Microsoft Research Blog

Search and information retrieval

  3. Adversarial and reinforcement learning-based approaches to information retrieval 

    July 9, 2018 | Bhaskar Mitra

    Traditionally, machine learning based approaches to information retrieval have taken the form of supervised learning-to-rank models. Recent advances in other machine learning approaches—such as adversarial learning and reinforcement learning—should find interesting new applications in future retrieval systems. At Microsoft AI & Research, we have been…

  4. Democratizing APIs with Natural Language Interfaces 

    July 2, 2018 | Ahmed Awadallah and Ryen W. White

    Benefiting from a confluence of factors, such as service-oriented architecture, cloud computing, and Internet-of-Things (IoT), application program interfaces – APIs – are playing an increasingly important role in both the virtual and the physical world. For example, web services, such as those featuring weather, sports,…

  6. Microsoft researchers unlock the black box of network embedding 

    February 7, 2018 | Kuansan Wang

    At the ACM Conference on Web Search and Data Mining 2018, my team will introduce research that, for the first time, provides a theoretical explanation of popular methods used to automatically map the structure and characteristics of networks, known as network embedding. We then use…

  7. a man wearing glasses and looking at the camera

    Getting LinkedIn to Data Science with Dr. Igor Perisic 

    February 7, 2018

    Episode 11, February 7, 2018 - Big data is a big deal, and if you follow the popular technical press, you’ll have heard all the metaphors: data is the new oil, the new bacon, the new currency, the new electricity. It’s even been called the…

  8. a group of people sitting at a table looking at a laptop

    New institute explores the future of Cortana 

    February 1, 2018 | Roy Zimmermann

    Today marks the establishment of the Cortana Intelligence Institute – a new, co-funded collaboration between Microsoft Research, Cortana Research and RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, to work on next-generation capabilities for Microsoft’s digital assistant Cortana. At Microsoft, we are constantly looking for opportunities to learn…

  9. 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…

  10. Project PrivTree: Blurring your “where” for location privacy 

    January 20, 2017

    By Winnie Cui, Senior Research Manager, Microsoft Research Asia Data scientist, Anthony Tockar, used publicly available location data to show how celebrities can be tracked throughout New York City, while working on his Master’s Degree at Northwestern University. By cross-referencing public news and photos about…

  11. Long-term collaboration takes aim at mobile browsing 

    August 11, 2016

    By Lily Sun, Research Program Manager, Microsoft Research Asia As mobile browsing continues to consume an ever larger share of Internet services, the stakes of improving the mobile user experience have never been greater. That’s one of the reasons that Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) and…

  12. Theoretical and practical wonders of the web: the 25th International WWW Conference 

    April 11, 2016

    By Kuansan Wang, Director, Internet Services Research Center, Microsoft Research Anyone reading the program for the 25th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW) would find it obvious that web innovation, powered by passionate scientists, users, and developers, continues to accelerate. At WWW this week, Microsoft Research…