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Latest episodes from Microsoft Research Podcast

What AI's impact on individuals means for the health workforce and industry

Play Episode Listen Later May 29, 2025 78:42 Transcription Available


Ethan Mollick and Azeem Azhar, thought leaders at the forefront of AI's influence on work, education, and society, discuss the impact of AI at the individual level and what that means for the healthcare workforce and the organizations and systems in medicine.

Abstracts: Zero-shot models in single-cell biology with Alex Lu

Play Episode Listen Later May 22, 2025 14:29 Transcription Available


The emergence of foundation models has sparked interest in applications to single-cell biology, but when tested in zero-shot settings, they underperform compared to simpler methods. Alex Lu shares insights on why more research on AI models is needed in biological applications.Show notes

Abstracts: Aurora with Megan Stanley and Wessel Bruinsma

Play Episode Listen Later May 21, 2025 9:57 Transcription Available


In this episode of Abstracts, Microsoft senior researchers Megan Stanley and Wessel Bruinsma join host Amber Tingle to discuss their groundbreaking work on environmental forecasting. Their new Nature publication, "A Foundation Model for the Earth System," features Aurora, an AI model that redefines weather prediction and extends its capabilities to other environmental domains such as tropical cyclones and ocean wave forecasting.Read the paper: A Foundation Model for the Earth System

Collaborators: Healthcare Innovation to Impact

Play Episode Listen Later May 20, 2025 41:59 Transcription Available


In this discussion, Matthew Lungren, Jonathan Carlson, Smitha Saligrama, Will Guyman, and Cameron Runde explore how teams across Microsoft are working together to generate advanced AI capabilities and solutions for developers and clinicians around the globe. 

Coauthor roundtable: Reflecting on real world of doctors, developers, patients, and policymakers

Play Episode Listen Later May 15, 2025 78:07 Transcription Available


Peter Lee and his coauthors, Carey Goldberg and Dr. Zak Kohane, reflect on how generative AI is unfolding in real-world healthcare, drawing on earlier guest conversations to examine what's working, what's not, and what questions still remain.

Abstracts: Heat Transfer and Deep Learning with Hongxia Hao and Bing Lv

Play Episode Listen Later May 8, 2025 17:31 Transcription Available


Silicon has long borne the burden of heat transfer in electronics, but in a post-Moore's Law world, researchers like Hongxia Hao and Bing Lv are using AI to discover and design next-generation materials that exceed the limits of silicon's thermal conductivity.Read the paper

Abstracts: Societal AI with Xing Xie

Play Episode Listen Later May 5, 2025 10:54 Transcription Available


New AI models aren't just changing the world of research; they're also poised to impact society. Xing Xie talks about Societal AI, a white paper that explores the changing landscape with an eye to future research and improved communication across disciplines.Read the paper

The AI Revolution in Medicine, Revisited: Laws, norms, and ethics for AI in health

Play Episode Listen Later May 1, 2025 89:54 Transcription Available


Healthcare experts Laura Adams, Vardit Ravitsky, and Dr. Roxana Daneshjou discuss responsible AI implementation in medicine, examining governance approaches, shifting patient-provider relationships, and the identification of bias to ensure equitable deployment.

The AI Revolution in Medicine, Revisited: Empowering patients and healthcare consumers in the age of generative AI

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 17, 2025 82:24 Transcription Available


In this episode, Dave deBronkart and Christina Farr, champions of patient-centered digital health, join Lee to talk about how AI is reshaping healthcare in terms of patient empowerment and emerging digital health business models. DeBronkart, a cancer survivor and longtime advocate for patient empowerment, discusses how AI tools like ChatGPT can help patients better understand their conditions, navigate the healthcare system, and communicate more effectively with clinicians. Farr, a healthcare investor and former journalist, talks about the evolving digital health–startup ecosystem, highlighting where AI is having the most meaningful impact—particularly in women's health, pediatrics, and elder care. She also explores consumer trends, like the rise of cash-pay healthcare.

