Microsoft Research Blog

Microsoft Ability Initiative: A collaborative quest to innovate in image captioning for people who are blind or with low vision

January 16, 2019 | Meredith Ringel Morris

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…

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Microsoft Ability Initiative: A collaborative quest to innovate in image captioning for people who are blind or with low vision

January 16, 2019 | Meredith Ringel Morris

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…
Influencing mainstream software—Applying programming language research ideas to transform spreadsheets

January 14, 2019 | Andy Gordon and Simon Peyton Jones

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: Reaching greater heights in internet communication security

January 14, 2019

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…
Microsoft Research 2018: 10 memorable blogs topping a year of open source and innovation

December 27, 2018

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,…
Competition win a steppingstone in the greater journey to create sustainable farming

December 18, 2018

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…
First TextWorld Problems—Microsoft Research Montreal’s latest AI competition is really cooking

December 11, 2018 | Wendy Tay and Adam Trischler

This week, Microsoft Research threw down the gauntlet with the launch of a competition challenging researchers around the world to develop AI agents that can solve text-based games. Conceived by the Machine Reading Comprehension team at Microsoft Research Montreal, the competition—First TextWorld Problems: A Reinforcement…
A Deep Learning Theory: Global minima and over-parameterization

December 10, 2018 | Zeyuan Allen-Zhu, Yuanzhi Li, and Zhao Song

One empirical finding in deep learning is that simple methods such as stochastic gradient descent (SGD) have a remarkable ability to fit training data. From a capacity perspective, this may not be surprising— modern neural networks are heavily over-parameterized, with the number of parameters much…
Fast, accurate, stable and tiny – Breathing life into IoT devices with an innovative algorithmic approach

December 6, 2018

In the larger quest to make the Internet of Things (IoT) a reality for people everywhere, building devices that can be both ultrafunctional and beneficent isn’t a simple matter. Particularly in the arena of resource-constrained, real-time scenarios, the hurdles are significant. The challenges for devices…
Learning to teach: Mutually enhanced learning and teaching for artificial intelligence

December 5, 2018 | Fei Tian

Teaching is super important. From an individual perspective, a student learning on his or her own is never ideal; a student needs a teacher's guidance and perspective to be more effectively educated. Taking the societal perspective, teaching enables civilization to be passed on to the…
Unlikely research area reveals surprising twist in non-smooth optimization

December 4, 2018 | Sébastien Bubeck

Modern machine learning is characterized by two key features: high-dimensional models and very large datasets. Each of these features presents its own unique challenges, from basic issues such as storing and accessing all of the data to more intricate mathematical quests such as finding good…
Getting into a conversational groove: New approach encourages risk-taking in data-driven neural modeling

December 3, 2018

Microsoft Research’s Natural Language Processing group has set an ambitious goal for itself: to create a neural model that can engage in the full scope of conversational capabilities, providing answers to requests while also bringing the value of additional information relevant to the exchange and—in…
The Microsoft Simple Encrypted Arithmetic Library goes open source

December 3, 2018 | Kristin Lauter, Kim Laine, and Sreekanth Kannepalli

Today we are extremely excited to announce that our Microsoft Simple Encrypted Arithmetic Library (Microsoft SEAL), an easy-to-use homomorphic encryption library developed by researchers in the Cryptography Research group at Microsoft, is open source on GitHub under an MIT License for free use. The library…

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