In the digital era, almost everyone struggles with the mountains of information they have. Every activity in our lives seemingly generates more information: emails, files, receipts, photos—the list goes on. We have trails of digital information from each of our work projects, vacations, hobbies, and…
Consider a person who applies for a loan with a financial company, but their application is rejected by a machine learning algorithm used to determine who receives a loan from the company. How would you explain the decision made by the algorithm to this person?…
I am pleased to announce the winners of the new Microsoft Investigator Fellowship. This fellowship is designed to empower researchers of all disciplines who plan to make an impact with research and teaching using the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform. Each fellowship provides $100,000 USD…
In their second and thirteenth years respectively, the Ada Lovelace Fellowship and PhD Fellowship continue a Microsoft Research tradition of providing promising doctoral students in North America with funding to support their studies and research. This year, there were over 600 submissions between both fellowships.…
Thanks to advances in computer vision and deep neural networks (DNNs) in what can arguably be described as the golden age of vision, AI, and machine learning, video analytics systems—systems performing analytics on live camera streams—are becoming more accurate. This accuracy offers opportunities to support…
Is bias in AI self-reinforcing? Decision-making systems that impact criminal justice, financial institutions, human resources, and many other areas often have bias. This is especially true of algorithmic systems that learn from historical data, which tends to reflect existing societal biases. In many high-stakes applications,…
You’re in a field. In front of you, there’s a white house. The door is boarded shut. The immediate challenge—investigate the house. The game—Zork I: The Great Underground Empire, a treasure-seeking adventure in which you’ll encounter monsters, a thief, and other interesting characters along the…
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…
Research is about achieving long-term goals, often through incremental progress. As the year comes to an end, it’s a good time to step back and reflect on the work that researchers at Microsoft and their collaborators have done to advance the state of the art…
Reinforcement learning has achieved great success in game scenarios, with RL agents beating human competitors in such games as Go and poker. Distributional reinforcement learning, in particular, has proven to be an effective approach for training an agent to maximize reward, producing state-of-the-art results on…
The ability to perceive communication signals and make sense of them played an essential role in the evolution of human intelligence. Computing technology is following the same trajectory. Now, computer vision and automatic speech recognition (ASR) technologies have enabled the advent of many artificial intelligence…
In both language and mathematics, symbols and their mutual relationships play a central role. The equation x = 1/y asserts the symbols x and y—that is, what they stand for—are related reciprocally; Kim saw the movie asserts that Kim and the movie are perceiver and…
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