The cucumber plants, their leaves wide and green and veiny, stood tall in neat rows, basking in the Netherland sunlight shining through the glass panes of their greenhouses. Hopes were high for the plants—a bountiful crop in just four months using as few resources as…
This week, Microsoft Research threw down the gauntlet with the launch of a competition challenging researchers around the world to develop AI agents that can solve text-based games. Conceived by the Machine Reading Comprehension team at Microsoft Research Montreal, the competition—First TextWorld Problems: A Reinforcement…
One empirical finding in deep learning is that simple methods such as stochastic gradient descent (SGD) have a remarkable ability to fit training data. From a capacity perspective, this may not be surprising— modern neural networks are heavily over-parameterized, with the number of parameters much…
Teaching is super important. From an individual perspective, a student learning on his or her own is never ideal; a student needs a teacher's guidance and perspective to be more effectively educated. Taking the societal perspective, teaching enables civilization to be passed on to the…
Microsoft Research’s Natural Language Processing group has set an ambitious goal for itself: to create a neural model that can engage in the full scope of conversational capabilities, providing answers to requests while also bringing the value of additional information relevant to the exchange and—in…
Chatbots come in many flavors, but most can be placed in one of two categories: goal-oriented chatbots and chit-chat chatbots. Goal-oriented chatbots behave like a natural language interface for function calls, where the chatbot asks for and confirms all required parameter values and then executes…
If you’re a deep learning practitioner, you may find yourself faced with the same critical question on a regular basis: Which neural network architecture should I choose for my current task? The decision depends on a variety of factors and the answers to a number…
In 1928, Alexander Fleming accidentally let his petri dishes go moldy, a mistake that would lead to the breakthrough discovery of penicillin and save the lives of countless people. From these haphazard beginnings, the pharmaceutical industry has grown into one of the most technically advanced…
With the latest Project Malmo competition, we’re calling on researchers and engineers to test the limits of their thinking as it pertains to artificial intelligence, particularly multi-task, multi-agent reinforcement learning. Last week, a group of attendees at the 14th Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive…
At Microsoft, we have a vision and passion to bring artificial intelligence solutions to real-world systems using the power of simulation. We continually strive to accelerate AI advances with the use of realistic simulators, tools, and environments. Today we are excited to announce AirSim availability…
Communication is a large part of who we are as human beings, and today, technology has allowed us to communicate in new ways and to audiences much larger and wider than ever before. That technology has assumed single-language speech, which — quite often — does…
Artificial intelligence has made tremendous strides in recent years, but oftentimes, its potential to help tackle some of the world’s most pressing issues is overshadowed by concerns and misunderstandings surrounding this growing technology. To focus on AI’s potential for enabling social good, Microsoft Research India,…
