AI is taking on an increasingly important role in many Microsoft products, such as Bing and Office 365. In some cases, it’s being used to power outward-facing features like semantic search in Microsoft Word or intelligent answers in Bing, and deep neural networks (DNNs) are one key to powering these features. One aspect of DNNs is inference—once these networks are trained, they use inference to make judgments about unknown information based on prior learning. In Bing, for example, DNN inference […]

When you reach out an empty hand to pick an apple from a tree, you’re met with a variety of sensations—the firmness of the apple as you grip it, the resistance from the branch as you tug the apple free, the weight of the apple in your palm once you’ve plucked it, and the smooth, round surface under your fingertips. In recent years, steady progress in haptic controllers from Microsoft Research has moved us toward a virtual reality (VR) experience […]