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From pixels to patches: Pooling strategies for earth embeddings

March 1, 2026 | Isaac Corley, Caleb Robinson, Inbal Becker-Reshef, and Juan M. Lavista Ferres

As geospatial foundation models shift from patch-level to pixel-level embeddings, practitioners must aggregate thousands of pixel vectors into patch representations that preserve class-discriminative signal while matching downstream label resolution. The default choice, mean pooling, discards within-patch variability and can reduce accuracy by more than 10%…
Individual Turing Test: A Case Study of LLM-based Simulation Using Longitudinal Personal Data

March 1, 2026

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable human-like capabilities, yet their ability to replicate a specific individual remains under-explored. This paper presents a case study to investigate LLM-based individual simulation with a volunteer-contributed archive of private messaging history spanning over ten years. Based on the…
Better Thinking Through AI – 10 Strategies for Using AI to Improve Your Thinking

March 1, 2026 | Richard Banks and Sean Rintel

The world has spent the last year getting used to AI as a writing tool, a code assistant, a meeting summarizer. But AI's real power may lie somewhere more subtle — and more profound: it can help us think better. Thinking well is hard. It…
Can Vision Language Models Assess Graphic Design Aesthetics? A Benchmark, Evaluation, and Dataset Perspective

March 1, 2026

Assessing the aesthetic quality of graphic design is central to visual communication, yet remains underexplored in vision language models (VLMs). We investigate whether VLMs can evaluate design aesthetics in ways comparable to humans. Prior work faces three key limitations: benchmarks restricted to narrow principles and…
StreamWise: Serving Multi-Modal Generation in Real-Time at Scale

March 1, 2026

Advances in multi-modal generative models are enabling new applications, from storytelling to automated media synthesis. Most current workloads generate simple outputs (e.g., image generation from a prompt) in batch mode, often requiring several seconds even for basic results. Serving real-time multi-modal workflows at scale is…
MSCCL++: Rethinking GPU Communication Abstractions for AI Inference

March 1, 2026

AI applications increasingly run on fast-evolving, heterogeneous hardware to maximize performance, but general-purpose libraries lag in supporting these features. Performance-minded programmers often build custom communication stacks that are fast but error-prone and non-portable. This paper introduces MSCCL++, a design methodology for developing high-performance, portable communication…
Memora: A Harmonic Memory Representation Balancing Abstraction and Specificity

March 1, 2026

Agent memory systems must accommodate continuously growing information while supporting efficient, context-aware retrieval for downstream tasks. Abstraction is essential for scaling agent memory, yet it often comes at the cost of specificity, obscuring the fine-grained details required for effective reasoning. We introduce Memora, a harmonic…
Texterial: A Text-as-Material Interaction Paradigm for LLM-Mediated Writing

February 28, 2026

What if text could be sculpted and refined like clay -- or cultivated and pruned like a plant? Texterial reimagines text as a material that users can grow, sculpt, and transform. Current generative-AI models enable rich text operations, yet rigid, linear interfaces often mask such…
Principal Researcher – Artificial Intelligence – Microsoft Research

February 27, 2026

The AI Interaction and Learning team in Microsoft Research advances research on collaborative AI systems, where humans and AI agents work together to achieve outcomes that exceed what either could accomplish alone. We are looking for a Principal Researcher with a passion for pushing the…
Principal Researcher – Cloud and AI Infrastructure – Microsoft Research

February 27, 2026

Microsoft Research Asia – Vancouver lab represents Microsoft Research Asia’s exciting expansion into the Redmond and Asia-Pacific region. We are seeking a highly skilled Principal Researcher - Cloud and AI Infrastructure with a keen interest in advancing cloud and Artificial Intelligence (AI) infrastructure architecture, and chip design using…
Principal Researcher – Artificial Specialized Intelligence – Microsoft Research

February 27, 2026

Microsoft Research Asia – Vancouver lab represents Microsoft Research Asia’s exciting expansion into the Redmond and Asia-Pacific region. We are currently seeking a Principal Researcher in the area of Artificial Specialized Intelligence, with a keen interest in developing cutting-edge large foundation models and post-training techniques for different…
Principal Researcher – Systems & Networking – Microsoft Research

February 27, 2026

Microsoft Research Asia – Vancouver lab, located in the vibrant city of Vancouver, BC, Canada, our lab represents Microsoft Research Asia’s exciting expansion into the Asia-Pacific region. We are currently seeking a Principal Researcher in the area of Systems and Networking with a keen interest in exploring…

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