Microsoft is committed to the advancement and use of AI grounded in principles that put people first and benefit society. We are putting these principles into practice throughout the company by embracing diverse perspectives, fostering continuous learning, and proactively responding as AI technology evolves.
Research is about achieving long-term goals, often through incremental progress. As the year comes to an end, it’s a good time to step back and reflect on the work that researchers at Microsoft and their collaborators have done to advance the state of the art…
The ability to perceive communication signals and make sense of them played an essential role in the evolution of human intelligence. Computing technology is following the same trajectory. Now, computer vision and automatic speech recognition (ASR) technologies have enabled the advent of many artificial intelligence…
In both language and mathematics, symbols and their mutual relationships play a central role. The equation x = 1/y asserts the symbols x and y—that is, what they stand for—are related reciprocally; Kim saw the movie asserts that Kim and the movie are perceiver and…
Having experience in deep learning doesn’t hurt when it comes to the often mysterious, time- and cost-consuming process of hunting down an appropriate neural architecture. But truth be told, no one really knows what works the best on a new dataset and task. Relying on…
Editor’s note: Since 2018, pre-training has without a doubt become one of the hottest research topics in Natural Language Processing (NLP). By leveraging generalized language models like the BERT, GPT and XLNet, great breakthroughs have been achieved in natural language understanding. However, in sequence to…
The past few years have seen tremendous progress in reinforcement learning (RL). From complex games to robotic object manipulation, RL has qualitatively advanced the state of the art. However, modern RL techniques require a lot for success: a largely deterministic stationary environment, an accurate resettable…
Lots of important information, including job openings and other kinds of advertising, are often transmitted by word-of-mouth in online settings. For example, social networks like LinkedIn are increasingly used as a way of spreading information about job opportunities, which can greatly affect people’s career development.…
January 31, 2019 marked the start of the sixth workshop for the Swiss Joint Research Center (Swiss JRC), an innovative and successful collaborative research engagement between Microsoft Research and the two universities that make up the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology—ETH Zurich (ETH) and EPFL.…
Causal inference studies the relationship between causes and effects. For example, one kind of question that causal inference can answer is the “What-happens-if …” question. What happens if I take a specific medication? What happens if I raise the price of a product? What happens…
The idea of crowdsourcing traffic data has been around for a while: If we can get vehicles on the roads to upload their current speeds, then we can get instant, up-to-date data on how fast traffic is moving for well-traveled segments. This is useful for…
Artificial intelligence technologies hold great promise as partners in the real world. They’re in the early stages of helping doctors administer care to their patients and lenders determine the risk associated with loan applications, among other examples. But what happens when these systems that users…
