News & features
In the news | Forward Future
Future Forward Live – AOC, Part 1
Francesca Parmigiani, Principal Research Manager at Microsoft Research Cambridge (@MSFTResearch), on the moment her team realized they were onto something big. “We ran a small version of these banking problems on the actual hardware and saw great accuracy. That was…
In the news | Forward Future
Future Forward Live – AOC, Part 2
What does an analog optical computer do? Francesca Parmigiani, Principal Research Manager at Microsoft Research Cambridge (@Microsoft), has the answer. “When you start learning a new programming language, you begin with a ‘Hello World.’ For us, that meant recognizing handwritten…
In the news | IBM Think
Computing with light offers two paths forward for AI
Light is edging into roles once reserved for electricity in computing. As researchers race to ease the growing energy and performance strain that AI puts on data centers, some are experimenting with using photons instead of electrons to process information, an…
In the news | Microsoft Source
Microsoft’s analog optical computer cracks two practical problems and shows AI promise
A small Microsoft Research team had lofty goals when it set out four years ago to create an analog optical computer that would use light as a medium for solving complex problems. From the beginning, they wanted to build it using…
In the news | Microsoft Build 2025
Inside Azure innovations with Mark Russinovich
Join Mark Russinovich, CTO, Deputy CISO, Technical Fellow of Microsoft Azure. Mark will take you on a tour of the latest innovations in Azure architecture and explain how Azure enables intelligent, modern, and innovative applications at scale in the cloud,…
In the news | IEEE Spectrum
Microsoft’s Muse AI Edits Video Games on the Fly: Muse is a proof of concept for more consistent AI gameplay
“They have trained what’s essentially a neural game engine that has unprecedented temporal coherence and fidelity,” says Julian Togelius, an associate professor of computer science at New York University and co-founder of AI game testing company Modl.ai. “That has wide…
In the news | Science News Explores
High-speed lasers write data — to last millennia — inside glass
The library, robot, laser, microscope and platters of glass are all part of a research program named Project Silica. Richard Black directs this project at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England. “Project Silica is a new approach to storing data,” he…
In the news | Science News Explores
A new frontier awaits — computing with light
In the guts of a new type of computer, a bunch of tiny LEDs emit a green glow. Those lights have a job to do. They’re performing calculations. Right now, this math is telling the computer how to identify handwritten…
In the news | Windows Experience Blog
Phi Silica, small but mighty on-device SLM
Today we will share how the Applied Sciences team used a multi-interdisciplinary approach to achieve a breakthrough in power efficiency, inference speed and memory efficiency for a state-of-the-art small language model (SLM), Phi Silica.