The AI Revolution in Medicine, Revisited: Real-world healthcare AI development and deployment—at scale

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 3, 2025 86:15 Transcription Available


In this episode, Dr. Matthew Lungren and Seth Hain, leaders in the implementation of healthcare AI technologies and solutions at scale, join Lee to discuss the latest developments. Lungren, the chief scientific officer at Microsoft Health and Life Sciences, explores the creation and deployment of generative AI for automating clinical documentation and administrative tasks like clinical note-taking. Hain, the senior vice president of R&D at the healthcare software company Epic, focuses on the opportunities and challenges of integrating AI into electronic health records at global scale, highlighting AI-driven workflows, decision support, and Epic's Cosmos project, which leverages aggregated healthcare data for research and clinical insights.

Ideas: Accelerating Foundation Models Research: AI for all

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 31, 2025 64:20 Transcription Available


Innovative AI research often depends on access to resources. Microsoft wants to help. Technical Advisor Evelyne Viegas and distinguished faculty from two Minority Serving Institutions discuss the benefits of Microsoft's Accelerating Foundation Models Research program in their lives and research.

The AI Revolution in Medicine, Revisited: The reality of generative AI in the clinic

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 20, 2025 77:15 Transcription Available


Two years ago, OpenAI's GPT-4 kick-started a new era in AI. In the months leading up to its public release, Peter Lee, president of Microsoft Research, cowrote a book full of optimism for the potential of advanced AI models to transform the world of healthcare. What has happened since? In this special podcast series—The AI Revolution in Medicine, Revisited—Lee revisits the book, exploring how patients, providers, and other medical professionals are experiencing and using generative AI today while examining what he and his coauthors got right—and what they didn't foresee.In this episode, Dr. Christopher Longhurst and Dr. Sara Murray, leading experts in healthcare AI implementation, join Lee to discuss the current state and future of AI in clinical settings. Longhurst, chief clinical and innovation officer at UC San Diego Health and executive director of the Jacobs Center for Health Innovation, details his healthcare system's collaboration with Epic and Microsoft to integrate GPT into their electronic health record system, offering clinicians support in responding to patient messages. Dr. Murray, chief health AI officer at UC San Francisco Health, discusses AI's integration into clinical workflows, the promise and risks of AI-driven decision-making, and how generative AI is reshaping patient care and physician workload.Learn more:Large Language Models for More Efficient Reporting of Hospital Quality MeasuresGenerative artificial intelligence responses to patient messages in the electronic health record: early lessons learnedThe Chief Health AI Officer — An Emerging Role for an Emerging TechnologyAI-Generated Draft Replies Integrated Into Health Records and Physicians' Electronic Communication Comparing Physician and Artificial Intelligence Chatbot Responses to Patient Questions Posted to a Public Social Media Forum The AI Revolution in Medicine: GPT-4 and Beyond

The AI Revolution in Medicine, Revisited: An Introduction

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 6, 2025 11:48 Transcription Available


Host Peter Lee, Microsoft Research president, discusses the motivation behind the new series and the GPT-4 encounter that helped him view the tech not only as a potential tool for improving healthcare but a chance to reexamine what it means to care for people. 

Ideas: Quantum computing redefined with Chetan Nayak

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 19, 2025 57:04 Transcription Available


Microsoft announced the creation of the first topoconductor and first QPU architecture with a topological core. Dr. Chetan Nayak, a technical fellow of Quantum Hardware at the company, discusses how the breakthroughs are redefining the field of quantum computing.

Ideas: Building AI for population-scale systems with Akshay Nambi

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 11, 2025 25:41 Transcription Available


In this episode, guest host Chris Stetkiewicz talks with Microsoft Principal Researcher Akshay Nambi about his focus on developing AI-driven technology that addresses real-world challenges at scale. Drawing on firsthand experiences, Nambi combines his expertise in electronics and computer science to create systems that enhance road safety, agriculture, and energy infrastructure. He's currently working on AI-powered tools to improve education, including a digital assistant that can help teachers work more efficiently and create effective lesson plans and solutions to help improve the accuracy of models underpinning AI tutors.

