Microsoft Research Blog

Intelligence

Microsoft Ability Initiative: A collaborative quest to innovate in image captioning for people who are blind or with low vision

January 16, 2019 | Meredith Ringel Morris

Microsoft is committed to pushing the boundaries of technology to improve and positively influence all parts of society. Recent advances in deep learning and related AI techniques have resulted in significant strides in automated image captioning. However, current image captioning systems are not well-aligned with…
Microsoft Research 2018: 10 memorable blogs topping a year of open source and innovation

December 27, 2018

The year’s end is an opportunity to reflect on what was achieved and to resolve to aspire to even greater heights in the one that’s about to begin. Looking back on what was accomplished at Microsoft Research in 2018 brings to mind numerous proud moments,…
Competition win a steppingstone in the greater journey to create sustainable farming

December 18, 2018

The cucumber plants, their leaves wide and green and veiny, stood tall in neat rows, basking in the Netherland sunlight shining through the glass panes of their greenhouses. Hopes were high for the plants—a bountiful crop in just four months using as few resources as…
First TextWorld Problems—Microsoft Research Montreal’s latest AI competition is really cooking

December 11, 2018 | Wendy Tay and Adam Trischler

This week, Microsoft Research threw down the gauntlet with the launch of a competition challenging researchers around the world to develop AI agents that can solve text-based games. Conceived by the Machine Reading Comprehension team at Microsoft Research Montreal, the competition—First TextWorld Problems: A Reinforcement…
A Deep Learning Theory: Global minima and over-parameterization

December 10, 2018 | Zeyuan Allen-Zhu, Yuanzhi Li, and Zhao Song

One empirical finding in deep learning is that simple methods such as stochastic gradient descent (SGD) have a remarkable ability to fit training data. From a capacity perspective, this may not be surprising— modern neural networks are heavily over-parameterized, with the number of parameters much…
Learning to teach: Mutually enhanced learning and teaching for artificial intelligence

December 5, 2018 | Fei Tian

Teaching is super important. From an individual perspective, a student learning on his or her own is never ideal; a student needs a teacher's guidance and perspective to be more effectively educated. Taking the societal perspective, teaching enables civilization to be passed on to the…
Getting into a conversational groove: New approach encourages risk-taking in data-driven neural modeling

December 3, 2018

Microsoft Research’s Natural Language Processing group has set an ambitious goal for itself: to create a neural model that can engage in the full scope of conversational capabilities, providing answers to requests while also bringing the value of additional information relevant to the exchange and—in…
ReDial: Recommendation dialogs for bridging the gap between chit-chat and goal-oriented chatbots

November 30, 2018

Chatbots come in many flavors, but most can be placed in one of two categories: goal-oriented chatbots and chit-chat chatbots. Goal-oriented chatbots behave like a natural language interface for function calls, where the chatbot asks for and confirms all required parameter values and then executes…
Discovering the best neural architectures in the continuous space

November 30, 2018 | Fei Tian

If you’re a deep learning practitioner, you may find yourself faced with the same critical question on a regular basis: Which neural network architecture should I choose for my current task? The decision depends on a variety of factors and the answers to a number…
Minimizing trial and error in the drug discovery process

November 29, 2018 | Alex Gaunt, Marc Brockschmidt, and Miltos Allamanis

In 1928, Alexander Fleming accidentally let his petri dishes go moldy, a mistake that would lead to the breakthrough discovery of penicillin and save the lives of countless people. From these haphazard beginnings, the pharmaceutical industry has grown into one of the most technically advanced…
Challenge accepted—MARLÖ competition among conference highlights

November 19, 2018 | Noboru Sean Kuno

With the latest Project Malmo competition, we’re calling on researchers and engineers to test the limits of their thinking as it pertains to artificial intelligence, particularly multi-task, multi-agent reinforcement learning. Last week, a group of attendees at the 14th Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive…
Microsoft AirSim now available on Unity

November 14, 2018 | Ashish Kapoor and Shital Shah

At Microsoft, we have a vision and passion to bring artificial intelligence solutions to real-world systems using the power of simulation. We continually strive to accelerate AI advances with the use of realistic simulators, tools, and environments. Today we are excited to announce AirSim availability…

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