Microsoft Research Podcast

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 decep...

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 page Ideas: Designing AI for people with Abigail Sellen | Microsoft Research P...

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...

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 paper Get the code

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

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 2024 Microsoft Climate Re...

Behnaz Arzani loves hard problems and the freedom to explore. That makes research a great fit! She discusses her work in network management, including the potential role of LLMs in the field; the challenges that excite her; and how storytelling changed her life. Learn more: Solving Max-Min Fair Resource Allocations Quickly on Large Graphs | Publication, February 2024 Finding Adversarial Inputs for...

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 Research Watch For | Project page Developer Tech Minutes: Watch For | Video, 2021

Social scientist and HCI expert Abigail Sellen explores the critical understanding needed to build human-centric AI through the lens of the new AICE initiative, a collective of interdisciplinary researchers studying AI impact on human cognition 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:...

Andrey Kolobov discusses WindSeer, a small CNN capable of estimating the wind field around an sUAV in flight more finely and with less compute and data than traditional models. The advancement can help support longer and safer autonomous flights. Learn more: WindSeer: Real-time volumetric wind prediction over complex terrain aboard a small uncrewed aerial vehicle

Jacki O'Neill saw an opportunity to expand Microsoft research efforts to Africa. She now leads Microsoft Research Africa, Nairobi (formerly MARI). O'Neill talks about the choices that got her there, the lab’s impact, and how living abroad is good for innovation.  Learn more: Jacki O'Neill at Microsoft Research Microsoft Research Africa (formerly MARI)

Researcher Michel Galley explores how he and fellow researchers combined new and existing data to create MathVista, an open-source benchmark for measuring the mathematical reasoning capabilities of foundation models in scenarios that involve text and images. Read the paper Get the code & dataset

Energized by disruption, partner group product manager Rafah Hosn is helping to drive scientific advancement in AI for Microsoft. She talks about the mindset needed to work at the frontiers of AI and how the research-to-product pipeline is changing in the GenAI era. Learn more: AI Frontiers - Microsoft Research Responsible AI Principles and Approach | Microsoft AI

Tusher Chakraborty talks about the paper “Spectrumize: Spectrum-efficient Satellite Networks for the Internet of Things,” including a method for supporting communication between a large IoT-satellite constellation and devices on Earth within a limited spectrum. Read the paper

The new series “Ideas” debuts with guest Kalika Bali. The speech and language tech researcher talks sci-fi and its impact on her career, the design thinking philosophy behind her research, and the “outrageous idea” she had to work with low-resource languages.  Learn more: The State and Fate of Linguistic Diversity and Inclusion in the NLP World | Publication, July 2020 Project VeLLM | Project page...

Principal Researcher Ida Momennejad brings her expertise in cognitive neuroscience and computer science to this in-depth conversation about general intelligence and what the evolution of the brain across species can teach us about building AI. Learn more: AI and Microsoft Research | Focus Area Evaluating Cognitive Maps and Planning in Large Language Models with CogEval | Publication, October 2023...

Senior Researcher Chang Liu discusses M-OFDFT, a variation of orbital-free density functional theory (OFDFT) that leverages deep learning to help identify molecular properties in a way that minimizes the tradeoff between accuracy and efficiency.  Read the paper

Can how we think about our thinking help us better incorporate generative AI in our lives & work? Explore metacognition’s potential to improve the tech’s usability on “Abstracts,” then sign up for Microsoft Research Forum for more on this & other AI work. Read the paper

Partner Research Manager and developer experience expert Nicole Forsgren talks about the future of software engineering with AI, why she loves tech, and her reliance on a spreadsheet and her gut when making career-changing decisions. Learn more: Nicole Forsgren at Microsoft Research Nicole Forsgren website Quantifying the impact of developer experience | Microsoft Azure Blog, January 2024 Yes, goo...

Partner Software Architect Ivan Tashev talks about applying his expertise in audio signal processing to the design and study of audio components for Microsoft products such as Kinect and shares how a focus on what he can control has fueled professional success. Learn more: Ivan Tashev at Microsoft Research Distributed Meetings: A Meeting Capture and Broadcasting System  | Publication, December 200...

On “Abstracts,” Jordan Ash & Dipendra Misra discuss the parameter reduction method LASER. Tune in to learn how selective removal of stored data alone can boost LLM performance, then sign up for Microsoft Research Forum for more on LASER & related topics. Learn more: The Truth is in There: Improving Reasoning in Language Models with Layer-Selective Rank Reduction | Publication, December 202...

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...

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 Research Manager Tao Qin and Senior Researcher Lijun Wu discuss “FABind: Fast and Accurate Protein-Ligand Binding.” The paper...

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 Researcher Alessandro Sordoni joins host Gretchen Huizinga to discuss “ Joint Prompt Optimization of Stacked LLMs using Variational I...

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, Xing Xie , a Senior Principal Research Manager of Microsoft Research Asia, joins host Dr. Gretchen Huizinga to discuss “Evaluating General-Purp...