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…
Memory is an important part of human intelligence and the human experience. It grounds us in the current moment, helping us understand where we are and, consequently, what we should do next. Consider the simple example of reading a book. The ultimate goal is to…
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…
One of the core directions of Project Malmo is to develop AI capable of rich interactions. Whether that means learning new skills to apply to challenging problems, understanding complex environments, or knowing when to enlist the help of humans, reinforcement learning (RL) is a core…
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…
While reinforcement learning (RL) has seen significant successes over the past few years, modern deep RL methods are often criticized for how sensitive they are with respect to their hyper-parameters. One such hyper-parameter is the discount factor, which controls how future rewards are weighted compared…
Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have facilitated tremendous progress across a range of applications, including image classification, translation, language modeling, and video captioning. DNN training is extremely time-consuming, needing efficient multi-accelerator parallelization. In “PipeDream: Generalized Pipeline Parallelism for DNN Training,” published at the 27th ACM Symposium…
When people create, it’s not very often they achieve what they’re looking for on the first try. Creating—whether it be a painting, a paper, or a machine learning model—is a process that has a starting point from which new elements and ideas are added and…
Visual understanding tasks are typically centered on objects, such as human pose tracking in Microsoft Kinect and obstacle avoidance in autonomous driving. In the deep learning era, these tasks follow a paradigm where bounding boxes are localized in an image, features are extracted within the…
Virtual reality (VR) has continually pushed the boundaries of how we perceive, from its early days of Ivan Sutherland’s Sword of Damocles to today. With the technology emerging from its early stages of bulky equipment tethered to one place out of necessity, researchers now are working with increased possibilities derived from hardware and new input sensors. The result is a unique set of challenges requiring innovative approaches to answering some of…
It’s not uncommon for us to hear that the Z3 theorem prover is magical, but the frequency of such complimentary feedback doesn’t make it any less unexpected—or humbling. When we began work on Z3 in 2006, the design was motivated by two emerging use cases:…
Making sense of the world around us is a skill we as human beings begin to learn from an early age. Though there is still much to know about the process, we can see that people learn a lot, both directly and indirectly, from observing…
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