Ideas: Bug hunting with Shan Lu

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 23, 2025 45:16


Struggles with programming languages helped research manager Shan Lu find her calling as a bug hunter. She discusses one bug that really haunted her, the thousands she's identified since, and how she's turning to LLMs to help make software more reliable.

Ideas: AI for materials discovery with Tian Xie and Ziheng Lu

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 16, 2025 49:58


How do you generate and test materials that don't exist yet? Researchers Tian Xie and Ziheng Lu share the story behind MatterGen and MatterSim, AI tools poised to transform materials discovery and help drive advances in energy, manufacturing, and sustainability.

Ideas: AI and democracy with Madeleine Daepp and Robert Osazuwa Ness

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 19, 2024 51:23 Transcription Available


As the “biggest election year in history” comes to an end, researchers Madeleine Daepp and Robert Osazuwa Ness and Democracy Forward GM Ginny Badanes discuss AI's impact on democracy, including Daepp and Ness's research into the tech's use in Taiwan and India.

NeurIPS 2024: The co-evolution of AI and systems with Lidong Zhou

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 17, 2024 17:36 Transcription Available


Just after his NeurIPS 2024 keynote on the co-evolution of systems and AI, Microsoft CVP Lidong Zhou joins the podcast to discuss how rapidly advancing AI impacts the systems supporting it and the opportunities to use AI to enhance systems engineering itself.Learn more:Verus: A Practical Foundation for Systems Verification | Publication, November 2024SuperBench: Improving Cloud AI Infrastructure Reliability with Proactive Validation | Publication, July 2024BitNet: Scaling 1-bit Transformers for Large Language Models | Publication, October 2023

NeurIPS 2024: AI for Science with Chris Bishop

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 13, 2024 21:49 Transcription Available


In this special edition of the podcast, Technical Fellow and Microsoft Research AI for Science Director Chris Bishop joins guest host Eliza Strickland in the Microsoft Booth at the 38th annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) in Vancouver, British Columbia, to talk about deep learning's potential to improve the speed and scale at which scientific advancements can be made.

Abstracts: NeurIPS 2024 with Jindong Wang and Steven Euijong Whang

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 13, 2024 11:34 Transcription Available


Researcher Jindong Wang and Associate Professor Steven Euijong Whang explore the NeurIPS 2024 work ERBench. ERBench leverages relational databases to create LLM benchmarks that can verify model rationale via keywords in addition to checking answer correctness. Read the paperGet datasets and codes

Abstracts: NeurIPS 2024 with Weizhu Chen 

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 6, 2024 8:27 Transcription Available


Next-token prediction trains a language model on all tokens in a sequence. VP Weizhu Chen discusses his team's 2024 NeurIPS paper on how distinguishing between useful and “noisy” tokens in pretraining can improve token efficiency and model performance.Read the paperGet the code

Abstracts: NeurIPS 2024 with Dylan Foster

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 6, 2024 10:42 Transcription Available


Can existing algorithms designed for simple reinforcement learning problems be used to solve more complex RL problems? Researcher Dylan Foster discusses the modular approach he and his coauthors explored in their 2024 NeurIPS paper on RL under latent dynamics.Read the paper

Abstracts: NeurIPS 2024 with Pranjal Chitale

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 6, 2024 10:45 Transcription Available


Pranjal Chitale discusses the '24 NeurIPS work CVQA. Spanning 31 languages and the cultures of 30 countries, this VQA benchmark was created with native speakers and cultural experts to evaluate model performance across diverse linguistic and cultural contexts.Read the paperGet the dataset

Ideas: Economics and computation with Nicole Immorlica

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 5, 2024 36:15 Transcription Available


When Senior Principal Research Manager Nicole Immorlica discovered she could use math to make the world a better place for people, she was all in. She discusses working in computer science theory and economics, including studying the impact of algorithms and AI on markets. 

