Microsoft Research Lab – Redmond
News & features
In the news | BBC
Tech Life: The doctor will see you now
Find out how holoportation 3D telemedicine technology is helping patients in Ghana.
Jianwei Yang introduces Magma, a new multimodal agentic foundation model designed for UI navigation in digital environments and robotics manipulation in physical settings.
In the news | TheSequence
One of the Best Agent Frameworks in the Market Just Got Way Better
AutoGen has undergone significant evolution since its inception, driven by the need for more efficient, flexible, and scalable agentic AI systems. The release of AutoGen v0.4 introduces a fundamental architectural shift, addressing prior inefficiencies and enhancing its capabilities.
In the news | Social Media Fails Many Users. Experts Have an Idea to Fix It
Remaking “Prosocial” Media
E. Glen Weyl and his coauthors have proposed a new “prosocial” structure for social media, where posts are flagged with the context of where they are socially accepted and users can navigate to see opposing perspectives on divisive issues.
Research Focus: Week of January 27, 2025
In this issue: A new approach to multimodal pretraining for remote sensing; Managed-retention memory for the AI era; Improving detection of macular telangiectasia type 2; Generalizing symbolic automata.
Ideas: Bug hunting with Shan Lu
| Gretchen Huizinga and Shan Lu
Struggles with programming languages helped research manager Shan Lu find her calling as a bug hunter. She discusses one bug that really haunted her, the thousands she’s identified since, and how she’s turning to LLMs to help make software more…
Awards | ACM
Wei Chen and Benjamin G. Zorn named 2024 ACM Fellows
Wei Chen and Benjamin G. Zorn are among the 55 new ACM Fellows for their contributions to computing that are transforming science and society.
Research Focus: Week of January 13, 2025
In this edition: Privacy enhancements for multiparty deep learning; using smaller, open-source models to provide relevance judgments; new tool uses AI, data to automate innovation and development; Yasuyuki Matsushita named IEEE 2025 Computer Society Fellow.
In the news | Microsoft Source Asia
Chasing peak sugar: India’s sugar cane farmers use AI to predict weather, fight pests and optimize harvests
The technology brings in weather, soil and other data from satellites as well as farm sensors onto a Microsoft data platform called Azure Data Manager for Agriculture (previously called FarmBeats), so farmers can see precisely what’s happening at their farm…