Research
If you haven't ever been in a casino, you may have found yourself asking one very pertinent question: On which slot machine am I going to hit the jackpot? Standing in front of a bank of identical-looking machines, you have only instinct to go on.…
The fields of cryptography and machine learning (ML) are evolving at a rapid pace and are each complex in their own ways. The Cryptography and Privacy Research Group at Microsoft Research has led the way in creating a new research area at the intersection of…
Cecily Morrison wants to build technology that enables people to live their lives the way they want and accomplish things they wouldn’t otherwise be able to. The Principal Researcher landed on the personal mission years before joining Microsoft Research. Experiences first teaching children robotics and…
Graduate students are often coached to pursue a career in higher education, yet the number of available tenure-track positions falls far short of the number of candidates looking to fill them. In reality, about 14 percent of graduates with advanced science, engineering, and health degrees…
There is a growing interest in the use of deep generative models for sampling high-dimensional data; examples include high-resolution natural images, long-form text generation, designing pharmaceutical drugs, and creating new materials at the molecular level. Training these models is, however, an arduous task. Even state-of-the-art…
Having experience in deep learning doesn’t hurt when it comes to the often mysterious, time- and cost-consuming process of hunting down an appropriate neural architecture. But truth be told, no one really knows what works the best on a new dataset and task. Relying on…
Last summer we announced Microsoft Research Open Data—an Azure-based repository-as-a-service for sharing datasets—to encourage the reproducibility of research and make research data assets readily available in the cloud. Among other things, the project started a conversation between the community and Microsoft’s legal team about dataset…
Imagine moving to a new city. You want to get from your new home to your new job. Unfamiliar with the area, you ask your co-workers for the best route, and as far as you can tell ... they’re right! You get to work and…
In many real-life scenarios, obtaining information is costly, and getting fully observed data is almost impossible. For example, in the recruiting world, obtaining relevant information (in other words, a feature value) for a company could mean performing time-consuming interviews. The same applies to many other…
By Alekh Agarwal and John Langford, Microsoft Research New York Clicks on Microsoft’s news website MSN.com increased 26 percent when a machine-learning system based on contextual-bandit algorithms was deployed in January 2016 to personalize news articles for individual users. The same real world interactive learning…
Today I would like to discuss running genetic algorithm… backwards. Yes, this is possible. Occasionally it is practical, when you need not the best, but the worst solution to a problem. And I think there are more uses for it. It seems to be helpful…
By Xuedong Huang, Chief Speech Scientist, Microsoft Xuedong Huang (Photo by Scott Eklund/Red Box Pictures) For more than 20 years, Microsoft has invested in advanced speech recognition research and development. It’s great to see the return on that investment in products and services such as…