Ideas: The journey to DNA data storage

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 19, 2024 42:39 Transcription Available


Research manager Karin Strauss and members of the DNA Data Storage Project reflect on the path to developing a synthetic DNA–based system for archival data storage, including the recent open-source release of its most powerful algorithm for DNA error correction.Get the Trellis BMA code: GitHub - microsoft/TrellisBMA: Trellis BMA: coded trace reconstruction on IDS channels for DNA storage

Abstracts: November 14, 2024

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 14, 2024 13:30 Transcription Available


The efficient simulation of molecules has the potential to change how the world understands biological systems and designs new drugs and biomaterials. Tong Wang discusses AI2BMD, an AI-based system designed to simulate large biomolecules with speed and accuracy.Read the paperGet the code

Collaborators: Prompt engineering with Siddharth Suri and David Holtz

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 11, 2024 55:26


Researcher Siddharth Suri and professor David Holtz give a brief history of prompt engineering, discuss the debate behind their recent collaboration, and share what they found from studying how people's approaches to prompting change as models advance.Learn more:As Generative Models Improve, People Adapt Their Prompts | Publication, July 2024AI, Cognition, and the Economy (AICE) | Initiative page

Abstracts: November 5, 2024

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 5, 2024 14:54 Transcription Available


In this episode, Microsoft senior principal researchers Chris Hawblitzel and Jay Lorch join host Amber Tingle to discuss “Verus: A Practical Foundation for Systems Verification,” which received the Distinguished Artifact Award at this year's Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, or SOSP. In their research, Hawblitzel, Lorch, and their coauthors leverage advances in programming languages and formal verification with two aims. The first aim is to help make software verification more accessible for systems developers so they can demonstrate their code will behave as intended. The second aim is to provide the research community with sound groundwork to tackle the application of formal verification to large, complex systems.Read the paper

Abstracts: November 4, 2024

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 4, 2024 Transcription Available


In their 2024 SOSP paper, researchers explore a common—though often undertested—software system issue: retry bugs. Research manager Shan Lu and PhD candidate Bogdan Stoica share how they're combining traditional program analysis and LLMs to address the challenge.Read the paper

Intern Insights: Vaishnavi Ranganathan with Angela Busheska

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 24, 2024


Every year, interns from academic institutions around the world apply and grow their knowledge as members of the research community at Microsoft. In this Microsoft Research Podcast series, these students join their internship supervisors to share their experience working alongside some of the leading researchers in their respective fields. In this episode, Angela Busheska, an undergraduate engineering student at Lafayette College, talks to Senior Researcher Vaishnavi Ranganathan, about her work on TerraTrace, a platform that brings together statistics and large language models to track land use over time for agricultural and forestry applications. Busheska discusses the personal loss that drew her to climate activism, the chain of events that led to a memorable face-to-face meeting with Microsoft's chief sustainability officer, and her advice for going after the internship you want and making the experience count.Learn more:TerraTrace | GitHub repoProject FarmVibes | Project homepageProject FoodVibes | Project homepage

Abstracts: September 30, 2024

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 30, 2024 18:55 Transcription Available


The personalizable object recognizer Find My Things was recently recognized for accessible design. Researcher Daniela Massiceti and software development engineer Martin Grayson talk about the research project's origins and the tech advances making it possible.The Find My Things story is an example of research at Microsoft enhancing Microsoft products and services. To try the Find My Things tool, download the free, publicly available Seeing AI app.Learn more:Find My Things: Personalized Accessibility through Teachable AI for People who are Blind or Low Vision | Publication, May 2024Understanding Personalized Accessibility through Teachable AI: Designing and Evaluating Find My Things for People who are Blind or Low Vision | Publication, October 2023Teachable AI Experiences (Tai X) | Project pagePeopleLens | Publication, June 2021ORBIT: A Real-World Few-Shot Dataset for Teachable Object Recognition | Publication, October 2021Collaborators: Teachable AI with Cecily Morrison and Karolina Pakėnaitė | Microsoft Research Podcast, December 2023

