In the news | SIGCHI
Dumais receives SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award
A common theme that runs through her work is the importance of understanding and improving information systems from an interdisciplinary and user-centered perspective. She is a co-inventor of Latent Semantic Analysis, a well-known word embedding technique, which was designed to…
Microsoft Research 2019 reflection—a year of progress on technology’s toughest challenges
Research is about achieving long-term goals, often through incremental progress. As the year comes to an end, it’s a good time to step back and reflect on the work that researchers at Microsoft and their collaborators have done to advance…
Directions in user research
Building empathy with customers, the rise of AI, and the value of the user researcher are a few trends that came to the forefront of the discipline in 2019. As the year comes to an end, one user researcher predicts…
Finding the best learning targets automatically: Fully Parameterized Quantile Function for distributional RL
| Li Zhao
Reinforcement learning has achieved great success in game scenarios, with RL agents beating human competitors in such games as Go and poker. Distributional reinforcement learning, in particular, has proven to be an effective approach for training an agent to maximize…
In the news | Rolls-Royce News
Technology breakthrough offers hope for people silenced by disability
Microsoft and other companies joined forces to help Rolls-Royce create new AI technology that will allow people with motor neurone disease (MND) to have a conversation in their own voice, even after they have lost the ability to speak.
In the news | Medium
Accelerating biodiversity surveys with Azure Machine Learning
Breaking the annotation logjam in wildlife surveys. Biodiversity is declining across the globe at a catastrophic rate. Conservation biologists are faced with the daunting — but urgent — task of surveying wildlife populations and making policy recommendations. What species need…
Making machines recognize and transcribe conversations in meetings using audio and video
| Takuya Yoshioka, Eyal Krupka, and Yifan Gong
The ability to perceive communication signals and make sense of them played an essential role in the evolution of human intelligence. Computing technology is following the same trajectory. Now, computer vision and automatic speech recognition (ASR) technologies have enabled the…
Next-generation architectures bridge gap between neural and symbolic representations with neural symbols
| Paul Smolensky
In both language and mathematics, symbols and their mutual relationships play a central role. The equation x = 1/y asserts the symbols x and y—that is, what they stand for—are related reciprocally; Kim saw the movie asserts that Kim and…