“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…
Recent successes in machine intelligence hinge on core computation ability to efficiently search through billions of possibilities in order to make decisions. Sequences of decisions, if successful, often suggest that perhaps computation is catching up to–or even surpassing–human intelligence. Human intelligence, on the other hand,…
Designing artificial intelligence systems and features poses new challenges for user experience (UX) practitioners. Traditionally, UX designers rely on sketching and low-fidelity, fast prototyping to imagine and test their ideas. The usual design tools and techniques, however, can’t always meet the demands of designing AI-infused…
At the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems conference in Glasgow, Scotland this May, researchers from Microsoft’s Redmond and UK labs, together with our university collaborators, will be presenting several papers and demos that explore how to design technologies more inclusively, to…
The mobility of tablets affords interaction from a wide diversity of postures: Hunched over a desk with brow furrowed in concentration. On the go with the tablet gripped in one hand, while operating it with the other. Or kicked back on a couch to relax…
There is a growing interest in exploring the use of variational auto-encoders (VAE), a deep latent variable model, for text generation. Compared to the standard RNN-based language model that generates sentences one word at a time without the explicit guidance of a global sentence representation,…
Imagine you’ve been asked to write a crucial document for your company, perhaps a detailed outline of its long-term strategy. You’re excited, but don’t know when you’ll find the time to write it. As you sit in a meeting later that day, waiting for the…
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