Microsoft Research Blog

Research Focus highlights notable publications, events, code/datasets, new hires and other milestones from across the research community at Microsoft.

Figure 1: Performance assessment methods change across the development lifecycle for complex AI systems in ways that differ from general purpose AI. The emphasis shifts from rapid technical innovation that requires easy-to-calculate aggregate performance metrics at the beginning of the development process to metrics that…

As AI becomes more deeply integrated into every aspect of our lives, it is essential that AI systems perform appropriately for their intended use. We know AI models can never be perfect, so how do we decide when AI performance is ‘good enough’ for use…

Today, we are experiencing waves of breakthroughs in computing that are transforming just about every aspect of our lives. Artificial intelligence is changing the way we develop and create. Human language technologies are revolutionizing the workflows of healthcare professionals. Deep learning is accelerating our ability…

Online trust has come a long way since the time of centralized databases, where information was concentrated in one location and the security and validation of that information relied on a core set of people and systems. While convenient, this model of centralized management and…

Despite increasingly widespread use of machine learning (ML) in all aspects of our lives, a broad class of scenarios still rely on automation designed by people, not artificial intelligence (AI). In real-world applications that involve making sequences of decisions with long-term consequences, from allocating beds…

What would it take to get humanoid, bipedal robots to dance like Mick Jagger? Indeed, for something more mundane, what does it take to get them to simply stand still? Sit down? Walk? Move in myriads of other ways many people take for granted? Bipedalism…

Large-scale models are revolutionizing deep learning and AI research, driving major improvements in language understanding, generating creative texts, multi-lingual translation and many more. But despite their remarkable capabilities, the models’ large size creates latency and cost constraints that hinder the deployment of applications on top…

For many organizations, trusting their data to the cloud requires having a complete understanding of and control over the environment in which that data resides and how it’s being processed. Microsoft understands this, and we are committed to building a trustworthy cloud—one in which security,…

Over the coming decade, deep learning looks set to have a transformational impact on the natural sciences. The consequences are potentially far-reaching and could dramatically improve our ability to model and predict natural phenomena over widely varying scales of space and time. Could this capability…

Addressing and mitigating the effects of climate change requires a collective effort, bringing our strengths to bear across industry, government, academia, and civil society.

They make restaurant recommendations, help us pay bills, and remind us of appointments. Many people have come to rely on virtual assistants and chatbots to perform a wide range of routine tasks. But what if a single dialog agent, the technology behind these language-based apps,…