In the pursuit of learning about fundamentals of the natural world, scientists have had success with coming at discoveries from both a bottom-up and top-down approach. Neuroscience is a great example of the former. Spanish anatomist Santiago Ramón y Cajal discovered the neuron in the late 19th century. While scientists’ understanding of these building blocks of the brain has grown tremendously in the past century, much about how the brain works on the whole remains an enigma. In contrast, fluid […]

Race and Technology: A Research Lecture Series features 14 distinguished scholars and domain experts from a diverse range of research areas and disciplines. From top left: Dr. Sareeta Amrute, Dr. Kim TallBear, Dr. Charlton McIlwain, Dr. Ruha Benjamin, Dr. Lisa Nakamura, Dr. Simone Browne, and Dr. André Brock. From bottom  

Episode 129 | July 20, 2021 Unlocking the challenge of molecular simulation has the potential to yield significant breakthroughs in how we tackle such societal issues as climate change, drug discovery, and the treatment of disease, and Microsoft is ramping up its efforts in the space. In this episode, Chris Bishop, Lab Director of Microsoft Research Cambridge, welcomes renowned machine learning researcher

Editor’s note: In recent years, telecommunications operators have faced a growing challenge to meet surging global demand for immersive online services and collaboration tools. Upgrading their proprietary networks to prepare for 5G and beyond would require major capital expenditures, even  

Episode 128 | July 14, 2021 For Microsoft researchers, COVID-19 was a call to action. The reimagining of work practices had long been an area of study, but existing and new questions that needed immediate answers surfaced as companies and their employees quickly adjusted to significantly different working conditions. Teams from across the Microsoft organizational chart pooled their unique  

Episode 127 | July 7, 2021 For Microsoft researchers, COVID-19 was a call to action. The reimagining of work practices had long been an area of study, but existing and new questions that needed immediate answers surfaced as companies and their employees quickly adjusted to significantly different working conditions. Teams from across the Microsoft organizational chart pooled their unique  

Episode 126 | June 30, 2021 For Microsoft researchers, COVID-19 was a call to action. The reimagining of work practices had long been an area of study, but existing and new questions that needed immediate answers surfaced as companies and their employees quickly adjusted to significantly different working conditions. Teams from across the Microsoft organizational chart pooled their unique  

The ability to reason about causality, and ask “what would happen if…?’’ is one property that sets human intelligence apart from artificial intelligence. Modern AI algorithms perform well on clearly defined pattern recognition tasks but fall short generalizing in the ways that human intelligence can. This often leads to unsatisfactory results on tasks that require extrapolation from training examples, e.g., recognizing events or objects in contexts that are different from the training set. To address this problem, we have built […]

For many years AI researchers have sought to build upon traditional machine learning, which trains technology to process facts and learn from them, and develop machine reasoning, in which programs apply logic to data and solve problems – comparable to the way humans think. For a system to analyze multiple sets of logical arguments, it requires both critical thinking and combinatorial reasoning abilities. One of the current benchmarks for evaluating a system’s logical reasoning ability is ReClor, a Reading Comprehension […]

Episode 125 | June 24, 2021 For Microsoft researchers, COVID-19 was a call to action. The reimagining of work practices had long been an area of study, but existing and new questions that needed immediate answers surfaced as companies and their employees quickly adjusted to significantly different working conditions. Teams from across the Microsoft organizational chart pooled their unique expertise together under The New Future of Work initiative. The results have informed product features designed to better support remote