Dianmu Zhang

Dianmu Zhang is a researcher in Microsoft’s Applied Sciences Group, where she works on improving human-computer interfaces with machine learning.  She has also worked on computer vision projects in ASG.

Dianmu holds a Ph.D. from the University of Washington, where she explored how to make artificial intelligence less artificial and more concrete for humans—whether it’s solving complex robotics problems with combinatorial reasoning of simple knowledge, or making unsupervised learning more efficient by trivial human intuition.

She has published articles on diverse topics ranging from A.I. to molecular biology in journals and conference proceedings such as The Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), leading A.I. publisher and conference organizer IJCAI, and Nature Chemical Biology.

Dianmu believes that robotics is the future.  “If robots take over one day, it had better be me who makes it happen!” she says with a note of villainous laughter.  But, she explains, her motives are good: she wants to build robots to do household chores, to walk your dog, and to take care of aging parents.