News & awards

What should you know about Ability and Accessibility in AI and responsible technology development? In this episode we interview Meredith Ringel Morris, a computer scientist conducting research in the areas of human-computer interaction (HCI), computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), social computing, and accessibility. Her current research focus is on accessibility, particularly on the intersection of accessibility and social technologies.

Microsoft Research Asia announced the establishment of OpenNetLab, an open networking community and platform in collaboration with multiple universities in Asia, including academia from China, Korea and Singapore.

Vision-language (VL) systems allow searching the relevant images for a text query (or vice versa) and describing the content of an image using natural language. In general, a VL system uses an image encoding module and a vision-language fusion module. Microsoft Research recently developed a new object-attribute detection model for image encoding called VinVL (Visual features in Vision-Language).

On this weeks Sunday Session I chat to Aditya Nori, lead of the Health Intelligence theme at Microsoft Research Cambridge, where their mission is to transform the practice of medicine via trusted and human-centred AI. In the past, Aditya has developed AI-based productivity tools for cancer treatment (The InnerEye Project), and also explored various synergies between programming languages and machine learning which inspired new perspectives in formal verification, probabilistic programming, and reliable machine learning. He has also built several programmer productivity tools, including the 2nd generation of the Static Driver Verifier toolkit for Microsoft Windows.

Andy Gordon, Dave Maltz, Meredith Ringel Morris and Tony Hoare (retired Microsoft) were named as one of the 95 2020 ACM Fellows for their contributions to computing. Andy is recognized for his contributions to programming languages: their principles, logic, usability, and trustworthiness,  Merrie for her to human-computer interaction, information retrieval, computer-supported cooperative work, and accessibility and Tony for his contributions to the theory of programming, and its application to the practice of engineering of software.  ACM President Gabriele Kotsis noted that, “The 2020 ACM Fellows have demonstrated excellence across many disciplines of computing. These men and women have made pivotal contributions to technologies that are transforming whole industries, as well as our personal lives. We fully expect that these new ACM Fellows will continue in the vanguard in their respective fields.” Read more.

“Raising the water for all boats” is part of our DNA here at the Providence Digital Innovation Group. Our approach is to shape, build, and scale meaningful ideas here at Providence — and then offer them externally as a part of our mission of health for a better world. It’s a unique approach — and one that I’m quite proud to be a part of. It’s incredibly rewarding to build technology that has such a direct impact on people’s health — at scale.

A hospital in Cambridge is the first to use artificial intelligence technology developed by Microsoft to treat cancer patients faster, helping to cut the treatment backlog and save lives.

Addenbrooke’s is the first hospital in the world to use Inner Eye, software that automatically highlights tumours and healthy organs from scans, reducing the time it takes clinicians to prepare radiotherapy treatment by up to 90 per cent. The results are then checked and confirmed by a clinical oncologist before treatment starts.

When SuperGLUE was introduced, there was a nearly 20-point gap between the best-performing model and human performance on the leaderboard. But as of early January, two models — one from Microsoft called DeBERTa and a second from Google called T5 + Meena — have surpassed the human baselines, becoming the first to do so.

Since the start of the pandemic, Microsoft Healthcare Bot has been at the leading edge of helping organizations be more agile with patient engagement. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Walgreens, Premera, and Providence are just a few of the many organizations that are leveraging Microsoft Healthcare Bot to create bots to triage symptoms, answer lab and COVID-related questions, locate nearby clinics, and more. Over the last year, the Healthcare Bot has been used to build thousands of bots and deliver close to 1 billion messages to over 80 million people worldwide, spanning 25 countries.

The IEEE SPS awarded Rico Malvar the Society’s prestigious Amar G. Bose Industrial Leader Award, for his contributions to multimedia signal processing and industrial research leadership. The award recognizes an industry business or technical leader whose leadership has resulted in major and outstanding advances or new directions using signal processing technologies.