In this episode, (26 min. long) we talk with Jaime Teevan, chief scientist for Microsoft’s Experiences and Devices, where she’s charged with creating the future of productivity. She also developed the first personalized search algorithm used by Bing and introduced microproductivity into Microsoft Office.
If you’re one of the many white-collar workers who left the office behind a year ago, you’re probably wondering just what’s in store when you go back. We get some insight on lessons learned from a year of remote work from Microsoft chief scientist Jaime Teevan.
Exclusive research and expert insights into a year of work like no other reveal urgent trends leaders should consider as hybrid work unfolds. We’re on the brink of a disruption as great as last year’s sudden shift to remote work: the move to hybrid work — a blended model where some employees return to the workplace and others continue to work from home. We’re experiencing this at Microsoft, and today we shared how we’re evolving our own hybrid work strategy for our 160,000+ employees around the world.
More than a year into the Covid-19 pandemic and WFH, new research from Microsoft shows that employees and teams are becoming much more siloed. In particular, connections with people outside our immediate teams has shrunk dramatically, leading to fewer places to connect around innovative ideas and fewer opportunities to build social capital. Further, this trend is making employees feel lonely and isolated. To help address this issue, leaders should focus on being proactive about connecting employees across the organization, make space for connections outside official meetings, encourage and reward social support, and improve the structure of meetings.
With the pandemic maybe now ebbing, the talk of the town for those of us who were lucky enough not to be on the front lines is about going back to work. Or not. “Most remote employees don’t want to return to the workplace,” trumpeted a recent poll. It found that a scant 5% of workers, forced home by the coronavirus a year ago, now wish to go back to the office full time even if the virus is vanquished.
Despite all the positives of synthetic media–create expression, educational applications, assistive technologies, entertainment–there’s a downside. It’s increasingly hard to detect, which leaves the door open for media to be altered after publication and spread as disinformation. Project Origin aims to create a measure of accountability through provenance: By certifying the source of the content like a watermark, we can safeguard against manipulation. Explore more…
Adaptive Biotechnologies launched a new diagnostic test for COVID-19 that uses machine learning technology from Microsoft to detect prior coronavirus infections. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last week issued an emergency use authorization (EUA) for the biotech company’s T-cell-based test, called T-Detect COVID, which is the first screening to detect past COVID-19 infections using an individual’s T-cell profile.
Microsoft’s researchers are using crowdsourcing to improve the amount and quality of data available. Danielle Bragg and her colleagues at the firm’s campus in Massachusetts are developing a smartphone version of “Battleship”, a game in which each player tries to sink their opponent’s ships by indicating locations on a grid…
Susan Dumais was inducted into the first class of the ACM SIGIR Academy in recognition of her significant, cumulative contributions to the development of the field of information retrieval (IR). Susan is a leader in IR, and has shaped the discipline through significant contributions to research and innovation. She is joined by 24 other individuals around the globe: James Allan, Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Nicholas Belkin, Andrei Broder, Jamie Callan, William Cooper, W. Bruce Croft, Edward Fox, Ophir Frieder, Norbert Fuhr, Marti Hearst, Kalervo Järvelin, Thorsten Joachims, Noriko Kando, Diane Kelly, Michael Lesk, Yoelle Maarek, Alistair Moffat, Marc Najork, C.J. van Rijsbergen, Stephen Robertson, Tefko Saracevic, Ellen Voorhees, and Chengxiang Zhai.
After Etalab helped them to get things off the ground back in 2016, and through close collaboration with the Direction Générale des Finances Publiques (the French public finance department), three researchers, among them Denis Merigoux (from Inria Paris), were given the opportunity to access the source code for France’s income tax calculator. After nearly two years of research, they have overhauled the language M and its compiler, making tax calculations more reliable.
Each year, close to 37 million households in France pay income tax. Calculated based on individual declarations made by taxpayers and information the tax authorities have at their disposal, it takes into account everything relating to people’s income and expenses, as well as their circumstances. This ensures that contributions are as fair as possible in terms of people’s individual circumstances, helping to avoid any rebates or penalties.
