In the news | Microsoft on the Issues
Celebrating 250 million: Empowering communities to enable the global AI economy
Ahead of Mobile World Congress, where global leaders, governments, and industry convene at the world’s largest connectivity event, Microsoft is marking a major milestone in our efforts to expand digital access worldwide. In 2022, we made a bold commitment (opens in…
Awards | ACM SIGCHI
ACM SIGCHI Societal Impact Award
Jacki O’Neill, founding Lab Director of Microsoft Research Africa, Nairobi, was given the 2026 Societal Impact Award by ACM SIGCHI for her research in computer science which has had extensive societal impact specifically in the areas of financial inclusion, future…
Experiential Reinforcement Learning
By Taiwei Shi, Sihao Chen, Longqi Yang, Jaime Teevan Reinforcement Learning is at the core of building and improving frontier AI models and products. Yet most state-of-the-art RL methods learn primarily from outcomes: a scalar reward signal that says whether…
Media Authenticity Methods in Practice: Capabilities, Limitations, and Directions
| Eric Horvitz, Andrew Jenks, and Jessica Young
As synthetic media grows, verifying what’s real, and the origin of content, matters more than ever. Our latest report explores media integrity and authentication methods, their limits, and practical paths toward trustworthy provenance across images, audio, and video.
In the news | XBOX Wire
Empowering Creators and Players With Muse, a Generative AI Model for Gameplay
In nearly every corner of our lives, the buzz about AI is impossible to ignore. It’s destined to revolutionize how we work, learn, and play. For those of us immersed in the world of gaming—whether as players or creators—the question…
Project Silica’s advances in glass storage technology
| Richard Black
Project Silica introduces new techniques for encoding data in borosilicate glass, as described in the journal Nature. These advances lower media cost and simplify writing and reading systems while supporting 10,000-year data preservation.
In the news | Nature
Laser writing in glass for dense, fast and efficient archival data storage
Long-term preservation of digital information is vital for safeguarding the knowledge of humanity for future generations. Existing archival storage solutions, such as magnetic tapes and hard disk drives, suffer from limited media lifespans that render them unsuitable for long-term data…
In the news | GIM International
Addressing the most pressing African challenges with GeoAI
By transforming remote sensing data into actionable insights for sustainable development, geospatial AI (GeoAI) is rapidly emerging as a vital tool to address the mounting challenges and urgent needs in Africa. These include climate change, rapid urbanization and food insecurity,…
In the news | National Academy of Engineering
Doug Burger elected to National Academy of Engineering
Academy membership honors individuals who have made outstanding contributions to engineering research, practice, or education. Burger was elected for accelerating cloud-scale computing and networking infrastructures with field-programmable systems.