Disposal of Hard Disks project, addressing the environmental and data security challenges posed by data centers. The team developed a robot to disassemble hard drives, enabling the recycling of valuable materials while ensuring data security by destroying sensitive data. This innovation builds on Microsoft’s….

Welcome to the Digital Preservation of Languages: Microsoft Language Bank

The Microsoft Language Bank, an initiative born from the 2022 Microsoft Hackathon, addresses the urgent need to preserve the world’s languages, 40% of which are endangered. Spearheaded by a team of ten in Beijing, the Language Bank employs AI to develop text-to-speech (TTS) technology for underrepresented languages like Inuktitut, Kurmanji, Hakka, and Minnan Chinese. By collecting voice data and innovating….

Repowering Coal

A seed of an idea can become a thriving forest. The Microsoft Global Hackathon, the largest private hackathon on the planet, is coming back again this fall. We’ll be sharing stories of some of the winners in the coming months, and we want to share this one with you. On a typical Tuesday morning, Conor Kelly, a 15-year Microsoft veteran,….

Garage project Journal becomes Microsoft Journal

Big news for enthusiasts of digital ink—Journal, a Garage project, is now Microsoft Journal. Microsoft Journal, an app for Windows, offers a delightful freeform personal notetaking experience that lets you take notes and reason through ink. Thank you for using Journal as a Garage project. Your input has shaped it into what Microsoft Journal is today. What makes Journal special?….

A new way to author and share Excel named formulas: advanced formula environment, a Microsoft Garage project

Advanced formula environment, a Microsoft Garage project, enables Excel users to write complex formulas efficiently and then share them in an Office Add-In for Excel. With the recent addition of the LAMBDA function to Excel, it is now possible to author your own custom functions using the same formula language that powers millions of spreadsheets today. Excel LAMBDA significantly expands….

Garage project Journal celebrates its anniversary with folders to keep you organized

Journal, released as a Microsoft Garage project one year ago, continues to delight today. It is designed—from the ground up—for personal journaling and notetaking with a digital pen. The Journal app is powered by AI to help you write, search, and annotate your ideas quickly and naturally. “We think of Journal and our other incubations as platforms to explore and….