The recent rollout of passkeys by hundreds of web services online is the largest attempt yet to achieve the goal of passwordless authentication. However, new authentication mechanisms can often overlook the unique threats faced by at-risk users, such as survivors of intimate partner violence, human…
SMS fraud has surged in recent years. Detection techniques have improved along with the fraud, necessitating harder-to-detect fraud techniques. We study one of these where scammers send an SMS to the victim addressing mum or dad, pretend to be their child, and ask for financial…
Alexandra Olteanu, Principal Researcher, and Su Lin Blodgett, Principal Researcher, both from Microsoft Research Montréal, discuss the anthropomorphic design and perception of generative AI systems. Their work equips practitioners with frameworks for understanding what makes these systems appear human-like, and how to deliberately design systems…
Frank Noé, Partner Research Manager at Microsoft Research AI for Science, shares a major milestone in biomolecular simulation: BioEmu, an emulator that predicts protein shape changes and stabilities with near-experimental accuracy, running up to 100,000x faster than traditional simulations. This opens new possibilities for drug…
This repository hosts the official code and data artifact for the "Affective Air Quality" dataset. Details about the user study and data collection can be found in our paper. The dataset released it's the first to include gas sensing data emitted by humans while experiencing different…
Paolo Costa, Partner Research Manager at Microsoft Research Cambridge, presents a breakthrough in AI infrastructure: using microLEDs to overcome scaling limitations in current communication technologies. Unlike copper (short range) and optics (high power), microLED links promise long reach, low power consumption, low cost, and high…
Kwangjun Ahn, Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research AI Frontiers, introduces Dion, a next-generation optimizer in the style of Muon that orthonormalizes only the top-r subspace via amortized power iteration. Dion retains Muon’s fast convergence while significantly reducing compute and communication, scaling efficiently with FSDP/TP for…
Mojan Javaheripi, Member of Technical Staff at Microsoft Research AI Frontiers, presents Phi-4-Reasoning and Phi-4-Reasoning-Plus—two 14B models designed to advance complex reasoning in small-scale language models. By introducing a dedicated “thinking block” and applying supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning on carefully curated STEM datasets, these…
By Advait Sarkar, Senior Researcher; Sean Rintel, Senior Principal Research Manager; Leon Reicherts, Researcher; Lev Tankelevitch, Senior Researcher; Pratik Ghosh, Senior Research Designer; Richard Banks, Principal Design Manager; Payod Panda, Design Engineering Researcher; Martin Grayson, Principal Research Software Development Engineer In today’s workplace, knowledge workers face…
Finding the right code quickly is critical. After listening to the community’s feedback, we rolled out a new Copilot embedding model that makes code search in VS Code faster, lighter on memory, and far more accurate. This means retrieving the snippets you actually need instead…
Noé is a pioneer in integrating artificial intelligence with theoretical chemistry.
Anonymity is essential for free speech and expressing dissent, but platform moderators need ways to police bad actors. For anonymous clients, this may involve banning their accounts, docking their reputation, or updating their state in a complex access control scheme. Frequently, these operations happen asynchronously…
