Microsoft Research Webinars

In this webinar, join Microsoft researchers Amit Sharma and Emre Kıcıman to learn about the fundamentals of causal inference. You will learn how a target question of cause and effect can be captured in a formal graphical model and answered systematically using available data. The researchers will introduce a four-step causal modeling framework for analyzing decision-making tasks and walk-through code examples using the DoWhy Python library that implements the framework. You will also discover how…

In this webinar, Microsoft Principal Researcher Daniel McDuff and University of Washington PhD student Xin Liu will present an overview of computer vision methods that leverage ordinary webcams to measure physiological signals (for example, peripheral blood flow, heart rate, respiration, and blood oxygenation) without contact with the body. Learn about some examples of state-of-the-art neural models that enable on-device sensing even in resource-constrained settings and understand some of the challenges and exciting research opportunities in…

In this webinar, led by Dr. Thomas Ball, Partner Researcher at Microsoft Research, and Stefania Druga, a PhD student at the University of Washington, learn how children and families are using TileCode to create retro video games on handheld gaming devices. You’ll gain an understanding of programming language design and the connections between video game mechanics and computational concepts.

In this webinar, based on the book Twitter: A Biography, Microsoft Senior Principal Researcher Nancy Baym and Queensland University of Technology Professor Jean Burgess introduce an original approach to this problem: the Platform Biography, a systematic framework for analyzing social media platforms. The framework provides a toolbox of concepts and empirical methods to diagnose patterns of past and emerging change in the cultures, politics, and governance of platforms.

In this webinar, Microsoft researchers Hoifung Poon, Senior Director of Biomedical NLP, and Jianfeng Gao, Distinguished Scientist, will challenge this assumption by showing that for domains with abundant unlabeled text, such as biomedicine, pretraining language models from scratch results in substantial gains over continual pretraining of general-domain language models.

In this webinar, Karthik Ramachandra, a Principal Engineering Manager who heads the Azure SQL Database R & D India organization at Microsoft, will take you on a journey addressing this important but often overlooked problem. First, he’ll describe how the declarative and imperative styles of programming are intertwined in today’s database systems and explain the challenges faced by practitioners. Then, he’ll address why this problem has lingered without a solution for years and what makes…

In this webinar, join Microsoft researcher Karin Strauss in exploring the role of biotechnology and synthetic DNA in reaching this goal. Although we have yet to achieve scalable, general-purpose molecular computation, there are areas of IT in which a molecular approach shows growing promise. These areas include storage as well as computation.

In this webinar, Dan Bohus, a Senior Principal Researcher in the Perception and Interaction Group at Microsoft Research, will introduce Platform for Situated Intelligence, an open-source framework that aims to address these challenges and accelerate and simplify the development, study, debugging, and maintenance of multimodal, integrative AI systems. The framework provides infrastructure for working with temporal streams of data; an efficient model for parallel, coordinated computation; rich tools for multimodal data visualization, annotation, and processing; and…

In this webinar, Microsoft researchers Alvin Chen and Chieh-Han Wu introduce Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG) and Microsoft Academic Knowledge Exploration Service (MAKES). You’ll begin with an introduction to how MAG works, its many applications, and its available APIs. Next, you’ll dive deeper into how MAKES extends the power of MAG for real-time applications at scale and learn the basics for building your own knowledge applications with MAKES.

In this webinar led by Microsoft Principal Researcher Dr. Nikunj Raghuvanshi, learn the ins and outs of creating practical, high-quality sound simulations. You will get an overview of the three components of sound simulation: synthesis, propagation, and spatialization. For each, we will review the underlying physics, research techniques, practical considerations, and open research questions. Special focus will be on Project Triton: a sound propagation technology being designed at Microsoft Research that ships in major games…

The latest trend in AI is that larger natural language models provide better accuracy; however, larger models are difficult to train because of cost, time, and ease of code integration. With the goal of advancing large model training by improving scale, speed, cost, and usability for model developers across the world, Microsoft made the DeepSpeed library open source in February of 2020. In this webinar, the DeepSpeed team will discuss what DeepSpeed is, how to use it…

Image retrieval systems allow individuals to find images that are semantically similar to a query image. This serves as the backbone of reverse image search engines and many product recommendation engines. Restricting an image retrieval system to particular subsets of images can yield new insights into relationships in the visual world. In this webinar, Microsoft Research Development Engineer Mark Hamilton presents a novel method for specializing image retrieval systems called conditional image retrieval. When applied over large…