Economics

Using technology to study human behavior in relation to resources, society, goverments and business

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Microsoft Research Blog

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Learn Artificial Intelligence Skills via Residency at Microsoft

Harness Machine Learning to Improve People’s Lives At Microsoft, we are committed to leveraging the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to benefit people and greater society. Advances in AI can be applied to address some of the world’s biggest challenges, and so we are keen to nurture the next generation of talent, so they are better prepared to innovate and contribute to multiple areas of AI, including machine learning, planning, and decision making. Microsoft is…

January 2018

Microsoft Research Blog

ACM EC'17

Microsoft and intelligent markets at ACM EC’17

By David Pennock, Principal Researcher and Assistant Managing Director  The 18th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC’17) starts today at MIT in Cambridge, MA, featuring some of the latest research findings at the interdisciplinary boundary between economics and computer science. Microsoft researchers will have a significant presence at the conference, co-authoring many papers, serving in leadership roles, giving an invited talk, and receiving an award. One theme at the conference is the design and…

June 2017

Microsoft Research Blog

Extensive crowdsourcing study reveals surprising results in reversal of platform design assumptions

By John Kaiser, Research News A 21-month study on the dynamics of crowdsourcing shows workers depend on collaborating with each other, upending platform designers’ long-held assumptions of crowdsourcing tasks performed in isolation. “People spend far more time on a task, trying to get it right, than we might expect, given the pay rates for many tasks,” said MSR lead researcher Mary Gray, who presented the study during this week’s Conference on Human Computation & Crowdsourcing…

November 2015

Microsoft Research Blog

Projects

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SecondLight

Established: July 26, 2010

 SecondLight is a rear projection, optical touch-sensing technology that augments the typical interactions afforded by multi-touch and tangible tabletops with the ability to project and sense both through and beyond the display.    

Opinion Dynamics in Social Networks

Established: May 13, 2014

This project aims to understand and characterize user behavior in online social networks. Specifically, we posit, analyze, and validate different models of formation and evolution of opinions in social networks. We characterize our models both in terms of stability and goodness in terms of an approximation ratio w.r.t. to a social optimum (e.g., Price of Anarchy, Price of Stability etc).

Algorithmic Crowdsourcing

Established: February 1, 2012

To build a machine learning based intelligent system, we often need to collect training labels and feed them into the system. A useful lesson in machine learning is that "more data beats a clever algorithm". In the current days, through a commercial crowdsourcing platform, we can easily collect a large amount of labels at a cost of pennies per label. However, the labels obtained from crowdsourcing may be highly noisy. Training a machine learning model…

Publications

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Products & Downloads

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Viral Economy Simulator

January 2008

Financial efficiency is the premier performance measure for most systems. Existing economic ecosystems for distribution of multimedia leave a lot to be desired: client-server platforms do not scale well, resulting in substantial operational costs, whereas peer-to-peer platforms cannot police copyright control and are thus notorious for not being able to capitalize on their vast delivery…

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Videos

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People

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Groups

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Computational Social Science

With an increasing amount of data on every aspect of our daily activities – from what we buy, to where we travel, to who we know, and beyond – we are able to measure human behavior with precision largely thought impossible just a decade ago, creating an unprecedented opportunity to address longstanding questions in the social sciences. Leveraging this sea of information requires both scalable computational tools, and understanding how the substantive scientific questions should…

Adaptive Systems and Interaction Group

The Adaptive Systems and Interaction group pursues advances in principles of intelligence and interaction and applications of these advances to enhance computational systems and interfaces. The team includes groups exploring foundations of sensing, learning, and decision making, search and retrieval, and human-computer interaction.

Algorithms (Redmond)

All computer systems, be it a standalone device, a datacenter, the internet, an advertising platform, deep neural networks or the internet of things rely on sound algorithmic ideas at their foundations.

Career Opportunities

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Research Intern – Computational Social Science at Microsoft Research NYC

Type: Internship
Lab/Location: Microsoft Research Lab - New York City
Research Area: Multiple

The Computational Social Science group at Microsoft Research NYC is actively seeking summer interns to join us in advancing the state-of-the-art in computational social science and online experimentation. The ideal applicant will possess awareness of the theoretical and experimental social science literature, experience with experimental design, as well as significant computer programming expertise. Microsoft Research offers an exhilarating and supportive environment for cutting-edge, multidisciplinary research with access to an extraordinary diversity of big and small…

Research Intern – Econometrics and Machine Learning

Type: Internship
Lab/Location: Microsoft Research Lab - New England
Research Area: Artificial intelligence, Economics

Microsoft Research New England has a single research position in machine learning and econometrics for the summer, working in the ALICE group with Greg Lewis and Vasilis Syrgkanis. Past work has included non-parametric IV estimation using neural nets, inference in high-dimensional settings, and estimation and policy optimization with heterogeneous treatment effects, all in settings where the objective is causal inference or counterfactual prediction. Microsoft Research New England is comprised of thirty full-time researchers and postdocs working in…

Research Intern – Social Media Collective

Type: Internship
Lab/Location: Microsoft Research Lab - New England
Research Area: Economics, Social sciences

Microsoft Research New England (MSRNE) is looking for advanced PhD students to join the Social Media Collective (SMC) for its 12-week Internship program. The Social Media Collective (in New England, we are Nancy Baym, Tarleton Gillespie, and Mary L. Gray, with current postdoc Elena Maris) bring together empirical and critical perspectives to understand the political and cultural dynamics that underpin social media technologies. Learn more about us here. The Social Media Collective (SMC) is a network of social science and humanistic…

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