First TextWorld Problems, the competition: Using text-based games to advance capabilities of AI agents
| Adam Trischler, Marc-Alexandre Côté, and Pedro Lima
Public competitions often help to advance the state of the art in challenging research problems. They frame a question, provide relevant data, and define evaluation metrics so that researchers across the world can work toward a shared goal—and ultimately learn…
Machine reading comprehension with Dr. T.J. Hazen
The ability to read and understand unstructured text, and then answer questions about it, is a common skill among literate humans. But for machines? Not so much. At least not yet! And not if Dr. T.J. Hazen, Senior Principal Research…
Who’s to blame? Debugging Internet performance for Azure users with BlameIt
| Ganesh Ananthanarayanan
Microsoft Azure cloud hosts a wide variety of services, and Azure has hundreds of network edge locations worldwide across the globe’s six continents to host those services. The Azure locations host many interactive (latency-sensitive) services that cater to consumer and…
Microsoft Azure was instrumental in helping us bootstrap fundamental components and services. This kept us focused on building our healthcare AI product.
Live video analytics and research as Test Cricket with Dr. Ganesh Ananthanarayanan
In an era of unprecedented advances in AI and machine learning, current gen systems and networks are being challenged by an unprecedented level of complexity and cost. Fortunately, Dr. Ganesh Ananthanarayanan, a researcher in the Mobility and Networking group at…
In the news | Science Rules! with Bill Nye
Listen Now Podcast: Machine Smarts
What's intelligence? Ashley Llorens, Chief of the Intelligent Systems Center at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, has a good idea. He joins us to talk about intelligence of the human-type and the machine-type, and what it will take for machines…
Project Malmo competition returns with student organizers and a new mission: To democratize reinforcement learning
| Noboru Sean Kuno
When I was asked about my favorite movie in a game with friends after my wedding ceremony, I replied Star Wars. That was about two decades ago, and, yes, it’s still the case. I especially like Return of the Jedi.…
Optics for the Cloud Research Alliance establishes collaborative research approach to improving cloud technology
| Tom Empson and Scarlet Schwiderski-Grosche
The cloud is an enormous success story. Microsoft Azure, the company’s cloud offering, was launched in 2010. It has grown by more than ten times in the past five years and is now operating in 54 regions around the world.…