Office 365 Goes Video Streaming

Microsoft unveiled Office 365 Video, a YouTube-like streaming service where enterprises and large organizations can post in-house video content for communication and training.

“Office 365 Video provides organizations with a secure, company-wide destination for posting, sharing and discovering video content,” said Mark Kashman, a senior product manager with the Office 365 team, in a blog posting.

Kashman touted Video as a tool for internal communications, citing the examples of new-employee orientation, management messaging and worker training. Employees will also be able to contribute to a “Community” section, though most companies will probably frown on cat antic clips.

The service rolls out over the next few days to companies that have registered for Office 365′s First Release early distribution program, then through early 2015 to others.

Video will be available only to subscribers of Office 365′s plans for enterprises — E1 through E4 — and universities (A2 through A4). It will not be offered to consumer subscribers or firms with small business-oriented plans like Business Essentials, Business and Business Premium.

Kashman also said Office 365 plans for government agencies will get Video at some point, but he did not proffer a timeline.

The other requirement is SharePoint Online, an off-premises component of the enterprise and academic plans, but missing from the increasingly popular Office 365 ProPlus, the rent-not-buy plan used by organizations that have decided to retain their back-end services, like SharePoint and Exchange, on premises.

Although Office 365 Video has elements of consumer streaming services like Google’s YouTube, it’s strictly an in-house affair: It will be available only to employees, and then only those whom IT administrators have assigned access rights.

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Scientist Develop Anti-Faking PC

Scientists have developed a computer system with sophisticated pattern recognition abilities that performed more impressively than humans in differentiating between people experiencing genuine pain and people who were just pretending.

In a study published in the journal Current Biology, human subjects did no better than chance – about 50 percent – in correctly judging if a person was feigning pain after seeing videos in which some people were and some were not.

The computer was right 85 percent of the time. Why? The researchers say its pattern-recognition abilities successfully spotted distinctive aspects of facial expressions, particularly involving mouth movements, that people generally missed.

“We all know that computers are good at logic processes and they’ve long out-performed humans on things like playing chess,” said Marian Bartlett of the Institute for Neural Computation at the University of California-San Diego, one of the researchers.

“But in perceptual processes, computers lag far behind humans and have a lot of trouble with perceptual processes that humans tend to find easy, including speech recognition and visual recognition. Here’s an example of a perceptual process that the computer is able to do better than human observers,” Bartlett said in a telephone interview.

For the experiment, 25 volunteers each recorded two videos.

In the first, each of the volunteers immersed an arm in lukewarm water for a minute and were told to try to fool an expert into thinking they were in pain. In the second, the volunteers immersed an arm in a bucket of frigid ice water for a minute, a genuinely painful experience, and were given no instructions on what to do with their facial expressions.

The researchers asked 170 other volunteers to assess which people were in real discomfort and which were faking it.

After they registered a 50 percent accuracy rate, which is no better than a coin flip, the researchers gave the volunteers training in recognizing when someone was faking pain. Even after this, the volunteers managed an accuracy rate of only 55 percent.

The computer’s vision system included a video camera that took images of a person’s facial expressions and decoded them. The computer had been programmed to recognize that one kind of facial movement combinations suggested true pain and another kind suggested faked pain.

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