Episode 68, March 20, 2019 - Today, Dr. Raghuvanshi talks about the unique challenges of simulating realistic sound on a budget (both money and CPU), explains how classic ideas in concert hall acoustics need a fresh take for complex games like Gears of War, reveals…
Episode 67, March 13, 2019 - Today, Dr. Phillips talks about the challenges and rewards inherent in reverse engineering biological systems to see how they perform information processing. He also explains what we can learn from stressed out bacteria, and tells us about Station B,…
Episode 65, February 27, 2019 - Dr. Josh Benaloh gives us a brief but fascinating history of elections, explains how the trade-offs among privacy, security and verifiability make the relatively easy math of elections such a hard problem for the internet, and tells the story…
Episode 64, February 20, 2019 - Dr. Layla El Asri talks about the particular challenges she and other scientists face in building sophisticated dialogue systems that lay the foundation for talking machines. She also explains how reinforcement learning, in the form of a text game…
Episode 63, February 13, 2019 - Dr. Varma tells us all about extreme classification (including where in the world you might actually run into 10 or 100 million options), reveals how his Parabel and Slice algorithms are making high quality recommendations in milliseconds, and proves,…
Episode 62, February 6, 2019 - Haiyan talks about her unique “brain hack” approach to the human-centered design process, and discusses a wide range of projects, from the connected play experience of Zanzibar, to Fizzyo, which turns laborious breathing exercises for children with cystic fibrosis…
Episode 61, January 30, 2019 - Dr. Rico Malvar recalls his early years at a fledgling Microsoft Research, talks about the exciting work he oversees now, explains why designing with the user is as important as designing for the user, and tells us how a…
Episode 60, January 23, 2019 - Dr. Morrison gives us an overview of what she calls the “pillars” of inclusive design, shares how her research is positively impacting people with health issues and disabilities, and tells us how having a child born with blindness put…
Episode 59, January 16, 2019 - Dr. Bennett brings us up to speed on the science of contextually intelligent assistants, explains how what we think our machines can do actually shapes what we expect them to do, and shares how current research in machine learning…
Episode 58, January 9, 2019 - Dr. Protzenko talks about what’s wrong with software (and why it’s vitally important to get it right), explains why there are so many programming languages (and tells us about a few he’s been working on), and finally, acts as…
Episode 54, December 12, 2018 - Amos Miller is a product strategist on the Microsoft Research NeXT Enable team, and he’s played a pivotal role in bringing some of MSR’s most innovative research to users with disabilities. He also happens to be blind, so he…
Episode 53, December 5, 2018 - Dr. Sébastien Bubeck explains the difficulty of the multi-armed bandit problem in the context of a parameter- and data-rich online world. He also discusses a host of topics from randomness and convex optimization to metrical task systems and log…
