This year marks the fourth year of the Microsoft Research Dissertation Grant, which offers grants of up to $25,000 to support the research of students nearing the completion of doctoral degrees at North American universities who are underrepresented in the field of computing. This was…
In computer vision, one key property we expect of an intelligent artificial model, agent, or algorithm is that it should be able to correctly recognize the type, or class, of objects it encounters. This is critical in numerous important real-world scenarios—from biomedicine, where an intelligent…
Editor’s Note: The author would like to give special thanks to his collaborators, Ardalan Amiri Sani, Professor of Computer Science at UC Irvine, Sung Eun (Summer) Kim, Professor of Law at UC Irvine, and UC Irvine students Saeed Mirzamohammadi, Yuxin (Myles) Liu, and Tianmei Ann…
What we can teach a model to do with natural language is dictated by the availability of data. Currently, we have a lot of labeled data for very few languages, making it difficult to train models to accomplish question answering, text summarization, and other tasks…
It’s a big day for you. Back-to-back meetings are scheduled with critical customers and partners, and a parent-teacher conference is sandwiched in there as well. As you’re headed toward the last meeting, suddenly you cannot remember the key talking points. Who sent you the pre-read…
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…
