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OptiMind: A small language model with optimization expertise 

January 15, 2026
OptiMind is a small language model that converts business operation challenges, described naturally, into mathematical formulations that optimization software can solve. It reduces formulation time & errors & enables fast, privacy-preserving local use.

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  1. A flowchart with three horizontal sections on a blue-to-green gradient background. The first section, labeled “Classification,” shows icons of a computer, an arrow pointing to a robot face, and another arrow pointing to a box labeled “TSP.” The second section, labeled “Inference,” displays a robot icon connected by arrows to two document icons, one of which includes a magnifying glass. The third section, labeled “Test-time scaling,” shows a document with a checkmark connected by an arrow to a circular refresh icon. Arrows indicate the flow between sections, starting from Classification to Inference and then to Test-time scaling.

    OptiMind: A small language model with optimization expertise 

    January 15, 2026

    OptiMind is a small language model that converts business operation challenges, described naturally, into mathematical formulations that optimization software can solve. It reduces formulation time & errors & enables fast, privacy-preserving local use.

  2. Research Focus: October 25th

    Research Focus: Week of October 23, 2023 

    October 25, 2023

    In this issue: Kosmos-2.5: A Multimodal Literate Model; Can vine copulas explain complex relationships of weather variables; New system accelerates the adaptive training process; Structural inequalities and relational labor in the influencer industry.

  3. Microsoft Research Focus 14 edition, week of April 24, 2023

    Research Focus: Week of April 24, 2023 

    April 26, 2023

    Welcome to Research Focus, a series of blog posts that highlights notable publications, events, code/datasets, new hires and other milestones from across the research community at Microsoft. Yael Tauman Kalai, a senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research, has been awarded the 2022 ACM Prize in…

  4. Microsoft researchers Nikolaj Bjørner (left) and Leonardo de Moura (center) received the 2019 Herbrand Award for Distinguished Contributions to Automated Reasoning in recognition of their work in advancing theorem proving. They’re pictured with Jürgen Giesl (right) of the award committee.

    The inner magic behind the Z3 theorem prover 

    October 16, 2019 | Nikolaj Bjørner and Leonardo de Moura

    It’s not uncommon for us to hear that the Z3 theorem prover is magical, but the frequency of such complimentary feedback doesn’t make it any less unexpected—or humbling. When we began work on Z3 in 2006, the design was motivated by two emerging use cases:…

  5. A Deep Learning Theory: Global minima and over-parameterization 

    December 10, 2018 | Zeyuan Allen-Zhu, Yuanzhi Li, and Zhao Song

    One empirical finding in deep learning is that simple methods such as stochastic gradient descent (SGD) have a remarkable ability to fit training data. From a capacity perspective, this may not be surprising— modern neural networks are heavily over-parameterized, with the number of parameters much…

  6. a group of people standing in front of a crowd

    Second homomorphic encryption standardization workshop delivers the goods 

    April 10, 2018 | Kristin Lauter

    What an exciting two days at the Second Homomorphic Encryption Standardization Workshop at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. More than 70 participants from 10 countries gathered together for two intense days of panels, discussions and planning and walked away with a significant milestone: the first draft…

  7. I Chose STEM – Event Recap 

    February 14, 2018 | Jessica Mastronardi

    Earlier this week Microsoft Research Montreal celebrated the International Day of Women and Girls in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) with a one-day symposium: I Chose STEM. More than 200 Canadian STEM students and research community stakeholders joined Microsoft Research for inspirational keynotes, workshops…

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