I’m delighted to be back in the booth today with Haiyan Zhang. When we last talked, Haiyan was Director of Innovation at Microsoft Research Cambridge in the UK and Technical Advisor to Lab Director Chris Bishop. In 2020, she moved across the pond and into the role of Chief of Staff for Microsoft Gaming. Now she’s the General Manager of Gaming AI at Xbox, and I normally say, let’s meet our collaborators right now, but today, we’ll be exploring several […]

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. In this article NEW RESEARCH RetroRanker: leveraging reaction changes to improve retrosynthesis prediction through re-ranking Retrosynthesis is an important task in organic chemistry. It’s designed to propose a list  

This research was accepted by and received a Best Paper Award during ACM Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) 2023, which is dedicated to advancing the field of user-centered system design. Headphones are traditionally used to provide and manage audio experiences through physical controls and a range of sensors. Nonetheless, these controls and sensors have remained confined to audio input and output functionality, such as adjusting the volume or muting the microphone. Imagine if headphones could transcend their role as mere audio […]

This research paper was accepted by the 50th EATCS International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming (ICALP 2023), which is dedicated to advancing the field of theoretical computer science. In the rapidly evolving landscape of cloud computing, escalating demand  

This research paper was accepted by 2023 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC), which is dedicated to advancing the field of systems research. Whether they’re personal computers or cloud instances, it’s crucial to ensure that the computer systems people use every day are reliable and secure. The validity of these systems is critical because if storage devices containing important executables and data become invalid, the entire system is affected. Numerous events can jeopardize the validity of computer systems or the data […]

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. In this article NEW RESEARCH The Best of Both Worlds: Unlocking the Potential of Hybrid Work for Software Engineers The era of hybrid work has created new challenges and opportunities  

Structure prediction is a fundamental problem in molecular science because the structure of a molecule determines its properties and functions. In recent years, deep learning methods have made remarkable progress and impact on predicting molecular structures, especially for protein molecules. Deep learning methods, such as AlphaFold and RoseTTAFold, have achieved unprecedented accuracy in predicting the most probable structures for proteins from their amino acid sequences and have been hailed as a game changer in molecular science. However, this method provides […]

On this episode, I’m talking to Dr. Spencer Fowers, a Principal Member of the Technical Staff at Microsoft Research, and Dr. Kwame Darko, a plastic surgeon at the National Reconstructive Plastic Surgery and Burns Centre at the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital in Accra, Ghana. Spencer and Kwame are working on 3D telemedicine, a project they hope will increase access to specialized healthcare in rural and underserved communities by using live 3D communication, or Holoportation. We’ll learn much more about that […]