SHAN LU: Thank you. HUIZINGA: So I like to start these episodes with what I’ve been calling the “research origin story,” and you have a unique, almost counterintuitive, story about what got you started in the field of systems research. Would you share that story with our listeners? LU: Sure, sure. Yeah. I grew up fascinating that I will become mathematician. I think I was good at math, and at some point, actually, until, I think, I entered college, I […]

[MUSIC FADES]  I’m your guest host, Lindsay Kalter. Today I’m talking to Microsoft Principal Research Manager Tian Xie and Microsoft Principal Researcher Ziheng Lu. Tian is doing fascinating work with MatterGen, an AI tool for generating new materials guided by specific design requirements. Ziheng is one of the visionaries behind MatterSim, which puts those new materials to the test through advanced simulations. Together, they’re redefining what’s possible in materials science. Tian and Ziheng, welcome to the podcast.  TIAN XIE: Very […]

Materials innovation is one of the key drivers of major technological breakthroughs. The discovery of lithium cobalt oxide in the 1980s laid the groundwork for today’s lithium-ion battery technology. It now powers modern mobile phones and electric cars, impacting the daily lives of billions of people. Materials innovation is also required for designing more efficient solar cells, cheaper batteries for grid-level energy storage,  

Over the past year, our work on AutoGen has highlighted the transformative potential of agentic AI and multi-agent applications. Today, we are excited to announce AutoGen v0.4, a significant milestone informed by insights from our community of users and developers. This update represents a complete redesign of the AutoGen library, developed to improve code quality, robustness, generality,  

In our increasingly complex digital landscape, enterprises and cloud providers face significant challenges in the development, deployment, and maintenance of sophisticated IT applications. The broad adoption of microservices and cloud-based serverless architecture has streamlined certain aspects of application development while simultaneously introducing a host of operational difficulties, particularly in fault diagnosis and mitigation. These complexities can result in outages, which have the potential to cause major business disruptions, underscoring the critical need for robust solutions that ensure high availability and […]

[MUSIC FADES] I’m your guest host, Ginny Badanes, and I lead Microsoft’s Democracy Forward program, where we’ve spent the past year deeply engaged in supporting democratic elections around the world, including the recent US elections. We have been working on everything from raising awareness of nation-state propaganda efforts to helping campaigns and election officials prepare for deepfakes to protecting political campaigns from cyberattacks. Today, I’m joined by two researchers who have also been diving deep into the impact of generative […]

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 NeoMem: Hardware/Software Co-Design for CXL-Native Memory Tiering The Compute Express Link (CXL) open standard interconnect enables integration of diverse types of memory into servers via its byte-addressable SerDes links. To fully utilize CXL-based heterogeneous memory systems (which combine different types of  

The challenge of effective prompting AI is reshaping industries—from education to healthcare—thanks to advancements in large language models (LLMs). These models rely on prompts, carefully crafted inputs that guide them to produce relevant and meaningful outputs. While the impact of prompts is profound, creating prompts that can help with complex tasks is a time-intensive and expertise-heavy  

JINDONG WANG: Thank you. Nice to be here. STEVEN EUIJONG WHANG: It’s great to be here. HUIZINGA: So, Jindong, I’ll start with you. In just a few sentences, tell us what problem your research addresses and why people should care about it. JINDONG WANG: OK, everybody knows that with the widespread usage of large language models, hallucination has become a crucial factor of concern. Hallucination occurs when models generate false or nonexistent information. In particular, factual hallucination greatly undermines the […]

WEIZHU CHEN: Thank you for having me, Amber.  TINGLE: So let’s start with a brief overview of your paper. In a couple sentences, tell us about the problem your research addresses and, more importantly, why the research community and beyond should know about this work.  CHEN: So my team basically in Microsoft GenAI, we are working on model training. So one of the things actually we do in the pretraining, we realize the importance of the data. And we found […]