Collaborators: Silica in space with Richard Black and Dexter Greene

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 5, 2024 46:04 Transcription Available


College freshman Dexter Greene and Microsoft research manager Richard Black discuss how technology that stores data in glass is supporting students as they expand earlier efforts to communicate what it means to be human to extraterrestrials.Learn more:Avenues: The World School — Golden Record 2.0Project homepageGolden Record: OverviewNASA ScienceProject SilicaProject homepageSealed in glassMicrosoft Unlocked innovation story, 2023Optics for the cloud: storage in the zettabyte era with Dr. Ant Rowstron and Mark RussinovichMicrosoft Research Podcast, November 2019Project Silica proof of concept stores Warner Bros. ‘Superman' movie on quartz glassMicrosoft Source blog, November 2019

What's Your Story: Lex Story

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 22, 2024 31:00 Transcription Available


Model maker and fabricator Lex Story helps bring research to life through prototyping. He discusses his take on failure; the encouragement and advice that has supported his pursuit of art and science; and the sabbatical that might inspire his next career move.Learn more:Microsoft PremonitionProject EclipseProject PRISM3D TelemedicineJacdacAudio Devices

Abstracts: August 15, 2024

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 16, 2024 15:00 Transcription Available


In this episode, Microsoft Product Manager Shrey Jain and OpenAI Research Scientist Zoë Hitzig join host Amber Tingle to discuss “Personhood credentials: Artificial intelligence and the value of privacy-preserving tools to distinguish who is real online.” In their paper, Jain, Hitzig, and their coauthors describe how malicious actors can draw on increasingly advanced AI tools to carry out deception, making online deception harder to detect and more harmful. Bringing ideas from cryptography into AI policy conversations, they identify a possible mitigation: a credential that allows its holder to prove they're a person––not a bot––without sharing any identifying information. This exploratory research reflects a broad range of collaborators from across industry, academia, and the civil sector specializing in areas such as security, digital identity, advocacy, and policy.

Collaborators: AI and the economy with Brendan Lucier and Mert Demirer

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 8, 2024 49:24 Transcription Available


Researcher Brendan Lucier and professor Mert Demirer are applying their micro- and macroeconomic expertise, respectively, to forecasting the economic impact of AI. They share how they're using a task-level breakdown of occupations to help predict the future.Learn more:AI, Cognition, and the Economy (AICE) | Initiative pageIdeas: Designing AI for people with Abigail Sellen | Microsoft Research Podcast, May 2024

What's Your Story: Emre Kiciman

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 1, 2024 40:05 Transcription Available


Emre Kiciman shares how some keen observations and a desire to have front-end impact led him to make the jump from systems and networking to computational social science and now causal analysis and large-scale AI—and how systems thinking still impacts his work.Learn more:AI Controller Interface: Generative AI with a lightweight, LLM-integrated VM (blog)AICI: Prompts as (Wasm) Programs (GitHub)

Abstracts: July 29, 2024

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 29, 2024 8:24 Transcription Available


A lack of appropriate data, decreased model performance, and other obstacles have made it difficult to expand the input language models can receive. Li Lyna Zhang introduces LongRoPE, a method capable of extending content windows to more than 2 million tokens.Read the paperGet the code

Abstracts: July 18, 2024

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 18, 2024 12:10 Transcription Available


Senior Researcher Arindam Mitra introduces AgentInstruct. Using raw data sources, the automated multi-agent framework can create diverse, high-quality synthetic data at scale for the post-training of small and large language models.Read the paper

