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…
Text to speech (TTS) has attracted a lot of attention recently due to advancements in deep learning. Neural network-based TTS models (such as Tacotron 2, DeepVoice 3 and Transformer TTS) have outperformed conventional concatenative and statistical parametric approaches in terms of speech quality. Neural network-based…
Artificial intelligence has evolved to become a revolutionary technology. It is rapidly changing the economy, both by creating new opportunities (it’s the backbone of the gig economy) and by bringing venerable institutions, like transportation, into the 21st century. Yet deep at its core something is…
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…
Drone racing has transformed from a niche activity sparked by enthusiastic hobbyists to an internationally televised sport. In parallel, computer vision and machine learning are making rapid progress, along with advances in agile trajectory planning, control, and state estimation for quadcopters. These advances enable increased…
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