[MUSIC FADES]  My guest on this episode is Abigail Sellen, known by her friends and colleagues as Abi. A social scientist by training and an expert in human-computer interaction, Abi has a long list of accomplishments and honors, and she’s a fellow of many technical academies and societies. But today I’m talking to her in her role as distinguished scientist and lab director of Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK, where she oversees a diverse portfolio of research, some of which supports […]

ANDREY KOLOBOV: Thank you for having me! HUIZINGA: So let’s start with a sort of abstract of your abstract. In just a few sentences, tell us about the problem your research addresses and more importantly, why we should care about it.  KOLOBOV: Right, so the overarching goal of this work—and I have to thank my collaborators from ETH Zürich, without whom this work would have been impossible—so the overarching goal of our work was to give drones the ability to […]

GEHRKE: We just had a discussion maybe a couple of years ago, right, when you were just in transition to Africa. So it’s really great to have you here and both learn a little bit what’s happening there, but also to learn a bit more about your story. Where did you grow up, and how did you end up here at Microsoft? O’NEILL: Yeah, thanks for asking that. I’ve had a very, well, it’s definitely not been a straight road […]

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 Injecting New Knowledge into Large Language Models via Supervised Fine-Tuning  Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance in generating text similar to that created by people, proving to be a valuable asset across various applications. However, adapting these models to incorporate new, out-of-domain knowledge remains a challenge,