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Microsoft Research Lab – New York City

STAC: Sociotechnical Alignment Center

STAC is a team of researchers, applied scientists, and linguists in Microsoft Research NYC who represent part of the research pillar of Microsoft’s Responsible AI (RAI) investments. Founded within Microsoft Research by Hanna Wallach in 2022, STAC’s mission is to guide the sociotechnical alignment of AI systems, with a particular emphasis on measuring risks, capabilities, performance, and other properties of these systems. STAC collaborates extensively with researchers from the Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics in AI (FATE) group and other groups across Microsoft.

We bridge research and practice, building on and contributing to research in computer science, the social sciences (especially measurement theory), linguistics (especially speech act theory), and statistics. Because of the pace of work in AI, research, product, and policy are increasingly entwined—especially for RAI, where we’re finding we need to push research frontiers at the same time as we build transformational products and craft policies to safeguard product deployment and operation. We produce research that is well-respected and adopted by the academic community, while simultaneously putting that research into practice via partnerships within Microsoft and collaborations across the broader AI industry.