April 16, 2020 10:00 AM (PT) - In this webinar with Dr. Josh Benaloh, Senior Principal Cryptographer at Microsoft Research, learn how the ElectionGuard technology works and how anyone can write an independent verifier that processes all of the artifacts produced by ElectionGuard. Specifically, understand how verifiers can either confirm that the announced tallies are fully consistent with the recorded votes or identify specific inconsistencies that should be addressed. Finally, examine how ElectionGuard uses techniques…
March 26th, 2020
Episode 112 | March 25, 2020 - Rangan Majumder is the Partner Group Program Manager of Microsoft’s Search and AI, and he has a simple goal: to make the world smarter and more productive. But nobody said simple was easy, so he and his team are working on better – and faster – ways to help you find the information you’re looking for, anywhere you’re looking for it. On the podcast, Rangan talks about how…
March 25th, 2020
Increases in the occurrence and global effect of mental illness have made the prevention and treatment of mental health problems a public health priority. To address the need for more access to mental health treatment, digital psychotherapy programs, such as internet-delivered Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (iCBT), have evolved and have achieved clinical outcomes comparable to traditional face-to-face therapy when it comes to meeting the needs of clients who are experiencing mental health problems. However, to attain…
March 24th, 2020
For developers, writing bug-free software that doesn’t crash is getting difficult in an increasingly competitive world where software needs to ship before it becomes obsolete. This challenge is especially apparent with online cloud services, which are often dictated by aggressive shipping deadlines. Cloud services are distributed programs comprising multiple back-end systems that continuously exchange asynchronous signals while responding to incoming web requests. They are complex by nature, hard to get right, and require protection from…
March 23rd, 2020
Episode 111 | March 18, 2020 - Dr. Behnaz Arzani is a senior researcher in the Mobility and Networking group at MSR, and she feels your pain. At least, that is, if you’re a network operator trying to troubleshoot an incident in a datacenter. Her research is all about getting networks to manage themselves, so your life is as pain-free as possible. On today’s podcast, Dr. Arzani tells us why it’s so hard to identify…
March 18th, 2020
Humans subconsciously use perception-action loops to do just about everything, from walking down a crowded sidewalk to scoring a goal in a community soccer league. Perception-action loops—using sensory input to decide on appropriate action in a continuous real time loop —are at the heart of autonomous systems. Although this tech has advanced dramatically in the ability to use sensors and cameras to reason about control actions, the current generation of autonomous systems are still nowhere…
March 17th, 2020
March 26, 2020 10:00 AM (PT) - In this webinar with Dr. Danna Gurari, Assistant Professor in the School of Information at University of Texas at Austin, and Dr. Ed Cutrell, Senior Principal Researcher in the Microsoft Research Ability Group, learn how computer vision researchers are working to create vision systems adapted to the needs of those who use them. By creating new dataset challenges, the researchers aim to empower the artificial intelligence community to…
March 11th, 2020
Episode 110 | March 11, 2020 - If you want an inside look at how a research idea goes from project to prototype to product, you should hang out with Gavin Jancke for a while. He’s the General Manager of Engineering for MSR Redmond where he created – and runs – the Central Engineering Group. Over the past two decades, he’s overseen more than seven hundred software and hardware engineering projects, from internal MSR innovations…
March 11th, 2020
In the February 2020 issue of Communications of the ACM, Microsoft researcher Patrice Godefroid published a new review article entitled “Fuzzing: Hack, Art, and Science,” which presents an overview of the main automated testing techniques in use today for finding security vulnerabilities in software. Fuzzing means automatic test generation and execution with the goal of finding security vulnerabilities. Over the last two decades, fuzzing has become a mainstay in software security. Thousands of security vulnerabilities…
March 4th, 2020
Episode 109 | March 4, 2020 - Over the past decade, the healthcare industry has undergone a series of technological changes in an effort to modernize it and bring it into the digital world, but the call for innovation persists. One person answering that call is Dr. Peter Lee, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Healthcare, a new organization dedicated to accelerating healthcare innovation through AI and cloud computing. Today, Dr. Lee talks about how MSR’s…
March 4th, 2020
In September last year, the Microsoft AI Residency program graduated its first class. The second class is already settled in and undertaking an exciting range of projects, and recruitment for the third class is underway! The AI Residency program is a 12-month program for early- and mid-career professionals to train as research software engineers in either Redmond, WA or Cambridge, UK. Both programs share common goals, with some differences due to the location of various…
March 3rd, 2020
March 9, 2020 10:00 AM (PT) - In this webinar led by Partner Researcher Dr. Ben Zorn, follow the path of the revolution that empowers more people to easily leverage computational resources for problem solving. You will examine the incredible opportunities and technical challenges of empowering users to quickly build correct and meaningful spreadsheets. The focus here includes recent efforts to combine spatial analysis, statistical analysis, and deep learning to find bugs in spreadsheets. You will also…
March 1st, 2020
