Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, some truths about the nature of work have been underscored: it is uniquely complex, quickly shifting, and increasingly technology-mediated. Teaching, medicine, mental health, and other professions—previously thought to be near-impossible to do remotely—have all abruptly moved to online and hybrid mediums. All kinds of workers have needed to find new and creative ways to do their jobs. For many, the boundary between office and home have become a thin, blurred line. These changes […]

While many of us think of human-computer interaction as a job for the eyes, ears and mind, we don’t think as often about the importance and complexity of our tactile interactions with computers. Haptics – the sense of touch or tactile sensations – permeates our computing experience, though we are often so habituated to it that it goes unnoticed. Consider the feeling of resistance and key travel that moderates your typing speed and confirms that your key presses are working, […]

While many of us think of human-computer interaction as a job for the eyes, ears and mind, we don’t think as often about the importance and complexity of our tactile interactions with computers. Haptics – the sense of touch or tactile sensations – permeates our computing experience, though we are often so habituated to it that it goes unnoticed. Consider the feeling of resistance and key travel that moderates your typing speed and confirms that your key presses are working, […]

Editor’s Note: Bimanual controllers are frequently used to enhance the realism and immersion of virtual reality experiences such as games and simulations. Researchers have typically relied on mechanical linkages between the controllers to recreate the sensation of holding different objects with both hands. However, those linkages cannot quickly adapt to simulate dynamic objects. They also make for bulky controllers that can’t be disconnected to support free, independent movements. This is the problem that researchers seek to solve in the recent […]

Episode 120 | May 5, 2021  Today, people around the globe—from teachers to small-business owners to finance executives—use Microsoft Excel to make sense of the information that occupies their respective worlds, and whether they realize it or not, in doing so, they’re taking on the role of programmer.  In this episode, Senior Principal Research Manager Andy Gordon, who leads the Calc  

One key aspiration of AI is to develop natural and effective task-oriented conversational systems. Task-oriented conversational systems use a natural language interface to collaborate with and support people in accomplishing specific goals and activities. They go beyond chitchat conversation. For example, as personal digital assistants, they ease the stress of trip planning or reduce the expertise required to generate a sales report from a database. While natural language understanding (NLU) technology and research have achieved remarkable recent progress, task-oriented assistance […]

Project Alexandria is a research project within Microsoft Research Cambridge dedicated to discovering entities, or topics of information, and their associated properties from unstructured documents. This research lab has studied knowledge mining research for over a decade, using the probabilistic programming framework Infer.NET. Project Alexandria was established seven years ago to build on Infer.NET and retrieve facts, schemas, and entities from unstructured data sources while adhering to Microsoft’s robust privacy standards. The goal of the project is to construct a […]

Since the DeepSpeed optimization library was introduced last year, it has rolled out numerous novel optimizations for training large AI models—improving scale, speed, cost, and usability. As large models have quickly evolved over the last year, so too has DeepSpeed. Whether enabling researchers to create the 17-billion-parameter Microsoft Turing Natural Language Generation (Turing-NLG) with state-of-the-art accuracy, achieving the fastest BERT training record, or supporting 10x larger model training using a single GPU, DeepSpeed continues to tackle challenges in AI at […]

Many of our online activities, from receiving and sending emails to searching for information to streaming movies, are driven behind the scenes by cloud-based distributed architectures, and writing concurrent software—programs with multiple logical threads of execution—is of paramount importance to scale these growing computing needs. Writing correct concurrent software is challenging. Unit, integration, and even stress testing don’t provide reasonable guarantees about the correctness of a concurrent program. Thus, insidious defects can remain latent in software until the late stages […]