By mid-morning, a typical knowledge worker is already juggling a client report, a budget spreadsheet, a slide deck, and an email backlog, all interdependent and all demanding attention at once. For AI agents to be genuinely useful in that environment, they will need to operate…
Jacki O’Neill, founding Lab Director of Microsoft Research Africa, Nairobi, was given the 2026 Societal Impact Award by ACM SIGCHI for her research in computer science which has had extensive societal impact specifically in the areas of financial inclusion, future of work and multi-cultural, multi-lingual…
Designing aligned and robust rewards for open-ended generation remains a key barrier to RL post-training. Rubrics provide structured, interpretable supervision, but scaling rubric construction is difficult: expert rubrics are costly, prompted rubrics are often superficial or inconsistent, and fixed-pool discriminative rubrics can saturate and drift,…
Artificial intelligence is diffusing at an impressive speed, but its adoption around the world remains profoundly uneven. As Microsoft’s latest AI Diffusion Report shows, AI usage in the Global North is roughly twice that of the Global South. And this divide continues to widen. This disparity impacts…
Ahead of Mobile World Congress, where global leaders, governments, and industry convene at the world’s largest connectivity event, Microsoft is marking a major milestone in our efforts to expand digital access worldwide. In 2022, we made a bold commitment (opens in new tab) to expand internet access…
Looting at archaeological sites poses a severe risk to cultural heritage, yet monitoring thousands of remote locations remains operationally difficult. We present a scalable, satellite-based pipeline to detect looted archaeological sites using PlanetScope monthly mosaics (4.7 m/pixel) and a curated dataset of 1,943 archaeological sites…
This chapter explores the global dynamics of AI talent mobility, moving beyond the traditional “brain drain” narrative to introduce the concepts of “brain circulation” and “brain regain.” Drawing on migration theory, empirical data, and national policy examples, we examine how countries can turn talent outflows…
The Office of the Chief Scientific Officer works with senior leadership at Microsoft on strategy and opportunities at the frontiers of science, engineering, and responsible artificial intelligence (AI). The office collaborates closely with teams across Microsoft, including Microsoft Research, divisional research and development (R&D) teams,…
By Taiwei Shi, Sihao Chen, Longqi Yang, Jaime Teevan Reinforcement Learning is at the core of building and improving frontier AI models and products. Yet most state-of-the-art RL methods learn primarily from outcomes: a scalar reward signal that says whether an attempt worked, not why…
While significant progress has been made in automating various aspects of software development through coding agents, there is still significant room for improvement in their bug fixing capabilities. Debugging and investigation of runtime behavior remains largely a manual, developer-driven process. Popular coding agents typically rely…
As a Research Intern in the Strategic Planning and Architecture (SPARC) group, you will contribute to the research, design, and development of cryptos & crypto applications for Caliptra and its usage models. This role encompasses topics such as crypto tradeoffs around silicon gate area, FW-HW…
As synthetic media grows, verifying what’s real, and the origin of content, matters more than ever. Our latest report explores media integrity and authentication methods, their limits, and practical paths toward trustworthy provenance across images, audio, and video.
