Microsoft Research Blog

Research Blog

  1. A graphic depicting audio and video content items passing through an audio transformer layer and a video transformer layer, respectively, before being combined while passing through a multimodal transformer layer

    Microsoft and NVIDIA introduce parameter-efficient multimodal transformers for video representation learning 

    May 17, 2021 | Yale Song

    Understanding video is one of the most challenging problems in AI, and an important underlying requirement is learning multimodal representations that capture information about objects, actions, sounds, and their long-range statistical dependencies from audio-visual signals. Recently, transformers have been successful in vision-and-language tasks such as image…

  3. GamesBond VR Prototype

    Microsoft Research collaborates with KAIST in Korea to explore bimanual interactions with haptic feedback in virtual reality 

    May 6, 2021 | Michel Pahud, Mike Sinclair, and Andrea Bianchi

    Editor's Note: Bimanual controllers are frequently used to enhance the realism and immersion of virtual reality experiences such as games and simulations. Researchers have typically relied on mechanical linkages between the controllers to recreate the sensation of holding different objects with both hands. However, those…

  6. Figure 2: A flowchart depicting unstructured text being processed though a query engine, a probabilistic parser, and probabilistic clustering to produce a unified knowledge base

    Alexandria in Microsoft Viva Topics: from big data to big knowledge 

    April 26, 2021

    Project Alexandria is a research project within Microsoft Research Cambridge dedicated to discovering entities, or topics of information, and their associated properties from unstructured documents. This research lab has studied knowledge mining research for over a decade, using the probabilistic programming framework Infer.NET. Project Alexandria…

  8. A circular flow chart of the QL framework. At the top is a rectangle labeled “QL Scheduling Strategy” with the word “Agent” in parenthesis, representing that the strategy is mapped to an RL agent. From the rectangle, an arrow points around to a rectangle below it that contains a input state space. The rectangle is labeled “Program under test” with the word “Environment” in parenthesis, representing that the program is mapped to the unknown environment. The arrow is labeled “Next op,” and alongside it are the Softmax selection function and the value update formula.

    Reinforcing program correctness with reinforcement learning 

    April 14, 2021 | Suvam Mukherjee

    Many of our online activities, from receiving and sending emails to searching for information to streaming movies, are driven behind the scenes by cloud-based distributed architectures. Writing concurrent software—programs with multiple logical threads of execution—is of paramount importance to scale to these growing computing needs.…

  12. graphical user interface, text, application, email

    The science behind semantic search: How AI from Bing is powering Azure Cognitive Search 

    March 2, 2021

    Azure Cognitive Search (opens in new tab) is a cloud search service that gives developers APIs and tools to build rich search experiences over private, heterogeneous content in web, mobile, and enterprise applications. It has multiple components, including an API for indexing and querying, seamless integration through Azure data ingestion, deep integration with Azure Cognitive Services, and persistent storage…