Collaborators: Sustainable electronics with Jake Smith and Aniruddh Vashisth

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 11, 2024 50:12


Printed circuit boards are abundant—in the stuff we use and in landfills. Researcher Jake Smith and professor Aniruddh Vashisth discuss the development of vitrimer-based PCBs that perform comparably to traditional PCBs but have less environmental impact.Learn more:Recyclable vitrimer-based printed circuit boards for sustainable electronics | Nature Sustainability, April 2024Microsoft Climate Research InitiativeMicrosoft Research AI for ScienceStoring digital data in synthetic DNA with Dr. Karin Strauss | Microsoft Research Podcast, October 2018

Ideas: Solving network management puzzles with Behnaz Arzani

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 13, 2024 43:39 Transcription Available


Behind every emerging technology is a great idea propelling it forward. In the new Microsoft Research Podcast series, Ideas, members of the research community at Microsoft discuss the beliefs that animate their research, the experiences and thinkers that inform it, and the positive human impact it targets. In this episode, host Gretchen Huizinga talks with Principal Researcher Behnaz Arzani. Arzani has always been attracted to hard problems, and there's no shortage of them in her field of choice—network management—where her contributions to heuristic analysis and incident diagnostics are helping the networks people use today run more smoothly. But the criteria she uses to determine whether a challenge deserves her time has evolved. These days, a problem must appeal across several dimensions: Does it answer a hard technical question? Would the solution be useful to people? And … would she enjoy solving it?Learn more:Solving Max-Min Fair Resource Allocations Quickly on Large Graphs | Publication, February 2024Finding Adversarial Inputs for Heuristics using Multi-level Optimization | Publication, February 2024MetaOpt: Examining, explaining, and improving heuristic performance | Microsoft Research blog, January 2024A Holistic View of AI-driven Network Incident Management | Publication, October 2023Behnaz Arzani: Painting, storytelling, and other hobbies | Microsoft Research bio page

What's Your Story: Weishung Liu

Play Episode Listen Later May 30, 2024 40:28 Transcription Available


Principal PM Manager Weishung Liu shares how a career delivering products and customer experiences aligns with her love of people and storytelling and how—despite efforts to defy the expectations that come with growing up in Silicon Valley—she landed in tech.Learn more:Weishung Liu at Microsoft ResearchWatch For | Project pageDeveloper Tech Minutes: Watch For | Video, 2021

Ideas: Designing AI for people with Abigail Sellen

Play Episode Listen Later May 23, 2024 47:55 Transcription Available


Behind every emerging technology is a great idea propelling it forward. In the new Microsoft Research Podcast series, Ideas, members of the research community at Microsoft discuss the beliefs that animate their research, the experiences and thinkers that inform it, and the positive human impact it targets.  In this episode, host Gretchen Huizinga talks with Distinguished Scientist and Lab Director Abigail Sellen. The idea that computers could be designed for people is commonplace today, but when Sellen was pursuing an advanced degree in psychology, it was a novel one that set her on course for a career in human-centric computing. Today, Sellen and the teams she oversees are studying how AI could—and should—be designed for people, focusing on helping to ensure new developments support people in growing the skills and qualities they value. Sellen explores those efforts through the AI, Cognition, and the Economy initiative—or AICE, for short—a collective of interdisciplinary scientists examining the short- and long-term effects of generative AI on human cognition, organizational structures, and the economy.Learn more:AI, Cognition, and the Economy (AICE) Responsible AI Principles and Approach | Microsoft AI  The Rise of the AI Co-Pilot: Lessons for Design from Aviation and Beyond The Myth of the Paperless Office

