When AI systems impact people’s lives, it is critically important that people understand their behavior. By understanding their behavior, data scientists can properly debug their models. If able to reason how models behave, designers can convey that information to end users. If doctors, judges and…
A palette makes it easy for painters to arrange and mix paints of different colors as they create art on the canvas before them. Having a similar tool that could allow AI to jointly learn from diverse data sources such as those for conversations, narratives,…
Everyone is familiar by now with recommendation systems such as on Netflix for movies, Amazon for products, Yelp for restaurants and TripAdvisor for travel. Indeed, quality recommendations are a crucial part of the value provided by these businesses. Recommendation systems encourage users to share feedback…
The past few years have seen tremendous progress in reinforcement learning (RL). From complex games to robotic object manipulation, RL has qualitatively advanced the state of the art. However, modern RL techniques require a lot for success: a largely deterministic stationary environment, an accurate resettable…
Lots of important information, including job openings and other kinds of advertising, are often transmitted by word-of-mouth in online settings. For example, social networks like LinkedIn are increasingly used as a way of spreading information about job opportunities, which can greatly affect people’s career development.…
Deep learning algorithms, supported by the availability of powerful Azure computing infrastructure and massive training data, constitutes the most significant driving force in our AI evolution journey. In the past three years, Microsoft reached several historical AI milestones being the first to achieve human parity…
“Here’s my conference paper—what do you think?” After hours of agonizing over words and illustrations, sharing a draft document is a moment of great pride. All too often, this is shortly followed by embarrassment when your colleague gets back to you with reams of edits.…
A team of researchers from the Natural Language Processing (NLP) Group at Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) and the Speech Dialog Research Group at Microsoft Redmond are currently leading in the Conversational Question Answering (CoQA) Challenge organized by Stanford University. In this challenge, machines are measured…
Whether at work or at home, people are regularly gathering and interpreting information to build their base of knowledge and gain a deeper understanding of the world around them. In this endeavor, they encounter data in many shapes and forms—lines of text in books, timelines…
Oxymorons of haptics might be the new normal Consumer virtual reality (VR) systems can immerse users in wonderous virtual worlds, rich in sights and sounds. However, how many times have you reached for an object in VR or augmented reality (AR) and, just as you…
As researchers continue to apply machine learning to more complex real-world problems, they’ll need to rely less on algorithms that require annotation. This is not only because labels are expensive, but also because supervised learners trained only to predict annotations tend not to generalize beyond…
How does a leading research institution ensure the flow of computer science talent and keep the most talented minds in the space focused on solving today’s truly challenging problems? The Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship recognizes innovative, promising new faculty members with $100,000 USD annually for…
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