Microsoft aids Johns Hopkins University with COVID-19 map tracker

Our industry has been called upon to help address the world's most acute needs through this crisis. And I'm proud of how all of you raised the game and been there when the world needed you the most, serving as those digital first responders. To the first responders out there for whom we're very thankful. And for me, that's been a point of light amidst this crisis seeing developers come together with those on the front lines, you know at Johns Hopkins University epidemiologists and software The developers created that canonical dashboard to track the spread of COVID-19 adaptive bio technologies using the cloud compute and AI to decode the immune systems response to the virus. In the United Kingdom, a cross section of manufacturers adjusted their production lines to build ventilators for the NHS using mixed reality to guide workers through the process. The NBA is using the power of the cloud and Xbox to engage fans and maintain the joy of the game. Role of developers is more important than ever. Already, we've seen something like two years worth of digital transformation in just two months. And we've seen how Critical digital technology is in the three phases of this crisis from emergency response to the recovery phase to the reimagining the world going forward. Every organization will increasingly need the ability at a moment's notice to remote in Everything from manufacturing to sales to customer support. They will also need the ability to simulate anything from how the immune system responds to a virus to how a fault in a wind turbine can impact our power supply. And they will need to be able to automate everywhere to enable Faster, more agile response from triage in healthcare, to the maintenance in smart buildings, to curbside pickup in retail. I think that this opportunity is what grounds us in our mission at Microsoft to empower every person and organization. On the planet to achieve more, this is just a snapshot of what we will share with you over the next 48 hours. These are your tools, your platforms to build the world we all want to live in. We are at an inflection point. as developers, you have that opportunity as well as a responsibility to define what should be rebuilt. What should be reimagined and what should be left behind? And we're all ready seeing developers have this impact. Folding at home is an amazing project, is a distributed computed project that. Harnesses the collective power of millions of volunteers to aid COVID-19 research efforts. Let's take a look. When I was eight years old, I had the unfortunate experience of losing most of my vision due to macular degeneration. One of the things that drew me to studying protein dynamics is it's something that nobody can see that really levels the playing field for me. If we can understand how proteins fold, then we should also be able to understand how they misfolded and Alzheimer's disease, or how they malfunction and cancer. Folding at home is basically a big computer cluster where people around the world volunteer to run simulations for us and send the data back to our servers. We can take problems that would have taken 500 years to complete on a single desktop and start solving them within a matter of six months. It feels amazing that an ordinary person like me can help experts hopefully cure illnesses that are incurable today But the current immediacy of the pandemic brought the whole thing to bear on COVID-19. So over the last two months, we've gone from having around 30,000 to 4 million devices running folding at home. But Microsoft has been partnering with us as we scale up in such a short period of time, GitHub started running our client on some of their hardware. And we're making use of Azure resources to run some of the large simulations. We've already recovered a couple of these novel binding site from the virus and are starting to delve into the structural details that provide new means to target these proteins. [BLANK_AUDIO] Welcome Greg, it's great to talk to you on Teams. It's really inspirational to see the progress you've made in such a short time, it's really remarkable. Maybe you can start by telling us more about the technology behind folding at home. So folding at home is a distributed distributed computing project for understanding all the moving parts of proteins and how we can control them. The basic idea behind the technology is to build a what is essentially a map of the different structures that a protein can adopt as it goes about its function and has all of these moving parts. And so we called out on the internet or citizen scientists around the world to contribute their computing power to running simulations of how all the atoms in a protein move over time. And on the server side, we collect all that data and build up these maps and identify the interesting features like new therapeutic targets, Right? So this is where you're going to start using more some of the Azure and GitHub from what I understood. You could even use that to go to the next phase of this. Exactly. Exactly. So Azure has been huge so we've got these active learning algoirithms that let us focus our compute resources on the structures that are most useful to us running on Azure. And along with that, running servers that let us Collect all that data and productively engage with all of our volunteers. We have a real opportunity to impact COVID-19 but this is also a general platform that we can bring to bear on Alzheimer's. Disease and antibiotic resistance and cancer and a long list of other things. So I'm excited about the engagement we're getting. It's fantastic to hear Greg and how can people get involved in your Your project. Yeah, there's a wide variety of ways. So the first thing is to go to foldingathome.org/start-folding, and you can download our software and start contributing your personal computing power. But if you want You wanna get more involved? There are a variety of ways. So we have a huge need for developers right now. And to help build out this platform and scale it in response to all the interest that COVID-19 has generated in the opportunity, we have to make a difference. Yeah, no tremendous. Thank you so much, Greg. It's such a great example of how you and a small group of developers, and scientists working together can make such a big difference. So thank you for sharing your story. And good luck going forward and we love to be, you know, involved deeply with you. Right here. I'm excited and look forward to it.