Abstracts: May 20, 2024

Play Episode Listen Later May 20, 2024 12:43 Transcription Available


Members of the research community at Microsoft work continuously to advance their respective fields. Abstracts brings its audience to the cutting edge with them through short, compelling conversations about new and noteworthy achievements. In this episode, Principal Research Manager Andrey Kolobov joins host Gretchen Huizinga to discuss “WindSeer: Real-time volumetric wind prediction over complex terrain aboard a small uncrewed aerial vehicle,” or sUAV. sUAVs can fly farther and more safely if they can reason about the terrain-affected wind in their vicinity. Traditional wind predictions ignore small-terrain features and work at the scale of hours and miles, far too coarsely for sUAVs. WindSeer can estimate the terrain-dependent wind field around an sUAV in flight, with limited onboard compute and measurement data, paving the way for safer and more energy-efficient autonomous drone operation.Learn more:WindSeer: Real-time volumetric wind prediction over complex terrain aboard a small uncrewed aerial vehicle

What's Your Story: Jacki O'Neill

Play Episode Listen Later May 16, 2024 35:52 Transcription Available


In the Microsoft Research Podcast series What's Your Story, Johannes Gehrke explores the who behind the technical and scientific advancements helping to reshape the world. A systems expert whose 10 years with Microsoft spans research and product, Gehrke talks to members of the company's research community about what motivates their work and how they got where they are today.In this episode, Gehrke is joined by Jacki O'Neill, director of Microsoft Research Africa (which started as the Microsoft Africa Research Institute, or MARI) in Nairobi, Kenya. O'Neill pitched the idea for the lab after seeing an opportunity to expand the Microsoft research portfolio. She shares how a desire to build tech that can have global societal impact and a familial connection to the continent factored into the decision; how degrees in psychology and computer science culminated in a career in human-computer interaction; and how a belief that life is meant to be exciting has allowed her to take big personal and professional swings.Learn more:Jacki O'Neill at Microsoft ResearchMicrosoft Research Africa (formerly MARI)

Abstracts: May 6, 2024

Play Episode Listen Later May 6, 2024 13:35 Transcription Available


Members of the research community at Microsoft work continuously to advance their respective fields. Abstracts brings its audience to the cutting edge with them through short, compelling conversations about new and noteworthy achievements.In this episode, Senior Principal Researcher Michel Galley joins host Gretchen Huizinga to discuss “MathVista: Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning of Foundation Models in Visual Contexts,” which was accepted at the 2024 International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR). MathVista, an open-source benchmark, combines new and existing data to measure how good models are at solving a variety of math problems that involve processing images as well as text, helping to gain insight into their reasoning capabilities.Read the paperGet the code

Ideas: Exploring AI frontiers with Rafah Hosn

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 25, 2024 38:56


Behind every emerging technology is a great idea propelling it forward. In the new Microsoft Research Podcast series, Ideas, members of the research community at Microsoft discuss the beliefs that animate their research, the experiences and thinkers that inform it, and the positive human impact it targets. In this episode, host Gretchen Huizinga talks with Rafah Hosn, partner group product manager for AI Frontiers at Microsoft Research. Hosn's professional experience spans the gamut—from research to product to engineering to research again, the discipline's uniquely high levels of creativity, curiosity, and intellect drawing her back in. Energized by past technical disruptions she's experienced, Hosn is on what she describes as her “most exciting adventure” yet, helping to drive scientific advancement in AI and to answer a big question: how far can we push machine intelligence while still delivering technologies people can derive value from? Learn more:AI Frontiers - Microsoft ResearchResponsible AI Principles and Approach | Microsoft AI

Abstracts: April 16, 2024

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 16, 2024 14:25 Transcription Available


Members of the research community at Microsoft work continuously to advance their respective fields. Abstracts brings its audience to the cutting edge with them through short, compelling conversations about new and noteworthy achievements.In this episode, Senior Research Software Engineer Tusher Chakraborty joins host Gretchen Huizinga to discuss “Spectrumize: Spectrum-efficient Satellite Networks for the Internet of Things,” which was accepted at the 2024 USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI). In the paper, Chakraborty and his coauthors share their efforts to address the challenges of delivering reliable and affordable IoT connectivity via satellite-based networks. They propose a method for leveraging the motion of small satellites to facilitate efficient communication between a large IoT-satellite constellation and devices on Earth within a limited spectrum.Read the paper

