Microsoft Research Blog

Many of our online activities, from receiving and sending emails to searching for information to streaming movies, are driven behind the scenes by cloud-based distributed architectures, and writing concurrent software—programs with multiple logical threads of execution—is of paramount importance to scale these growing computing needs.…

Microsoft Excel is one of the world’s most important software tools, relied upon users worldwide to create, understand, model, predict, and collaborate. As the Excel team works to leverage new areas of computer science – advancements in programming languages, NLP, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning – they…

From BiT (928 million parameters) to GPT-3 (175 billion parameters), state-of-the-art machine learning models are rapidly growing in size. With the greater expressivity and easier trainability of these models come skyrocketing training costs, deployment difficulties, and even climate impact. As a result, we’re witnessing exciting…

Is innovation another loss due to the global COVID-19 pandemic? Indicators reveal challenges to overcome—as well as opportunities to build on our collective experience gained in the last year. Measuring collaboration using network machine learning provides a powerful diagnostic tool to address issues as they…

Editor’s note: This research was conducted by Sai Vemprala, Senior Researcher, and Ashish Kapoor, Partner Researcher, of Microsoft Research along with Sami Mian, who was a PhD Researcher at the University of Pittsburgh and an intern at Microsoft at the time of the work. Autonomous…

Azure Cognitive Search is a cloud search service that gives developers APIs and tools to build rich search experiences over private, heterogeneous content in web, mobile, and enterprise applications. It has multiple components, including an API for indexing and querying, seamless integration through Azure data ingestion, deep integration with Azure Cognitive Services, and persistent storage of user-owned indexed content. At…

Humans perceive the world through observing a large number of visual scenes around us and then effectively generalizing—in other words, interpreting and identifying scenes they haven’t encountered before—without heavily relying on labeled annotations for every single scene. One of the core aspirations in artificial intelligence…

The purpose of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, according to its bylaws, is twofold. The first is to promote research in the area of AI, and the second is to promote the responsible use of these types of technology. The result was a 35th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-21) schedule that broadens the possibilities of AI and is heavily reflective of a…

In video games, nonplayer characters, bots, and other game agents help bring a digital world and its story to life. They can help make the mission of saving humanity feel urgent, transform every turn of a corner into a gamer’s potential demise, and intensify the…

Editor’s note: This post and its research are the result of the collaborative efforts of a team of researchers comprising former Microsoft Research Engineer Hadi Salman, CMU PhD student Mingjie Sun, Researcher Greg Yang, Partner Research Manager Ashish Kapoor, and CMU Associate Professor J. Zico…

At Microsoft Bing, our mission is to delight users everywhere with the best search experience. We serve a diverse set of customers all over the planet who issue queries in over 100 languages. In search we’ve found about 15% of queries submitted by customers have…

From a research point of view, games offer an amazing environment in which to develop new machine learning algorithms and techniques. And we hope, in due course, that those new algorithms will feed back not just into gaming, but into many other domains. Beyond the…