Today people use personal digital assistants for help with scheduling, playing music, turning on or adjusting other devices, and answering basic questions such as “What time’s the game on?” or “Where’s the nearest hardware store?” But what if these assistants could do more to help…
I’m pleased to announce the winners of the 2019 Microsoft Research Dissertation Grants. Each dissertation grant provides up to $25,000 in funding to doctoral students at North American universities who are underrepresented in the field of computing. This is the third year Microsoft Research has…
Microsoft Research has teamed up with economists at Bank of Canada to launch an interactive tool for exploring online job search trends in the country. The tool, based on a classification process derived from previous research on how job searches align with socio-demographic data in…
Reinforcement Learning (RL), much like scaling a 3,000-foot rock face, is about learning to make sequential decisions. The list of potential RL applications is expansive, spanning robotics (drone control), dialogue systems (personal assistants, automated call centers), the game industry (non-player characters, computer AI), treatment design…
Recently, Microsoft Research Montréal open sourced a phonetic matching component used previously in Maluuba Inc.'s natural language understanding platform. The library contains string comparison utilities that operate on a phoneme level as opposed to a character level. This allows upstream systems to utilize personalized and…
Reinforcement learning, a machine learning paradigm for sequential decision making, has stormed into the limelight, receiving tremendous attention from both researchers and practitioners. When combined with deep learning, reinforcement learning (RL) has produced impressive empirical results, but the successes to date are limited to simulation…
In its young existence, the tamperproof and distributed ledger technology blockchain has already generated a lot of buzz and is being seen as disruptive, influencing approaches in such diverse areas as financial services, supply chains, and governance. To say its future is bright might be…
Bias in AI is a big problem. In particular, AI can compound the effects of existing societal biases: in a recruiting tool, if more men than women are software engineers, AI is likely to use that data to identify job applicants and overscreen for men,…
In his work in visual merchandising, designer Kenroy Tyrell has used LED lights in displays for trade shows and showrooms. But on this particular day, he found himself using the technology in a way he never anticipated—as part of a garment he had created. Tyrell…
Technical Fellow and Director of Microsoft Research Eric Horvitz was completely floored as he spun around and spied the stunning sculpture that had silently been wheeled in behind him. The evening’s gathering had been arranged to celebrate a special birthday. His wife, Mary, had just…
Language Representation Learning maps symbolic natural language texts (for example, words, phrases and sentences) to semantic vectors. Robust and universal language representations are crucial to achieving state-of-the-art results on many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Ensemble learning is one of the most effective approaches for…
Mixed reality (MR) applications and devices are seeing increased adoption, integrating computation into the fabric of our daily lives. This requires realistic rendering of virtual audio-visual content to deliver sensory immersion to MR users. Producing renderings indistinguishable from reality within tight computational budgets is both…
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