News & awards

Sumit Gulwani and Ashish Tiwari are this year’s recipients of the ICSE 2020 Most Influential Paper Award from ICSE 2010 for their paper, Oracle-Guided Component-Based Program Synthesis (May 2010). The paper won this award because it has made a significant impact in Software Engineering and beyond, inspiring subsequent work not only on program synthesis and learning, but also on automated program repair, controller synthesis, and interpretable artificial intelligence.

What if your developer tools could track your edits and learn while you are making changes? What if they could offer to do remaining edits for you?

Your repeated edit experience is now enhanced by IntelliCode suggestions in Visual Studio 2019 16.7. IntelliCode spots repetitions and suggests other places in your code where you could apply that same change.

Non-player characters are the heart and soul of many video games, and new AI technology lets developers create characters that act organically and respond naturally to the player. The Project Paidia team, in collaboration with game developer Ninja Theory, is exploring new opportunities created by reinforcement learning. Our goal is to democratize state-of-the-art reinforcement learning techniques for any developer through Azure Machine Learning, and to provide access to training infrastructure and easy integration tools.

Azure offers a full range of AI solutions to help you build, run and grow your games. AI and machine learning can help accelerate game development by providing more realistic worlds and challenges as well as support automation and live operations.

Quantum computers promise to be game-changers in fields where there are enormously complex calculations to be carried out. Hoping to use quantum computing to address one of humanity’s biggest problems — climate change — investigators from Microsoft Research and ETH Zurich have developed a quantum algorithm they say is able to simulate catalytic processes extremely quickly.

Ah, the sweet days of running your memory sample through volatility. It’s not over yet — but Microsoft has done an amazing job at releasing a new service, which can perform a full-blown volatile memory analysis of a Linux system, with special focus on detecting rootkits.

Microsoft is using unsupervised learning techniques to extract knowledge about disruptions to cloud services. In a paper published on the preprint server Arxiv.org, researchers at the company detail SoftNER, a framework that has been deployed internally at Microsoft to collate information regarding 400 storage, compute, and other cloud outages. They claim it eliminates the need to annotate a large amount of training data while scaling to a high volume of timeouts, slow connections, and other product  …

COVID-19, caused by the novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), has put health-care systems worldwide into crisis.1 The speed with which health-care resources have been consumed has in some countries exceeded supply of personal protective equipment and ventilators, the unprecedented need for the latter as a result of life-threatening respiratory failure that characterises severe disease.

Boffins in Microsoft Research has pulled the covers off Project Freta, a free service aimed at spotting memory malfeasance.

A technology demonstration named for the street in Warsaw, Poland where Marie Curie was born, Freta comes from the NExT Security Ventures (NSV) team and is all about taking a VM snapshot and scanning the volatile memory for signs of nefarious behaviour.