Microsoft Research Blog

Artifical intelligence

  1. Person looking at televisions for sale in a department store.

    Incentivizing information explorers (when they’d really rather exploit) 

    May 7, 2019

    Everyone is familiar by now with recommendation systems such as on Netflix for movies, Amazon for products, Yelp for restaurants and TripAdvisor for travel. Indeed, quality recommendations are a crucial part of the value provided by these businesses. Recommendation systems encourage users to share feedback…

  2. Minimizing gaps in information access on social networks while maximizing the spread 

    May 6, 2019 | Benjamin Fish

    Lots of important information, including job openings and other kinds of advertising, are often transmitted by word-of-mouth in online settings. For example, social networks like LinkedIn are increasingly used as a way of spreading information about job opportunities, which can greatly affect people’s career development.…

  3. Graphic showing different types of microphone arrays

    New Advancements in Spoken Language Processing 

    May 6, 2019 | Xuedong Huang

    Deep learning algorithms, supported by the availability of powerful Azure computing infrastructure and massive training data, constitutes the most significant driving force in our AI evolution journey. In the past three years, Microsoft reached several historical AI milestones being the first to achieve human parity…

  4. Person on computer with multiple screens

    Beyond spell checkers: Enhancing the editing process with deep learning 

    May 3, 2019 | Miltos Allamanis, Marc Brockschmidt, and Alex Gaunt

    “Here’s my conference paper—what do you think?” After hours of agonizing over words and illustrations, sharing a draft document is a moment of great pride. All too often, this is shortly followed by embarrassment when your colleague gets back to you with reams of edits.…

  5. mutual information maximization prediction

    Deep InfoMax: Learning good representations through mutual information maximization 

    May 1, 2019 | Devon Hjelm, Philip Bachman, and Adam Trischler

    As researchers continue to apply machine learning to more complex real-world problems, they’ll need to rely less on algorithms that require annotation. This is not only because labels are expensive, but also because supervised learners trained only to predict annotations tend not to generalize beyond…

  6. a man standing in front of a computer screen

    Toward Emotionally Intelligent Artificial Intelligence 

    April 30, 2019 | Daniel McDuff and Ashish Kapoor

    Recent successes in machine intelligence hinge on core computation ability to efficiently search through billions of possibilities in order to make decisions. Sequences of decisions, if successful, often suggest that perhaps computation is catching up to–or even surpassing–human intelligence. Human intelligence, on the other hand,…

  7. How to better design AI – from ideation to user perception and acceptance 

    April 26, 2019 | Mihaela Vorvoreanu, Saleema Amershi, Justin Cranshaw, and Shamsi Iqbal

    Designing artificial intelligence systems and features poses new challenges for user experience (UX) practitioners. Traditionally, UX designers rely on sketching and low-fidelity, fast prototyping to imagine and test their ideas. The usual design tools and techniques, however, can’t always meet the demands of designing AI-infused…

  8. Rapidly enabling autonomy at scale with simulation 

    April 8, 2019 | Ashish Kapoor

    Autonomous Systems have attracted a lot of attention as they promise to improve efficiency, reduce cost and most importantly take on tasks that are too dangerous for humans. However, building a real-world autonomous system that would operate safely at scale is a very difficult task.…

  9. a man sitting in front of a laptop

    Advancing Human-Centered AI 

    March 18, 2019 | Eric Horvitz

    We’re excited about the formal launch of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) on Monday, March 18th. We resonate with Fei-Fei Li, John Etchemendy, and other leaders at Stanford on the promise of taking an interdisciplinary approach to AI, on a pathway guided…