This year I will be attending the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC), where I will be part of a panel discussion on the topic, “Will Artificial Intelligence Eliminate Accessibility Barriers?” (at noon on Wednesday, Sept. 26th). I’ve attended GHC three times in…
Speech recognition is something we humans do remarkably well, which includes our ability to understand speech even in noisy multi-talker environments. While our natural sophistication at this is something we take for granted, speech recognition researchers continue to pursue refinements and improvements on the frontiers…
Benefiting from a confluence of factors, such as service-oriented architecture, cloud computing, and Internet-of-Things (IoT), application program interfaces – APIs – are playing an increasingly important role in both the virtual and the physical world. For example, web services, such as those featuring weather, sports,…
For most of us, a call to emergency services is a rare act, or one thankfully that we’ve never had to take. Anyone having had to make that call often will, in a calmer future moment, reflect on what transpired during it – the quality…
The United States, along with much of the world, is in the midst of an economic transition from manual to intellectual labor. The changing nature of work, including the automation of labor, is an important issue facing society, with implications not only for our standard…
Imagine for a moment that you are blind and are navigating the web using a screen reader to hear websites rather than see them. Imagine that the article you have navigated to includes images. To understand the content and significance, you are relying on your…
Generating realistic images from a text description is a challenging task for a bot. A solution to this task has potential applications in the video game and image editing industries, among many others. Recently, researchers at Microsoft and elsewhere have been exploring ways to enable…
Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality each has distinct advantages when it comes to bringing digital capabilities into our everyday lives. Everything users see, including the environment and every object can be controlled and changed. This also means that what users see doesn’t necessarily mirror the…
The notion of an “uncanny valley” is well known in robotics[1]. This is when increasing the realism of a robot’s human-like appearance can lead to feelings of unease—or even revulsion—as a robot becomes more and more (but never quite fully) human-like[2]. While this uncanny valley…
At RSA Conference 2018, Microsoft announced Azure Sphere, previewing a unique new solution to help connect and secure the most populous category of computing today: the tens of billions of devices powered by microcontrollers (MCUs). Azure Sphere represents an opportunity for Microsoft and our partners…
Over the last decade, advances in machine learning coupled with the availability of large amounts of data have led to significant progress on long-standing AI challenges. In domains like computer vision, speech recognition, machine translation and image captioning, machines have reached and sometimes even exceeded…
It was a love of toys, a shared appreciation for the intrinsic beauty of physical objects and a recognition of their absence in the daily computer interactions of a world that currently spends most of its time gazing at and touching two-dimensional glass that propelled…
