Portrait of Katja Hofmann

Katja Hofmann

Researcher

I am a researcher at the Machine Intelligence and Perception group at Microsoft Research Cambridge. I am the research lead of Project Malmo, which uses the popular game Minecraft as an experimentation platform for developing intelligent technology. My long-term goal is to develop AI systems that learn to collaborate with people, to empower their users and help solve complex real-world problems.

Outside of Project Malmo, I work on online evaluation and interactive learning for information retrieval. This means that I try to understand how we can apply machine learning an artificial intelligence to develop more intelligent search and recommendation systems.

Before joining Microsoft Research, I completed my PhD in Computer Science as part of the ILPS group at the University of Amsterdam. I worked with Maarten de Rijke and Shimon Whiteson on smart search engines that learn directly from their users. My thesis on Fast and Reliable Online Learning to Rank in Information Retrieval can be downloaded from my personal homepage.

Project Tokyo

Established: October 31, 2016

“Technology has the potential to enrich people’s lives in ways never before possible and we won’t stop pushing the boundaries of what technology can do to empower every person and organization on the planet.” –Jenny Lay Flurrie, Chief Accessibility Officer, Microsoft Recent advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision and related disciplines are helping transform industries and empowering people. We formed Project Tokyo in support of Microsoft’s efforts to democratize computing for everyone. An…

Project Malmo

Established: June 1, 2015

How can we develop artificial intelligence that learns to make sense of complex environments? That learns from others, including humans, how to interact with the world? That learns transferable skills throughout its existence, and applies them to solve new, challenging problems? https://youtu.be/KkVj_ddseO8 Project Malmo sets out to address these core research challenges, addressing them by integrating (deep) reinforcement learning, cognitive science, and many ideas from artificial intelligence. The Malmo platform is a sophisticated AI experimentation…

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Project Malmo on GitHub

July 2016

Project Malmo is a platform for Artificial Intelligence experimentation and research built on top of Minecraft. We aim to inspire a new generation of research into challenging new problems presented by this unique environment.

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  • Github

For a list of my publications before joining MSR, please see the ILPS (Information and Language Processing Systems) list of publications, MSR Academic, or dblp.

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