Research Focus: Week of March 4, 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 Generative Kaleidoscopic Networks Neural networks are deep learning models that can be trained to learn complex patterns and relationships within data. In a recent paper: Generative Kaleidoscopic Networks, researchers from Microsoft detail how they discovered an “over-generalization” phenomenon, which indicates that the neural networks tend to  

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Creating Asynchronous Tasks With Celery and Django

You’ve built a shiny Django app and want to release it to the public, but you’re worried about time-intensive tasks that are part of your app’s workflow. You don’t want your users to have a negative experience navigating your app. You can integrate Celery to help with that. Celery is a distributed task queue for UNIX systems. It allows you to offload work from your Python app. Once you integrate Celery into your app, you can send time-intensive tasks to […]

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Orca-Math: Demonstrating the potential of SLMs with model specialization

Our work on Orca and Orca 2 demonstrated the power of improved training signals and methods to enhance the reasoning abilities of smaller language models, getting closer to the levels found in much larger language models. Orca-Math is another step in this direction, where we explore the capabilities of small language models (SLMs) when specialized in a certain area, in this case solving grade school math problems, which has long been recognized as a complex task for SLMs. Orca-Math  

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Python’s __all__: Packages, Modules, and Wildcard Imports

Python has something called wildcard imports, which look like from module import *. This type of import allows you to quickly get all the objects from a module into your namespace. However, using this import on a package can be confusing because it’s not clear what you want to import: subpackages, modules, objects? Python has the __all__ variable to work around this issue. The __all__ variable is a list of strings where each string represents the name of a variable, […]

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Jevons Paradox doesn’t always apply to software

When it comes to fighting climate change, I strongly believe that getting involved in politics is one of the most useful things you can do. But given how energy-intensive software is these days, writing more efficient software also seems worth doing, especially if your software is used at scale. However, whenever efficiency is brought up, Jevons Paradox rears its head. Writing in the 19th century, Jevons pointed out that increased efficiency in the use of coal didn’t decrease the amount […]

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Spotting the Exception: Classical Methods for Outlier Detection in Data Science

Outliers are unique in that they often don’t play by the rules. These data points, which significantly differ from the rest, can skew your analyses and make your predictive models less accurate. Although detecting outliers is critical, there is no universally agreed-upon method for doing so. While some advanced techniques like machine learning offer solutions, in this post, we will focus on the foundational Data Science methods that have been in use for decades. Let’s get started. Spotting the Exception: […]

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Abstracts: February 29, 2024

LEV TANKELEVITCH: Thanks for having me.  HUIZINGA: So in just a couple sentences—a metacognitive elevator pitch, if you will—tell us about the issue or problem your paper addresses and, more importantly, why we should care about it.  TANKELEVITCH: Sure. So as generative AI has, sort of, rolled out over the last year or two, we’ve seen some user studies come out, and as we read these studies, we noticed there are a lot of challenges that people face with these […]

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Python’s Requests Library (Guide)

Watch Now This tutorial has a related video course created by the Real Python team. Watch it together with the written tutorial to deepen your understanding: Making HTTP Requests With Python The Requests library is the de facto standard for making HTTP requests in Python. It abstracts the complexities of making requests behind a beautiful, simple API so that you can focus on interacting with services and consuming data in your application. Throughout this tutorial, you’ll see some of the […]

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Python Basics Exercises: Installing Packages With pip

So far on the Python Basics learning path, you’ve been working within the bounds of the Python standard library. Now it’s time to unlock packages that aren’t included with Python by default. To do that, you’ll need pip. Many programming languages offer a package manager that automates the process of installing, upgrading, and removing third-party packages. Python is no exception. The de facto package manager for Python is called pip. In this Python Basics Exercises course, you’ll test and reinforce […]

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