Plural Technology Collaboratory

August 15, 2024 | Amber Tingle, Shrey Jain, and Zoë Hitzig

Advanced AI may make it easier for bad actors to deceive others online. A multidisciplinary research team is exploring one solution: a credential that allows people to show they’re not bots without sharing identifying information. Shrey Jain and Zoë Hitzig…

May 30, 2024 | Johannes Gehrke and Weishung Liu

Principal PM Manager Weishung Liu shares how a career delivering products and customer experiences aligns with her love of people and storytelling and how—despite efforts to defy the expectations that come with growing up in Silicon Valley—she landed in tech.

October 5, 2023 | Madeleine Daepp, Alejandro Cuevas, and Jennifer Scurrell

Connecting with researchers, collaborating across disciplines, and exploring a new city—PhD students Jennifer Scurrell and Alejandro Cuevas talk to Senior Researcher Madeleine Daepp about the internship experience at Microsoft Research.

May 3, 2023 | Gretchen Huizinga, Petar Maymounkov, and Kasia Sitkiewicz

Collaboration is key to bringing ideas from lab to life. In the first episode of the #MSRPodcast series “Collaborators,” learn how GitHub’s Kasia Sitkiewicz and Protocol Labs’ Petar Maymounkov are teaming up to make open-source collaborative work better.

April 26, 2023

Welcome to Research Focus, a series of blog posts that highlights notable publications, events, code/datasets, new hires and other milestones from across the research community at Microsoft. Yael Tauman Kalai, a senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research, has been awarded…

April 17, 2023

Michael Freedman At a disarmament conference of 1932 Einstein described our technological vs. social maturity as a razor blade in the hand of a three-year-old. Ninety years has led to little gains in our social maturity and vast expansions of…

March 19, 2023

E. Glen Weyl, Shrey Jain, Karen Easterbrook, Jason Entenmann We are excited to introduce the Plural Technology Collaboratory (PTC), a cross-company and multi-partner collaboration with a home base within Microsoft Research (MSR) Special Projects. Collectively, we are exploring how to…

March 19, 2023

E. Glen Weyl, Kasia Sitkiewicz, Petar Maymounkov Open-source software, as exemplified by the communities that have formed around the “git” protocol for collaborative software development and version management, is one of the great wonders of digital technology.  Communal open-source projects…

March 19, 2023

Shrey Jain, Karen Easterbrook and E. Glen Weyl Generative foundation models (opens in new tab) (GFMs) like GPT-4 will transform human productivity.  Yet the astonishing capabilities of these models will also strain many social institutions, including the ways we communicate…