Human trafficking and labor exploitation are ancient problems that have evolved with each major leap in technology, from the agricultural revolution to the information age. But what if the right combination of people, data, and technology could help to tackle these problems on an unprecedented scale? With the emergence of generative AI models, which can create rich text and media from natural language prompts and real-world understanding, we are seeing new opportunities to advance the work of organizations that are […]

Earlier this year, we introduced GraphRAG (opens in new tab), a graph-based approach to retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) that enables question-answering over private or previously unseen datasets. Today, we’re pleased to announce that GraphRAG is now available on GitHub (opens in new tab), offering more structured information retrieval and comprehensive response generation than naive RAG approaches. The GraphRAG code repository is complemented by a solution accelerator (opens in new tab), providing an easy-to-use  

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 Towards Energy Efficient 5G vRAN Servers Virtualized radio access networks (vRANs), which run the cellular radio stack on commodity servers instead of specialized hardware, are increasingly used in modern cellular networks (e.g., 5G), owing to advantages such as a multi-vendor ecosystem, easier maintenance, and faster feature upgrades. In a recent  

In the intertwined worlds of psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and artificial intelligence, scientists continue to pursue the elusive goal of decoding and mimicking human and animal behavior. One of the most intriguing aspects of this research is the interplay between two types of behaviors: habitual and goal directed. Traditionally, these behaviors are believed  

Microsoft is proud to sponsor the 41st annual Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2024), held from June 17 to June 21. This premier conference covers a broad spectrum of topics in the field, including 3D reconstruction and modeling, action and motion analysis, video and image processing, synthetic data generation, neural networks, and many more. This year, 63 papers from Microsoft have been accepted, with six selected for oral presentations. This post highlights  

Multi-agent approaches to AI applications, where multiple foundation model-based agents collaborate to solve problems, are emerging as a powerful paradigm for accomplishing increasingly complex tasks. In September 2023, we released AutoGen – a flexible and open-source Python-based framework for defining, configuring, and composing AI agents to drive multi-agent applications. Today, we are introducing AutoGen Studio (version 0.1.0) – a low-code interface for rapidly building, testing, and sharing multi-agent solutions.  

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 RELEVANCE: Automatic evaluation framework for LLM responses Relevance in AI refers to the usefulness of information or actions to a specific task or query. It helps determine the accuracy, effectiveness, efficiency, and user satisfaction of content from search engines, chatbots, and other AI systems. RELEVANCE (Relevance and Entropy-based  

In the latest episode of Microsoft Research Forum, researchers explored the importance of globally inclusive and equitable AI, shared updates on AutoGen and MatterGen, presented novel use cases for AI, including industrial applications and the potential of multimodal models to improve assistive technologies.  Below is a brief recap of the event, including select quotes from the presentations. Full replays of each session and presentation will be available soon.  Jacki O’Neill, Lab Director, Microsoft  

The integration of AI and other computational technologies is becoming increasingly common in high-stakes sectors such as finance, healthcare, and government, where their capacity to influence critical decisions is growing. While these systems offer numerous benefits, they also introduce risks, such as entrenching systemic biases and reducing accountability. The ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM FaccT 2024) tackles these issues, bringing together experts from a wide range of disciplines who are committed to the responsible development of computational […]

When Storm Ciarán battered northwestern Europe in November 2023, it left a trail of destruction. The low-pressure system associated with Storm Ciarán set new records for England, marking it as an exceptionally rare meteorological event. The storm’s intensity caught many off guard, exposing the limitations of current weather-prediction models and highlighting the need for more accurate forecasting in the face of climate change. As communities grappled with the aftermath, the urgent question arose: How can we better anticipate and prepare […]