When we began developing Microsoft MakeCode, a computing education platform, it was all about making programming easier, more engaging, and just plain friendlier. After all, if we were going to inspire the next generation of coders, easier entry into the world of computer science would…
How we act, including how we speak, is more often than not determined by the situation we find ourselves in. We wouldn’t necessarily use the same tone and language with friends during a night out bowling as we would with colleagues during an office meeting.…
Public competitions often help to advance the state of the art in challenging research problems. They frame a question, provide relevant data, and define evaluation metrics so that researchers across the world can work toward a shared goal—and ultimately learn from each other’s advances. The…
Microsoft Azure cloud hosts a wide variety of services, and Azure has hundreds of network edge locations worldwide across the globe’s six continents to host those services. The Azure locations host many interactive (latency-sensitive) services that cater to consumer and enterprise clients covering a broad…
When I was asked about my favorite movie in a game with friends after my wedding ceremony, I replied Star Wars. That was about two decades ago, and, yes, it’s still the case. I especially like Return of the Jedi. The third installment in the…
The cloud is an enormous success story. Microsoft Azure, the company’s cloud offering, was launched in 2010. It has grown by more than ten times in the past five years and is now operating in 54 regions around the world. Azure Chief Technology Officer, Mark…
Word embeddings have had a big impact on many applications in natural language processing (NLP) and information retrieval. It is, therefore, crucial to open the blackbox and understand their meaning representation. We propose probing tasks for analyzing the meaning representation in word embeddings. Our tasks…
With the advent of AI assistants, initially developed for structured databases and manually curated knowledge graphs, answers to the types of basic fact-based questions people encounter during the course of regular conversation became keystrokes or a verbal cue away. What film won the Academy Award…
AI has made major strides in the last decade, from beating the world champion of Go, to learning how to program, to telling fantastical short stories. However, a basic human trait continues to elude machines: common sense. Common sense is a big term with…
Microsoft researchers are delving beyond the boundaries of information retrieval to optimize how we access and manage information in different areas. Not only are they advancing the realm most synonymous with information retrieval, search engines, but they are also researching new information access processes, utilizing…
Have you ever wondered what happens when you ask a search engine to search for something as seemingly simple as “how do you grill salmon”? Have you found yourself entering multiple searches before arriving at a webpage with a satisfying answer? Perhaps it was only…
Computers are disappearing. This doesn’t mean they’re actually going away, though. In fact, every day more and more of how we live, work, and interact is transformed by computers. But it does mean that technology has become so ubiquitous in recent years that our focus…
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