Have you ever wondered what happens when you ask a search engine to search for something as seemingly simple as “how do you grill salmon”? Have you found yourself entering multiple searches before arriving at a webpage with a satisfying answer? Perhaps it was only…
Computers are disappearing. This doesn’t mean they’re actually going away, though. In fact, every day more and more of how we live, work, and interact is transformed by computers. But it does mean that technology has become so ubiquitous in recent years that our focus…
Significant advances are being made in artificial intelligence, but accessing and taking advantage of the machine learning systems making these developments possible can be challenging, especially for those with limited resources. These systems tend to be highly centralized, their predictions are often sold on a…
The rise of deep learning is accompanied by ever-increasing model complexity, larger datasets, and longer training times for models. When working on novel concepts, researchers often need to understand why training metrics are trending the way they are. So far, the available tools for machine…
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…
How do humans communicate efficiently? The common belief is that the words humans use to communicate – such as dog, for instance – invoke similar understanding of the physical concepts. Indeed, there exists a common conception about the physical appearance of a dog, the sounds…
If you were asked to draw a picture of several people in ski gear, standing in the snow, chances are you’d start with an outline of three or four people reasonably positioned in the center of the canvas, then sketch in the skis under their…
New camera localization technology for sensitive environments can keep images and map data confidential Advances in augmented reality (AR) and mobile robotics promise to revolutionize how we see and interact with our physical world in the future. Today, AR and mixed reality (MR) devices, in…
Today people use personal digital assistants for help with scheduling, playing music, turning on or adjusting other devices, and answering basic questions such as “What time’s the game on?” or “Where’s the nearest hardware store?” But what if these assistants could do more to help…
Microsoft Research has teamed up with economists at Bank of Canada to launch an interactive tool for exploring online job search trends in the country. The tool, based on a classification process derived from previous research on how job searches align with socio-demographic data in…
Reinforcement Learning (RL), much like scaling a 3,000-foot rock face, is about learning to make sequential decisions. The list of potential RL applications is expansive, spanning robotics (drone control), dialogue systems (personal assistants, automated call centers), the game industry (non-player characters, computer AI), treatment design…
Recently, Microsoft Research Montréal open sourced a phonetic matching component used previously in Maluuba Inc.'s natural language understanding platform. The library contains string comparison utilities that operate on a phoneme level as opposed to a character level. This allows upstream systems to utilize personalized and…
