Portrait of Eric Horvitz

Eric Horvitz

Chief Scientific Officer

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News & features

Four white icons on a blue-to-purple gradient background: the first icon shows a node cluster, the second shows two persons, the third is a building, and the fourth is a location pin
Microsoft Research Blog

| Gagan Bansal, Wenyue Hua, Zachary Huang, Adam Fourney, Amanda Swearngin, Chinmay Singh, Brendan Lucier, Jake Hofman, Markus Mobius, Will Epperson, Tyler Payne, Akshay Nambi, Archana Yadav, Maya Murad, Matthew Vogel, Alex Slivkins, Dan Goldstein, David Rothschild, Hussein Mozannar, Nicole Immorlica, Subbarao Kambhampati, Eric Horvitz, and Saleema Amershi

AI agents are poised to transform digital marketplaces. To explore what can happen when AI agents interact and transact at scale, we built Magentic Marketplace, an open-source simulation environment for studying agentic market designs.

Illustrated headshots (from left to right): Eric Horvitz, Bruce Wittmann, Tessa Alexanian, and James Diggans.
Microsoft Research Podcast

| Eric Horvitz, Bruce Wittmann, Tessa Alexanian, and James Diggans

Microsoft’s Eric Horvitz and guests Bruce Wittmann, Tessa Alexanian, and James Diggans discuss the Paraphrase Project—a red-teaming effort that exposed and secured a biosecurity vulnerability in AI-driven protein design. The work offers a model for addressing AI’s dual-use risks.

Paraphrase Project Protiens
Microsoft Research Blog

| Eric Horvitz

Microsoft researchers reveal a confidential research effort that explored how open-source AI tools could be used to bypass biosecurity checks—and helped create fixes now influencing global standards.

A visual illustration of Medprompt performance on the MedQA benchmark. Moving from left to right on a horizontal line, the illustration shows how different Medprompt components and additive contributions improve accuracy starting with zero-shot at 81.7 accuracy, to random few-shot at 83.9 accuracy, to random few-shot, chain-of-thought at 87.3 accuracy, to kNN, few-shot, chain-of-thought at 88.4 accuracy, to ensemble with choice shuffle at 90.2 accuracy.
Microsoft Research Blog

| Eric Horvitz, Harsha Nori, and Naoto Usuyama

Discover the most effective run-time strategies on the OpenAI o1-preview model, improving accuracy in medical language tasks.

In the news | LinkedIn

David Baker received the Nobel Prize today for breakthrough work in protein design, on creating new proteins to serve as novel therapies and vaccines. Five years ago, we made the decision to go all-in with David. The goal was to…

Microsoft at CHI 2024
Microsoft Research Blog

From immersive virtual experiences to interactive design tools, Microsoft Research is at the frontier of exploring how people engage with technology. Discover our latest breakthroughs in human-computer interaction research at CHI 2024.

In the news | The Rise of the AI Co-Pilot: Lessons for Design from Aviation and Beyond

three conversation bubbles on a blue, purple, and pink gradient background
Microsoft Research Blog

| Eric Horvitz, Harsha Nori, and Yin Tat Lee

We’re seeing exciting capabilities of frontier foundation models, including intriguing powers of abstraction, generalization, and composition across numerous areas of knowledge and expertise. Even seasoned AI researchers have been impressed with the ability to steer the models with straightforward, zero-shot prompts. Beyond…

In the news | Microsoft Unlocked

Recent advances in AI have sparked both wonder and anxiety as we contemplate its transformative potential. AI holds enormous promise to enrich our lives, but this anticipation comes intertwined with apprehensions about the challenges and risks that might emerge. To…