Orchard: An open framework for scalable agentic AI
| Baolin Peng, Wenlin Yao, Qianhui Wu, Hao Cheng, and Jianfeng Gao
Orchard is an open-source framework for the research community to train and evaluate AI agents across task types. It reduces complexity while supporting strong performance from smaller models by enabling researchers to reuse the same infrastructure.
In the news | LinkedIn
ACM Special Interest Group on Security, Audit and Control (SIGSAC)
Our SIGSAC Spotlight featured researcher this month is Dr. F. Betül Durak, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research (MSR) and an applied cryptographer whose work explores how trust can be made explicit and measurable in modern technologies. Betül’s recent work…
Echoverse: Deep, evolving environments for computer-use agents
| Akshay Nambi, Yash Pandya, Sahil Gupta, Sarthak Harne, Archana Yadav, Kavyansh Chourasia, Yash Lara, Ahmed Awadallah, and Ece Kamar
Computer-use AI agents struggle with multi-step workflows like email and customer support. Echoverse trains agents in realistic environments rather than simply providing more training tasks, helping them improve as the tasks, tests, and environments evolve.
EvoLib: Turning experience into evolving knowledge
| Weijia Xu, Alessandro Sordoni, Zelalem Gero, Michel Galley, Eric Yuan, and Jianfeng Gao
LLMs do not get smarter just by remembering more. EvoLib turns experience into evolving knowledge, taking reusable skills and insights that help models learn and adapt across tasks long after deployment.
In the news | BigData Insider
Dear AI: How amputees themselves curate the training data for better AI images
Generative image models often depict people with prostheses incorrectly or not at all. With the "Dear AI" initiative, the medical technology group Ottobock wants to change that. Together with those affected, an open data set is created that is intended…
In the news | Microsoft Signal
A new approach to AI data puts communities in charge
Much of what AI knows about the world comes from data most people never see and from technical processes that determine what’s included or left out. As AI becomes increasingly influential in daily life, a new platform aims to help…
In the news | Ottobock
Human reality, not cyborg clichés: representing people with prostheses accurately in AI images.
As much as artificial intelligence can achieve, it still frequently struggles in its attempts to represent people with disabilities. Anyone who has tried to use AI to create images of people with prostheses will be familiar with the distorted images…
In the news | Microsoft Source EMEA
Dear AI, here’s how to portray amputees correctly
Artificial Intelligence (AI) struggles to create true-to-life images of people with amputations. Now amputees are teaching AI to be responsible and inclusive – with help from prosthetics manufacturer Ottobock and Microsoft.
By Najeeb G. Abdulhamid¹, Elizabeth “Liz” Ankrah¹, Abiodun Ogunyemi², Mark Perry³, Merja Lina M. Bauters², Jona Repishti⁴, Steven Sam³, Samuel Chege Maina¹, Millicent Ochieng¹, Mercy Muchai¹, Stephanie Nyairo¹, Rikin Gandhi⁴, Jacki O’Neill¹ (see author affiliations) Reported extension worker to farmer…