Advancing Excel as a programming language with Andy Gordon and Simon Peyton Jones on the Microsoft Research Podcast
Microsoft Research Podcast

Today, people around the globe—from teachers to small-business owners to finance executives—use Microsoft Excel to make sense of the information that occupies their respective worlds, and whether they realize it or not, in doing so, they’re taking on the role…

brain with tangled knot
Articles

In the past, teaching in the corporate setting, I have seen adult learners bring feelings of defensiveness and insecurity to the classroom that not only detracted from their results, but those of others. As someone who regularly takes on new…

Articles

Editor's note, June 4, 2021 - the post has been updated with a more extensive FAQ to provide more details on the changes announced May 4. For over seven years, Microsoft Research has been proud to have one of its…

Awards | Fast Company

Microsoft—a winner of Fast Company’s 2021 World Changing Ideas Awards—shows how a giant company can push change across a wide variety of disciplines, from climate to energy to health to education.

Awards | Fast Company

Microsoft’s Premonition platform—a winner of Fast Company’s 2021 World Changing Ideas Awards—tracks, captures, and analyzes mosquitoes, to give health officials a sense of what pathogens are circulating in the area.

An example of a multi-turn text-to-SQL task. The user query “Find the names of the top 3 highest sales books” corresponds to the formal program “SELECT title FROM book ORDER BY sale_amount DESC LIMIT 3”. The follow-up user query, “Who are their authors,” corresponds to the formal program “SELECT t1.title, t1.name FROM author AS t1 JOIN book AS t2 ON t1.id = t2.author_id ORDER BY t2.sale_amount DESC LIMIT 3”. In the corresponding database, there is an “Author” table with an “id” column, a “name” column, a “country” column, and an ellipsis signifying additional columns; a “Press” table with an “id” column, a “name” column, an “address” column, and an ellipsis signifying additional columns; and a “Book” table with an “id” column, a “title” column, an “author id” column, a “sale_amount” column, and an ellipsis signifying additional columns.
Microsoft Research Blog

| Alex Polozov, Chris Meek, and Ahmed Awadallah

One key aspiration of AI is to develop natural and effective task-oriented conversational systems. Task-oriented conversational systems use a natural language interface to collaborate with and support people in accomplishing specific goals and activities. They go beyond chitchat conversation. For…

An animation showing an example of a high-level language message format specified by EverParse. From the message, two arrows labeled “EverParse” point to a rectangle labeled “formal specification” and a rectangle labeled “low-level implementation,” respectively, inside a larger rectangle labeled “F* code.” The figure represents EverParse’s ability to automatically generate safe, correct, and fast F* parsing code. “Correctness” is defined as “Correctness: ​parse (serialize msg) = msg​” and “valid msg ==> serialize (parse msg) = msg​.” The F* logo appears with the description that F* is a type theory–based programming language and proof assistant that can prove theorems about programs​. From the “F* code” rectangle, arrows point from the “low-level implementation” rectangle and a rectangle labeled “verified libraries for combinators” to a rectangle labeled “Safe high-performance C code.”
Microsoft Research Blog

| Tahina Ramananandro, Aseem Rastogi, and Nikhil Swamy

EverParse (opens in new tab) is a framework for generating provably secure parsers and formatters used to improve the security of critical code bases at Microsoft. EverParse is developed as part of Project Everest (opens in new tab), a collaboration…

In the news | New York Times

At least a dozen treatments are being evaluated for virus patients whose immune systems go on the attack. Many coronavirus patients seem to get better at first, then rapidly decline and are overtaken by an overwhelming immune response that causes…

In the news | Pioneer

To use artificial intelligence to support frontline clinicians interpreting chest radiographs (CXR) as a way to diagnose Covid-19 and predict the likely outcomes for patients. Although Covid-19 can be diagnosed using throat and nose swabs, these remain limited in supply…