Microsoft Research Blog

Artificial intelligence

  1. To Schedule or not to Schedule: Extracting Task Specific Temporal Entities and Associated Negation Constraints. 

    October 30, 2020 | Barun Patra, Chala Fufa, Pamela Bhattacharya, and Charles Lee

    State of the art research for date-time entity extraction from text is task agnostic. Consequently, while the methods proposed in the literature perform well for generic date-time extraction from texts, they don’t fare as well on task-specific date-time entity extraction where only a subset of…

  2. Value-Approximation based Deep Reinforcement Learning Techniques: An Overview 

    October 29, 2020 | Mohit Sewak, Sanjay K. Sahay, and Hemant Rathore

    Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) combines the power of Deep Leaning and Reinforcement learning, and has started gaining a lot of attraction in various domains. Also, it is empowering the artificial intelligence based agents which could surpass human-level performance even the tasks which was earlier thought…

  3. Estimating Crop Yields With Remote Sensing And Deep Learning 

    October 28, 2020 | Renato L. de F. Cunha and Bruno Silva

    Increasing the accuracy of crop yield estimates may allow improvements in the whole crop production chain, allowing farmers to better plan for harvest, and for insurers to better understand risks of production, to name a few advantages. To perform their predictions, most current machine learning…

  4. An Integrated Approach of Deep Learning and Symbolic Analysis for Digital PDF Table Extraction 

    October 27, 2020 | Mengshi Zhang, Daniel Perelman, Vu Le, and Sumit Gulwani

    Deep learning has shown great success at interpreting unstructured data such as object recognition in images. Symbolic/logical-reasoning techniques have shown great success in interpreting structured data such as table extraction in webpages, custom text files, spreadsheets. The tables in PDF documents are often generated from…

  5. Ant Colony Optimization for Object-Oriented Unit Test Generation 

    October 26, 2020 | Dan Bruce, Héctor D. Menéndez, Earl T. Barr, and David Clark

    Generating useful unit tests for object-oriented programs is difficult for traditional optimization methods. One not only needs to identify values to be used as inputs, but also synthesize a program which creates the required state in the program under test. Many existing Automated Test Generation…

  6. An Open Source Implementation of ITU-T Recommendation P.808 with Validation 

    October 24, 2020 | Babak Naderi and Ross Cutler

    The ITU-T Recommendation P.808 provides a crowdsourcing approach for conducting a subjective assessment of speech quality using the Absolute Category Rating (ACR) method. We provide an open-source implementation of the ITU-T Rec. P.808 that runs on the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform. We extended our implementation…

  7. Advancing Non-Contact Vital Sign Measurement using Synthetic Avatars 

    October 23, 2020

    Non-contact physiological measurement has the potential to provide low-cost, non-invasive health monitoring. However, machine vision approaches are often limited by the availability and diversity of annotated video datasets resulting in poor generalization to complex real-life conditions. To address these challenges, this work proposes the use…

  10. Freetures: Localization in Signed Distance Function Maps 

    October 18, 2020

    Localization of a robotic system within a previously mapped environment is important for reducing estimation drift and for reusing previously built maps. Existing techniques for geometry-based localization have focused on the description of local surface geometry, usually using pointclouds as the underlying representation. We propose…

  11. ORES: Lowering Barriers with Participatory Machine Learning in Wikipedia 

    October 13, 2020 | Aaron L Halfaker and R. Stuart Geiger

    Algorithmic systems---from rule-based bots to machine learning classifiers---have a long history of supporting the essential work of content moderation and other curation work in peer production projects. From counter-vandalism to task routing, basic machine prediction has allowed open knowledge projects like Wikipedia to scale to…

  12. Improving Person Re-Identification With Iterative Impression Aggregation 

    October 12, 2020

    Our impression about one person often updates after we see more aspects of him/her and this process keeps iterating given more meetings. We formulate such an intuition into the problem of person re-identification (re-ID), where the representation of a query (probe) image is iteratively updated…