Inside the new Microsoft, where lie detection is a killer app
JENNIFER Marsman recently tested a lie detector of her own design on her boss at Microsoft. Do you work for the best company in the world, she asked. Yes. Oops! According to the software, that was probably a fib. Will she get a promotion this year? Yes! This time her manager was most likely telling the truth.
No, Microsoft isn’t getting into the law- enforcement game. Marsman, 37, is a “principal developer evangelist,” whose job is to tirelessly advocate for machine learning- a form of artificial intelligence that uses data to make predictions about everything from quarterly sales to when a cow will get pregnant.
The lie detector, cobbled together from algorithms and a 14-pronged headset that measures brain waves, is a kind of party trick Marsman deploys to show software developers how to use Microsoft’s Azure Machine Learning tools. Boisterous and known to spout Harry Potter references, Marsman plays a crucial role for a company that was early to machine learning but is now competing with Google and Amazon to commercialise the technology.
The stakes are high. In the coming years, machine learning will change the world-making computers exponentially smarter and helping companies cut costs, figure out where to invest and a whole lot more. Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Anurag Rana describes the technology as “one of the biggest differentiators for software companies for years to come.”
Without it, he says, “you’re not going to be able to sell your product.”
Though Microsoft has been working on machine learning for at least 20 years, divisions like Office and Windows once harnessed its predictive qualities only sparingly.
“The reaction of many people there was ‘We know how to do things, why are you questioning my views with your data,’” says Pedro Domingos, a University of Washington computer science professor who wrote a book on machine learning called “The Master Algorithm.”
Microsoft truly embraced the technology when it started Bing in an attempt to catch up with Google. Satya Nadella ran engineering and technical strategy for the search division before becoming chief executive officer two years ago and has been sprinkling machine learning like fairy dust on everything his company touches.
“Microsoft is now in this place where they have machine learning very deeply embedded,” Domingos says. “They’re investing a lot in making machine learning less Wild West.”
Like Google and Amazon, which have both used the technology to improve their own products, Microsoft is weaving machine learning into its own operations. This isn’t simply about helping the company save money and function better; the more Microsoft uses the technology itself, the easier it is to explain and sell. “Customers are confused,” says Joseph Sirosh, lured from Amazon in 2013 to oversee engineering for Microsoft’s machine learning efforts.
“Cutting through that noise has been a bit of a challenge. It has been also hard for our own field and sales people to go talk to customers and educate them about all the use cases.” —WPBloomberg