# Factors to Consider When Selecting a Health Insurance Plan During Open Enrollment for 2024  Selecting a health insurance plan during the open enrollment period can be a complex process, but understanding the key factors to consider can help individuals make informed decisions. Here are some important aspects to keep in mind:  ## Coverage and Networks  One of the primary considerations is the coverage network of the plan. Insurers form coverage networks of hospitals and doctors, and it is crucial to ensure that […]

Earlier this year, Microsoft Research announced (opens in new tab) its newest lab in Tokyo, Japan. Today, we are celebrating its grand opening, reinforcing Microsoft Research’s commitment to AI research across the Asia-Pacific region. This new lab will focus on embodied AI, well-being and neuroscience, societal AI, and industry innovation—all areas that align with Japan’s socioeconomic priorities. This initiative will enhance collaboration with local academic and industrial partners, contributing to global innovation and talent development.  We recently spoke with Yasuyuki […]

In cancer diagnosis or advanced treatments like immunotherapy, every detail in a medical image counts. Radiologists and pathologists rely on these images to track tumors, understand their boundaries, and analyze how they interact with surrounding cells. This work demands pinpoint accuracy across several tasks—identifying whether a tumor is present, locating it precisely, and mapping its contours on complex CT scans or pathology slides.  Yet, these crucial steps—object recognition, detection,  

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) allows AI systems to provide additional information and context to a large language model (LLM) when generating a response to a user query. However, traditional RAG-based methods  

Our work on Orca and Orca 2 demonstrated the power of using synthetic data for the post-training of small language models and getting them to levels of performance previously found only in much larger language models. Orca-AgentInstruct is another step in this direction, where we explore using agentic flows to generate diverse and high-quality data at scale. Orca-AgentInstruct is an agentic solution for synthetic-data generation. By leveraging an agentic framework, AgentInstruct can generate tailored datasets, comprising both prompts and responses, […]

Today, development of generalizable AI models requires access to sufficient data and compute resources, which may create challenges for some researchers. Democratizing access to technology across the research community can advance the development of generalizable AI models. By applying the core software development concept of modularity to AI, we can build models that are powerful, efficient, adaptable, and transparent.  Until recently, AI models were primarily built using monolithic architecture. Though powerful, these models can be challenging to customize and edit […]

Welcome to Research Focus, a series of blog posts that highlights notable publications, events, code/datasets, new hires and other milestones from across the research community at Microsoft. NEW RESEARCH Look Ma, no markers: holistic performance capture without the hassle Motion-capture technologies used in film and game production typically focus solely on face, body, or hand capture, requiring complex and expensive hardware and lots of manual intervention from skilled operators. While machine-learning-based  

[MUSIC FADES] Today I’m talking to Dr. Siddharth Suri, also known as Sid, who’s a computational social scientist and a senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research. With him is Dr. David Holtz, an assistant professor in the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. Sid and David are co-leading a team of researchers who are exploring the fascinating world of prompt engineering as part of the AI, Cognition, and the Economy, or AICE, initiative at Microsoft Research. […]

The essence of the biological world lies in the ever-changing nature of its molecules and their interactions. Understanding the dynamics and interactions of biomolecules is crucial for deciphering the mechanisms behind biological processes and for developing biomaterials and drugs. As Richard Feynman famously said, “Everything that living things do can be understood in terms of the jigglings and wigglings of atoms.” Yet capturing these real-life movements is nearly impossible through experiments.  In recent years, with the development of deep  

The rise of affordable small-scale renewable energy, like rooftop solar panels, is reshaping energy systems around the world. This shift away from fossil fuel-powered grids creates new opportunities for energy distribution that prioritize decentralized energy ownership and community empowerment. Despite this progress, centralized energy systems still dominate, often failing to provide vulnerable communities with reliable, affordable renewable energy. In response, Microsoft researchers are collaborating with local communities to explore how AI can enable community-scale energy solutions focused on energy