The increasing availability and accuracy of AI has stimulated uses of AI technologies in mainstream user-facing applications and services. Along with opportunities for infusing valuable AI services in a wide range of products come challenges and questions about best practices and guidelines for human-centered design.…
Causal inference studies the relationship between causes and effects. For example, one kind of question that causal inference can answer is the “What-happens-if …” question. What happens if I take a specific medication? What happens if I raise the price of a product? What happens…
Researchers from Microsoft Research will present a series of studies and insights relating to fairness in machine learning systems and allocations at the FAT* Conference—the new flagship conference for fairness, accountability, and transparency in socio-technical systems—to be held from January 29–31 in Atlanta, Georgia. Presented…
The idea of crowdsourcing traffic data has been around for a while: If we can get vehicles on the roads to upload their current speeds, then we can get instant, up-to-date data on how fast traffic is moving for well-traveled segments. This is useful for…
Artificial intelligence technologies hold great promise as partners in the real world. They’re in the early stages of helping doctors administer care to their patients and lenders determine the risk associated with loan applications, among other examples. But what happens when these systems that users…
Mutations in the genome of an organism give rise to variations in its form and function—its phenotype. However, phenotypic variations can also arise in other ways. The random collisions of molecules constituting an organism—including its DNA and the proteins that transcribe the DNA to RNA—result…
Microsoft Research is proud to announce the 2019 winners of the Ada Lovelace Fellowship and PhD Fellowship. The Ada Lovelace Fellowship is a new fellowship for Microsoft Research, established to support diverse talent getting doctorates in computing-related fields by providing three years of funding for…
Microsoft is committed to pushing the boundaries of technology to improve and positively influence all parts of society. Recent advances in deep learning and related AI techniques have resulted in significant strides in automated image captioning. However, current image captioning systems are not well-aligned with…
Spreadsheets are the world’s most widely used programming language, by several orders of magnitude. We asked ourselves whether it would be possible to apply programming language research ideas to make spreadsheets a better programming language? If we could, that would empower a huge user community…
Project Everest is a multiyear collaborative effort focused on building a verified, secure communications stack designed to improve the security of HTTPS, a key internet safeguard. This post, about the verification tools and techniques the Everest team is using and developing, is the first in…
The year’s end is an opportunity to reflect on what was achieved and to resolve to aspire to even greater heights in the one that’s about to begin. Looking back on what was accomplished at Microsoft Research in 2018 brings to mind numerous proud moments,…
The cucumber plants, their leaves wide and green and veiny, stood tall in neat rows, basking in the Netherland sunlight shining through the glass panes of their greenhouses. Hopes were high for the plants—a bountiful crop in just four months using as few resources as…
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