In the news | SIGMOD Blog
The Diversity of Diversity & Inclusion
The importance of diversity and inclusion has been widely recognized by now and efforts toward this goal are commonplace in almost all settings. Diversity and inclusion, however, remains challenging, and even well-intentioned efforts do not always work.
Awards | Association for Women in Mathematics
Jennifer Chayes selected to 2020 class of AWM Fellows
Jennifer Chayes, Technical Fellow and Microsoft Researcher Emeritus, was awarded the Fellow of the Association for Women in Mathematics 2020 for pioneering the way for women in the mathematical sciences to have leading technical roles in the high-tech industry, and for…
In the news | SIGCHI
Dumais receives SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award
A common theme that runs through her work is the importance of understanding and improving information systems from an interdisciplinary and user-centered perspective. She is a co-inventor of Latent Semantic Analysis, a well-known word embedding technique, which was designed to…
Microsoft Research 2019 reflection—a year of progress on technology’s toughest challenges
Research is about achieving long-term goals, often through incremental progress. As the year comes to an end, it’s a good time to step back and reflect on the work that researchers at Microsoft and their collaborators have done to advance…
Directions in user research
Building empathy with customers, the rise of AI, and the value of the user researcher are a few trends that came to the forefront of the discipline in 2019. As the year comes to an end, one user researcher predicts…
Finding the best learning targets automatically: Fully Parameterized Quantile Function for distributional RL
| Li Zhao
Reinforcement learning has achieved great success in game scenarios, with RL agents beating human competitors in such games as Go and poker. Distributional reinforcement learning, in particular, has proven to be an effective approach for training an agent to maximize…
In the news | Rolls-Royce News
Technology breakthrough offers hope for people silenced by disability
Microsoft and other companies joined forces to help Rolls-Royce create new AI technology that will allow people with motor neurone disease (MND) to have a conversation in their own voice, even after they have lost the ability to speak.
In the news | Medium
Accelerating biodiversity surveys with Azure Machine Learning
Breaking the annotation logjam in wildlife surveys. Biodiversity is declining across the globe at a catastrophic rate. Conservation biologists are faced with the daunting — but urgent — task of surveying wildlife populations and making policy recommendations. What species need…