Microsoft – Microsoft patents tech to attain conferences utilizing physique language, facial expressions, different information
Microsoft is dealing with criticism for its new “Productivity Score” expertise, which may measure how a lot particular person staff use e-mail, chat and different digital instruments. Nevertheless it seems the corporate has even greater concepts for utilizing expertise to watch staff within the curiosity of maximizing organizational productiveness.
Newly surfaced Microsoft patent filings describe a system for deriving and predicting “overall quality scores” for conferences utilizing information resembling physique language, facial expressions, room temperature, time of day, and variety of folks within the assembly. The system makes use of cameras, sensors, and software program instruments to find out, for instance, “how much a participant contributes to a meeting vs performing other tasks (e.g., texting, checking email, browsing the Internet).”
The “meeting insight computing system” would then predict the chance {that a} group will maintain a high-quality assembly. It will flag potential challenges when an organizer is setting the assembly up, and suggest various venues, occasions, or folks to incorporate within the assembly, for instance.
“Because conventional computerized scheduling systems lack real-world context, users may not be aware that they are attempting to schedule non-optimal meetings, which may result in meetings that are unproductive at best,” reads a patent software made public Nov. 12. It notes, “many organizations are plagued by overly long, poorly attended, and recurring meetings that could be modified and/or avoided if more information regarding meeting quality was available.”
The strategy would apply to in-person and digital conferences, and hybrids of the 2. Individuals named within the filings embrace members of the corporate’s Azure IoT and Microsoft 365 groups. Patent filings present that the idea goes again no less than two years inside the corporate. The brand new patent submitting is a follow-up to a associated software filed in 2018 and granted in August of this 12 months.
The filings don’t element any potential privateness safeguards. A Microsoft spokesperson declined to touch upon the patent filings in response to GeekWire’s inquiry.
To make sure, patents will not be merchandise, and there’s no signal but that Microsoft plans to roll out this hypothetical system. Microsoft has established an inside synthetic intelligence ethics workplace and a companywide committee to make sure that its AI merchandise dwell by its rules of accountable AI, together with transparency and privateness.
Nevertheless, the filings are a window into the concepts floating round inside Microsoft, and so they’re in step with the course the corporate is already heading.
The corporate rolled out its new “Productivity Score” function in late October. The instrument offers firms information to grasp how staff are utilizing and adopting completely different types of expertise.
Microsoft says the aim is to assist organizations make sure that their staff are benefiting from instruments like shared workspaces and cloud-based file sharing to work most effectively. This additionally works to Microsoft’s benefit by encouraging using its merchandise resembling Groups and SharePoint inside firms, making future Microsoft 365 renewals extra possible.
However the instrument has made headlines over the previous week as experiences surfaced that it lets managers see particular person consumer information by default.
Productiveness Rating turns Microsoft 365 right into a “full-fledged workplace surveillance tool,” wrote Wolfie Christl of the impartial Cracked Labs digital analysis institute in Vienna, Austria. “Employers/managers can analyze employee activities at the individual level (!), for example, the number of days an employee has been sending emails, using the chat, using ‘mentions’ in emails etc.”
Esoteric metrics primarily based on analyzing in depth information about worker actions has been largely the area of fringe software program distributors. Now it is constructed into MS 365.
A brand new function to calculate ‘productiveness scores’ turns Microsoft 365 into an full-fledged office surveillance instrument: pic.twitter.com/FC3N6KkIR3
— Wolfie Christl (@WolfieChristl) November 24, 2020
Asserting the overall availability of Productiveness Rating on Oct. 29, the corporate anticipated and sought to handle these privateness considerations. Microsoft has “a strong commitment to privacy across all our services,” wrote Jared Spataro, company vp for Microsoft 365, within the submit.
“Let me be clear: Productivity Score is not a work monitoring tool,” he added. “Productivity Score is about discovering new ways of working, providing your people with great collaboration and technology experiences. It focuses on actionable insights about the ways in which people and teams are using the tools so you can make improvements or provide training to further your digital transformation.”
Microsoft says it offers organizations the flexibility to find out who can see particular person consumer information, with the choice to anonymize or take away particular person information. As well as, the submit says, “to help maintain privacy and trust, the user data provided in Productivity Score is aggregated over a 28-day period.”
However critics say that’s not sufficient if firms, not staff, are in in the end in charge of the privateness settings.
Tying these two threads collectively, simply think about the response if the information additionally included info collected from cameras about physique language and facial expressions in conferences, as described within the Microsoft patent filings.
By the way in which, one instance cited within the “meeting insight computing system” patent software stood out as oddly particular, extra so than some other instance within the submitting — placing us as maybe an inside joke among the many Microsoft crew. In claims itemizing how the expertise might be used, it cited a situation “where the individuals in the organization are human resources managers, and one or more of the meeting trends indicate that a recurring meeting consistently has a low quality score.”
