Episode 42, September 19, 2018 - On today’s podcast, you’ll hear the stories of three of these interns, each of whom came to Microsoft Research from a different field, with a different story and a different perspective, but all of whom share MSR’s passion for finding innovative solutions to the world’s toughest challenges.
September 19th, 2018
Episode 41, September 12, 2018 - Dr. Nancy Baym shares her insights on a host of topics ranging from the arduous maintenance requirements of social media, to the dialectic tension between connection and privacy, to the funhouse mirror nature of emerging technologies. She also talks about her new book, Playing to the Crowd: Musicians, Audiences and the Intimate Work of Connection, which explores how the internet transformed – for better and worse – the relationship…
September 12th, 2018
At the 30th conference on Neural Information Processing in 2016, one of the world’s foremost gatherings on machine learning, there was not a single accepted paper from a researcher at an African institution. In fact, for the last decade, the entire African continent has been absent from the contemporary machine learning landscape. The following year, a group of researchers set out to change this, founding a world-class machine learning conference that would strengthen African machine…
September 10th, 2018
Microsoft is very proud to be a diamond sponsor of ECCV 2018 and we’re in Munich, Germany from September 8-14 with the global computer vision community to share our research and to learn from our fellow contributors. At Microsoft, in parallel with fundamental research, we build products. Our software products, like Visual Studio, PowerPoint and Linux on Windows are used every day by computer vision researchers and engineers. Hardware products, like Surface, Xbox, and HoloLens,…
September 7th, 2018
KDD 2018, the 24th ACM Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining took place in London, United Kingdom on August 19-23 in the heart of London’s historic Royal Docks. KDD is one of the top conferences in the machine learning and data mining domain, bringing together researchers and practitioners across computer science and all verticals. This year’s KDD was the largest ever, with more than 3400 participants from 99 countries and 1588 submissions and included…
September 6th, 2018
Episode 40, September 5, 2018 - In today’s podcast we find out a bit about what else the Special Projects team is up to, and then we hear all about Project Natick and how Ben and his team conceived of, and delivered on, a novel idea to deal with the increasing challenges of keeping data centers cool, safe, green, and, now, dry as well!
September 5th, 2018
Speech recognition is something we humans do remarkably well, which includes our ability to understand speech even in noisy multi-talker environments. While our natural sophistication at this is something we take for granted, speech recognition researchers continue to pursue refinements and improvements on the frontiers of the research space of automatic speech recognition. Significant technological progress that has been made over decades has shaped automatic speech recognition technology into its current form, which is already…
August 31st, 2018
Episode 39, August 29, 2018 - Dr. Hofmann talks about her vision of a future where machines learn to collaborate with people and empower them to help solve complex, real-world problems. She also shares the story of how her early years in East Germany, behind the Iron Curtain, shaped her both personally and professionally, and ultimately facilitated a creative, exploratory mindset about computing that informs her work to this day.
August 29th, 2018
For decades, databases have supported declarative SQL as well as imperative functions and procedures as ways for users to express data processing tasks. While the evaluation of declarative SQL has received a lot of attention resulting in highly sophisticated techniques, improvements in the efficient evaluation of imperative programs have remained elusive. Imperative User-Defined Functions (UDFs) and procedures offer several benefits over SQL, including code modularity, reusability and readability. Because of these benefits, imperative programs often…
August 27th, 2018
Episode 38, August 22, 2018 You know those people who work behind the scenes to make sure nothing bad happens to you, and if they’re really good, you never know who they are because nothing bad happens to you? Well, meet one of those people. Dr. Brian LaMacchia is a Distinguished Engineer and he heads up the Security and Cryptography Group at Microsoft Research. It’s his job to make sure – using up-to-the-minute math –…
August 22nd, 2018
For decades, causal inference methods have found wide applicability in the social and biomedical sciences. As computing systems start intervening in our work and daily lives, questions of cause-and-effect are gaining importance in computer science as well. To enable widespread use of causal inference, we are pleased to announce a new software library, DoWhy. Its name is inspired by Judea Pearl’s do-calculus for causal inference. In addition to providing a programmatic interface for popular causal…
August 21st, 2018
Microsoft Research is actively developing technologies as we continually strive to make our network and online services the most performant and efficient on the planet and this includes openly sharing our progress in advancing the state of the art with the research community. At the upcoming SIGCOMM 2018 – the annual flagship conference organized by Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Data Communications, held this year in Budapest, August 20-24 – Microsoft Research…
August 21st, 2018
