HELP! Training assistive indoor agents to ask for assistance via imitation learning
| Debadeepta Dey, Khanh Nguyen, Chris Brockett, and Bill Dolan
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…
All Data AI with Dr. Andrew Fitzgibbon
You may not know who Dr. Andrew Fitzgibbon is, but if you’ve watched a TV show or movie in the last two decades, you’ve probably seen some of his work. An expert in 3D computer vision and graphics, and head…
Awards | ACM SIGAI
Winner of 2019 ACM SIGAI Industry Award
The selection committee for the ACM SIGAI Industry Award for Excellence in Artificial Intelligence (AI) is pleased to announce that the Decision Service created by the Real World Reinforcement Learning Team from Microsoft, has been chosen as the winner of…
Awards | ACM SIGAI
Real World Reinforcement Learning Team honored with 2019 ACM SIGAI award
The selection committee selected the Decision Service created by the Real World Reinforcement Learning team as the winner of the inaugural 2019 ACM SIGAI Industry Award for Excellence in Artificial Intelligence (AI) (opens in new tab). The committee was impressed…
2019 Dissertation Grant recipients embarking on diverse paths to scientific and societal impact
| Meredith Ringel Morris
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…
In the news | Microsoft Azure Blog
Microsoft FHIR Server for Azure extends to SQL
Since the launch of the open source FHIR Server for Azure on GitHub last November, we have been humbled by the tremendously positive response and surge in the use of FHIR in the healthcare community. There has been great interest…
Exploring job search trends in Canada with search query data: A collaboration with Bank of Canada
| Scott Counts and Justin Cranshaw
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…
Reliability in Reinforcement Learning
| Romain Laroche
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…
A phonetic matching made inˈhɛvən
| Matthew Dixon
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…