Microsoft Research Blog

Machine learning

  1. PhD Fellowship 2018

    Nominations wanted: Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship Program 2018 

    September 5, 2017 | Sandy Blyth

    At Microsoft Research, we are on the lookout for exceptional students to apply for our two-year PhD fellowship program. Our fellowships are for students in computer science, electrical engineering and mathematics, as well as interdisciplinary studies intersecting with those domains such as computational biology, social…

  2. Real world interactive learning at cusp of enabling new class of applications 

    August 22, 2017

    By Alekh Agarwal and John Langford, Microsoft Research New York Clicks on Microsoft’s news website MSN.com increased 26 percent when a machine-learning system based on contextual-bandit algorithms was deployed in January 2016 to personalize news articles for individual users. The same real world interactive learning…

  3. Transfer learning for machine reading comprehension 

    July 26, 2017

    By Xiaodong He, Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research For human beings, reading comprehension is a basic task, performed daily. As early as in elementary school, we can read an article, and answer questions about its key ideas and details. But for AI, full reading comprehension is…

  4. a group of people sitting at a table in front of a crowd

    Transportation Data Science at Microsoft 

    July 13, 2017

    By Vani Mandava, Director, Data Science Outreach, Microsoft Research The National Science Foundation (NSF)-supported Big Data Innovation Hubs launched a National Transportation Data Challenge with a kickoff event in Seattle in May 2017. Microsoft Outreach, through its partnership with the Big Data Hubs organized an…

  5. QA model

    A Joint Model for Question Answering and Question Generation 

    June 9, 2017

    At the Microsoft Research Montreal lab, one of our primary research focuses is to advance the field of Question Answering. Automatic question-answering systems can provide humans with efficient access to vast amounts of information, and the task also acts as an important proxy for assessing…

  6. A snapshot from AirSim shows an aerial vehicle flying in an urban environment, training for real-world AI

    Toward AI that operates in the real world 

    May 29, 2017

    By Ashish Kapoor, Microsoft Research It’s an exciting time to be a machine intelligence researcher. Recent successes in machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), which span from achieving human-level parity in speech recognition to beating world champions in board games, indicate the promise of…

  7. MSR Swiss Joint Research Center

    From improving a golf swing to reducing energy in datacenters 

    February 21, 2017

    2017 Swiss Joint Research Center kick off By Scarlet Schwiderski-Grosche, Senior Research Program Manager Recently, we celebrated an important milestone for our Swiss Joint Research Center (Swiss JRC). We welcomed top researchers from all partners to a workshop at the Microsoft Research Cambridge Lab, to…

  8. Substance, not hype, powers AI excitement at premier machine learning conference 

    December 1, 2016

    By Christopher Bishop, Distinguished Scientist and Director of Microsoft Research Cambridge Lab This month, I will attend the Conference and Workshop on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), the premier gathering in the machine learning field. I’ve participated in this conference most years since it began…

  9. Making better use of the crowd 

    December 1, 2016

    By Jennifer Wortman Vaughan, Senior Researcher, Microsoft Research Over the last decade, computer scientists have harnessed crowds of Internet users to solve tasks that are notoriously difficult to crack with computers alone, such as determining whether an image contains a tree, rating the relevance of…