Awards | Fast Company

Microsoft—a winner of Fast Company’s 2021 World Changing Ideas Awards—shows how a giant company can push change across a wide variety of disciplines, from climate to energy to health to education.

Awards | Fast Company

Microsoft’s Premonition platform—a winner of Fast Company’s 2021 World Changing Ideas Awards—tracks, captures, and analyzes mosquitoes, to give health officials a sense of what pathogens are circulating in the area.

An example of a multi-turn text-to-SQL task. The user query “Find the names of the top 3 highest sales books” corresponds to the formal program “SELECT title FROM book ORDER BY sale_amount DESC LIMIT 3”. The follow-up user query, “Who are their authors,” corresponds to the formal program “SELECT t1.title, t1.name FROM author AS t1 JOIN book AS t2 ON t1.id = t2.author_id ORDER BY t2.sale_amount DESC LIMIT 3”. In the corresponding database, there is an “Author” table with an “id” column, a “name” column, a “country” column, and an ellipsis signifying additional columns; a “Press” table with an “id” column, a “name” column, an “address” column, and an ellipsis signifying additional columns; and a “Book” table with an “id” column, a “title” column, an “author id” column, a “sale_amount” column, and an ellipsis signifying additional columns.
Microsoft Research Blog

| Alex Polozov, Chris Meek, and Ahmed Awadallah

One key aspiration of AI is to develop natural and effective task-oriented conversational systems. Task-oriented conversational systems use a natural language interface to collaborate with and support people in accomplishing specific goals and activities. They go beyond chitchat conversation. For…

An animation showing an example of a high-level language message format specified by EverParse. From the message, two arrows labeled “EverParse” point to a rectangle labeled “formal specification” and a rectangle labeled “low-level implementation,” respectively, inside a larger rectangle labeled “F* code.” The figure represents EverParse’s ability to automatically generate safe, correct, and fast F* parsing code. “Correctness” is defined as “Correctness: ​parse (serialize msg) = msg​” and “valid msg ==> serialize (parse msg) = msg​.” The F* logo appears with the description that F* is a type theory–based programming language and proof assistant that can prove theorems about programs​. From the “F* code” rectangle, arrows point from the “low-level implementation” rectangle and a rectangle labeled “verified libraries for combinators” to a rectangle labeled “Safe high-performance C code.”
Microsoft Research Blog

| Tahina Ramananandro, Aseem Rastogi, and Nikhil Swamy

EverParse (opens in new tab) is a framework for generating provably secure parsers and formatters used to improve the security of critical code bases at Microsoft. EverParse is developed as part of Project Everest (opens in new tab), a collaboration…

In the news | New York Times

At least a dozen treatments are being evaluated for virus patients whose immune systems go on the attack. Many coronavirus patients seem to get better at first, then rapidly decline and are overtaken by an overwhelming immune response that causes…

In the news | Pioneer

To use artificial intelligence to support frontline clinicians interpreting chest radiographs (CXR) as a way to diagnose Covid-19 and predict the likely outcomes for patients. Although Covid-19 can be diagnosed using throat and nose swabs, these remain limited in supply…

Figure 1: The overall architecture for FastSpeech 2 and 2s. LR in subfigure (b) denotes the length regulator operation proposed in FastSpeech. LN in subfigure (c) denotes layer normalization. Variance predictor represents duration/pitch/energy predictor.
Articles

By Xu Tan , Senior Researcher Neural network based text to speech (TTS) has made rapid progress in recent years. Previous neural TTS models (e.g., Tacotron 2) first generate mel-spectrograms autoregressively from text and then synthesize speech from the generated mel-spectrograms using a…

Articles

Helping users build – and maintain – a wall between personal and business communications is a key job that technology can do to help users once they create a business identity. We plan to continue delving into the needs of…

Figure 2: A flowchart depicting unstructured text being processed though a query engine, a probabilistic parser, and probabilistic clustering to produce a unified knowledge base
Microsoft Research Blog

| Sanil Rajput , John Winn, Naomi Moneypenny, Yordan Zaykov, and CJ Tan

Project Alexandria is a research project within Microsoft Research Cambridge dedicated to discovering entities, or topics of information, and their associated properties from unstructured documents. This research lab has studied knowledge mining research for over a decade, using the probabilistic…