Ideas: Language technologies for everyone with Kalika Bali

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 11, 2024 47:28 Transcription Available


Behind every emerging technology is a great idea propelling it forward. In the new Microsoft Research Podcast series, Ideas, members of the research community at Microsoft discuss the beliefs that animate their research, the experiences and thinkers that inform it, and the positive human impact it targets. In this episode, host Gretchen Huizinga talks with Principal Researcher Kalika Bali. Inspired by an early vision of “talking computers” and a subsequent career in linguistics, Bali has spent the last two decades bringing the two together. Aided by recent advances in large language models and motivated by her belief that everyone should have access to AI in their own language, Bali and her teams are building language technology applications that they hope will bring the benefits of generative AI to under-resourced and underserved language communities around the world.Learn more:The State and Fate of Linguistic Diversity and Inclusion in the NLP World | Publication, July 2020Project VeLLM | Project pageKahani: Visual Storytelling | Project pageKahani: Visual Storytelling through Culturally Nuanced Images | Microsoft Research Forum | Episode 1, January 2024Teachers in India help Microsoft Research design AI tool for creating great classroom content | Microsoft Research blog, October 2023Digital Labor: Project Karya | Project pageVillage by village, creating the building blocks for AI tools with work that also educates | Microsoft Source Asia blog, February 2024

AI Frontiers: Rethinking intelligence with Ashley Llorens and Ida Momennejad

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 28, 2024 41:47 Transcription Available


Powerful large-scale AI models like GPT-4 are showing dramatic improvements in reasoning, problem-solving, and language capabilities. This marks a phase change for artificial intelligence—and a signal of accelerating progress to come.In this Microsoft Research Podcast series, AI scientist and engineer Ashley Llorens hosts conversations with his collaborators and colleagues about what these models—and the models that will come next—mean for our approach to creating, understanding, and deploying AI, its applications in areas such as health care and education, and its potential to benefit humanity.This episode features Principal Researcher Ida Momennejad. Momennejad is applying her expertise in cognitive neuroscience and computer science to better understand—and extend—AI capabilities, particularly when it comes to multistep reasoning and short- and long-term planning. Llorens and Momennejad discuss the notion of general intelligence in both humans and machines; how Momennejad and colleagues leveraged prior research into the cognition of people and rats to create prompts for evaluating large language models; and the case for the development of a “prefrontal cortex” for AI.Learn more:AI and Microsoft Research | Focus AreaEvaluating Cognitive Maps and Planning in Large Language Models with CogEval | Publication, October 2023Imitating Human Behaviour with Diffusion Models | Publication, May 2023Navigates Like Me: Understanding How People Evaluate Human-Like AI in Video Games | Publication, April 2023Navigation Turing Test (NTT): Learning to Evaluate Human-Like Navigation | Publication, July 2021Predictive Representations in Hippocampal and Prefrontal Hierarchies | Publication, January 2022The successor representation in human reinforcement learning | Publication, September 2017Encoding of Prospective Tasks in the Human Prefrontal Cortex under Varying Task Loads | Publication, October 2013

Abstracts: March 21, 2024

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 21, 2024 13:27 Transcription Available


Members of the research community at Microsoft work continuously to advance their respective fields. Abstracts brings its audience to the cutting edge with them through short, compelling conversations about new and noteworthy achievements. In this episode, Senior Researcher Chang Liu joins host Gretchen Huizinga to discuss Overcoming the Barrier of Orbital-Free Density Functional Theory for Molecular Systems Using Deep Learning.” In the paper, Liu and his coauthors present M-OFDFT, a variation of orbital-free density functional theory (OFDFT). M-OFDFT leverages deep learning to help identify molecular properties in a way that minimizes the tradeoff between accuracy and efficiency, work with the potential to benefit areas such as drug discovery and materials discovery.Read the paper

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