As technology has advanced, the way we accomplish things in our lives has shifted. While new tech is influencing such basic human activities as communication, for instance, encouraging us to reconsider what it means to connect with one another, technological innovations are also changing approaches…
At the 2005 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, researcher Hanna Wallach found herself in a unique position—sharing a hotel room with another woman. Actually, three other women to be exact. In the previous years she had attended, that had never been an option because…
“This is a game changer for the big data community. Initiatives like Microsoft Research Open Data reduce barriers to data sharing and encourage reproducibility by leveraging the power of cloud computing” —Sam Madden, Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology An open and collaborative research culture has…
In February, we announced DeepSpeed, an open-source deep learning training optimization library, and ZeRO (Zero Redundancy Optimizer), a novel memory optimization technology in the library, which vastly advances large model training by improving scale, speed, cost, and usability. DeepSpeed has enabled researchers to create Turing…
Humans perceive the world through many channels, such as images viewed by the eyes or voices heard by the ears. Though any individual channel might be incomplete or noisy, humans can naturally align and fuse the information collected from multiple channels to grasp the key…
Microsoft AI for Accessibility is funding the ORBIT research project, which is enlisting the help of people who are blind or low vision to build a new dataset. People who are blind or low vision can contribute to the project by providing videos of things…
Editor's Note: This post was written collaboratively by Brennan Jones, Sunny Zhang, Priscilla Wong, and Sean Rintel and told from the first-person perspective of Brennan Jones. One of my life missions is to connect people, and I’ve been pursuing this mission through research projects that…
One of the goals of quantum computing research is to understand which problems quantum computers can solve faster than classical (non-quantum) computers and how big the speedup can be. Grover’s algorithm and Shor’s algorithm are two famous quantum algorithms that yield a polynomial speedup and…
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact communities around the world, researchers everywhere are fighting hard in the hopes of gradually understanding the mystery of the COVID-19 virus through the most advanced technologies available. Based on their expertise and research experience in the fields of…
Hardware is important, but it’s hard More than ever before, our society depends on an array of interactive devices. We need to provide input to computer systems throughout our day, whether at home, at work, or on the move. And the same computer systems often…
Unaddressed mental health conditions are growing worldwide, with millions across the world living with different types of these conditions. The World Health Organization projects that depression may be the biggest contributor to a key indicator of the impact of disease by 2030. Even with this high…
The Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship recognizes innovative, promising new faculty, whose exceptional talent for research and innovation identifies them as emerging leaders in their fields. This year, 185 individuals were nominated. Microsoft Research is proud to announce the 2020 recipients for these awards. The…
