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…
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…
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…
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…
Games are popular as a test-bed for new machine learning techniques because they can be very challenging and allow for easy analysis of new learning techniques in a controlled environment. For reinforcement learning, where the goal is to learn good behavior in a data-driven way,…
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…
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…
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…
By Allison Linn, Senior Writer, Microsoft Just a decade ago, the idea of using technology to do things like automatically translate conversations, identify objects in pictures — or even write a sentence describing those pictures — seemed like interesting research projects, but not practical for real-world use.…
By Jim Pinkelman, Senior Director, Microsoft Research Since 2004, the Microsoft Research PhD Scholarship Programme in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) has supported groundbreaking PhD projects. This year we have 17 projects that span six countries, and include research areas such as computational biology,…
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…
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…
