Episode 121 | May 19, 2021 In the world of economics, researchers at Microsoft are examining a range of complex systems—from those that impact the technologies we use to those that inform the laws and policies we create—through the lens of a social science that goes beyond the numbers to better understand people and society. In this episode, Dr. Hunt Allcott, Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research New England, talks with 

Understanding video is one of the most challenging problems in AI, and an important underlying requirement is learning multimodal representations that capture information about objects, actions, sounds, and their long-range statistical dependencies from audio-visual signals. Recently, transformers have been successful in vision-and-language tasks such as image captioning and visual question answering due to their ability to learn multimodal contextual representations. However, training multimodal transformers end-to-end is difficult because of the excessive memory requirement. In fact, most existing vision and language transformers […]

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 […]