Quiz: Namespaces and Scope in Python

Interactive Quiz ⋅ 11 QuestionsBy Martin Breuss Share In this quiz, you’ll test your understanding of Python Namespaces and Scope. You’ll revisit how Python organizes symbolic names and objects in namespaces, when Python creates a new namespace, how namespaces are implemented, and how variable scope determines symbolic name visibility. The quiz contains 11 questions and there is no time limit. You’ll get 1 point for each correct answer. At the end of the quiz, you’ll receive a total score. The […]

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Quiz: Basic Input and Output in Python

Interactive Quiz ⋅ 5 QuestionsBy Martin Breuss Share In this quiz, you’ll test your understanding of how to use Python’s built-in functions input() and print() for basic input and output operations. You’ll also revisit how to use readline to improve the user experience when collecting input, and how to format output using the sep and end keyword arguments of print(). The quiz contains 5 questions and there is no time limit. You’ll get 1 point for each correct answer. At […]

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Orca-AgentInstruct: Agentic flows can be effective synthetic-data generators

Our work on Orca and Orca 2 demonstrated the power of using synthetic data for the post-training of small language models and getting them to levels of performance previously found only in much larger language models. Orca-AgentInstruct is another step in this direction, where we explore using agentic flows to generate diverse and high-quality data at scale. Orca-AgentInstruct is an agentic solution for synthetic-data generation. By leveraging an agentic framework, AgentInstruct can generate tailored datasets, comprising both prompts and responses, […]

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Abstracts: November 14, 2024

TONG WANG: Thank you, Bonnie. KRUFT: Microsoft Research is one of the earliest institutions to apply AI in biomolecular simulation research. Why did the AI for Science team choose this direction, and—with this work specifically, AI2BMD—what problem are you and your coauthors addressing, and why should people know about it? WANG: So as Richard Feynman famously said, “Everything that living things do can be understood in terms of the jigglings and the wigglings of atoms.” To study the mechanisms behind […]

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Using portable SIMD in stable Rust

In a previous post we saw that you can speed up code significantly on a single core using SIMD: Single Instruction Multiple Data. These specialized CPU instructions allow you to, for example, add 4 values at once with a single instruction, instead of the usual one value at a time. The performance improvement you get compounds with multi-core parallelism: you can benefit from both SIMD and threading at the same time. Unfortunately, SIMD instructions are specific both to CPU architecture […]

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Python Dictionary Comprehensions: How and When to Use Them

Dictionary comprehensions are a concise and quick way to create, transform, and filter dictionaries in Python. They can significantly enhance your code’s conciseness and readability compared to using regular for loops to process your dictionaries. Understanding dictionary comprehensions is crucial for you as a Python developer because they’re a Pythonic tool for dictionary manipulation and can be a valuable addition to your programming toolkit. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to: Create dictionaries using dictionary comprehensions Transform existing dictionaries with […]

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Toward modular models: Collaborative AI development enables model accountability and continuous learning

Today, development of generalizable AI models requires access to sufficient data and compute resources, which may create challenges for some researchers. Democratizing access to technology across the research community can advance the development of generalizable AI models. By applying the core software development concept of modularity to AI, we can build models that are powerful, efficient, adaptable, and transparent.  Until recently, AI models were primarily built using monolithic architecture. Though powerful, these models can be challenging to customize and edit […]

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Research Focus: Week of November 11, 2024

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 Look Ma, no markers: holistic performance capture without the hassle Motion-capture technologies used in film and game production typically focus solely on face, body, or hand capture, requiring complex and expensive hardware and lots of manual intervention from skilled operators. While machine-learning-based  

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Formatting Floats Inside Python F-Strings

You’ll often need to format and round a Python float to display the results of your calculations neatly within strings. In earlier versions of Python, this was a messy thing to do because you needed to round your numbers first and then use either string concatenation or the old string formatting technique to do this for you. Since Python 3.6, the literal string interpolation, more commonly known as a formatted string literal or f-string, allows you to customize the content […]

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