Episodes

Every year, interns from academic institutions around the world apply and grow their knowledge as members of the research community at Microsoft. In this Microsoft Research Podcast series, these students join their internship supervisors to share their experience working alongside some of the leading researchers in their respective fields. In this episode, Angela Busheska, an undergraduate engineering student at Lafayette College, talks to Senior Researcher Vaishnavi Ranganathan, about her work...

The personalizable object recognizer Find My Things was recently recognized for accessible design. Researcher Daniela Massiceti and software development engineer Martin Grayson talk about the research project’s origins and the tech advances making it possible. The Find My Things story is an example of research at Microsoft enhancing Microsoft products and services. To try the Find My Things tool, download the free, publicly available Seeing AI app. Learn more: Find My Things: Personalized Acc...

College freshman Dexter Greene and Microsoft research manager Richard Black discuss how technology that stores data in glass is supporting students as they expand earlier efforts to communicate what it means to be human to extraterrestrials. Learn more: Avenues: The World School — Golden Record 2.0 Project homepage Golden Record: Overview NASA Science Project Silica Project homepage Sealed in glass Microsoft Unlocked innovation story, 2023 Optics for the cloud: storage in the zettabyte era...

Model maker and fabricator Lex Story helps bring research to life through prototyping. He discusses his take on failure; the encouragement and advice that has supported his pursuit of art and science; and the sabbatical that might inspire his next career move. Learn more: Microsoft Premonition Project Eclipse Project PRISM 3D Telemedicine Jacdac Audio Devices

In this episode, Microsoft Product Manager Shrey Jain and OpenAI Research Scientist Zoë Hitzig join host Amber Tingle to discuss “Personhood credentials: Artificial intelligence and the value of privacy-preserving tools to distinguish who is real online.” In their paper, Jain, Hitzig, and their coauthors describe how malicious actors can draw on increasingly advanced AI tools to carry out deception, making online deception harder to detect and more harmful. Bringing ideas from cryptography into ...

Researcher Brendan Lucier and professor Mert Demirer are applying their micro- and macroeconomic expertise, respectively, to forecasting the economic impact of AI. They share how they’re using a task-level breakdown of occupations to help predict the future. Learn more: AI, Cognition, and the Economy (AICE) | Initiative page Ideas: Designing AI for people with Abigail Sellen | Microsoft Research Podcast, May 2024

Emre Kiciman shares how some keen observations and a desire to have front-end impact led him to make the jump from systems and networking to computational social science and now causal analysis and large-scale AI—and how systems thinking still impacts his work. Learn more: AI Controller Interface: Generative AI with a lightweight, LLM-integrated VM (blog) AICI: Prompts as (Wasm) Programs (GitHub)

A lack of appropriate data, decreased model performance, and other obstacles have made it difficult to expand the input language models can receive. Li Lyna Zhang introduces LongRoPE, a method capable of extending content windows to more than 2 million tokens. Read the paper Get the code

Senior Researcher Arindam Mitra introduces AgentInstruct. Using raw data sources, the automated multi-agent framework can create diverse, high-quality synthetic data at scale for the post-training of small and large language models. Read the paper

Printed circuit boards are abundant—in the stuff we use and in landfills. Researcher Jake Smith and professor Aniruddh Vashisth discuss the development of vitrimer-based PCBs that perform comparably to traditional PCBs but have less environmental impact. Learn more: Recyclable vitrimer-based printed circuit boards for sustainable electronics | Nature Sustainability, April 2024 Microsoft Climate Research Initiative Microsoft Research AI for Science Storing digital data in synthetic DNA with Dr...

Behnaz Arzani loves hard problems and the freedom to explore. That makes research a great fit! She discusses her work in network management, including the potential role of LLMs in the field; the challenges that excite her; and how storytelling changed her life. Learn more: Solving Max-Min Fair Resource Allocations Quickly on Large Graphs | Publication, February 2024 Finding Adversarial Inputs for Heuristics using Multi-level Optimization | Publication, February 2024 MetaOpt: Examining, expl...

Principal PM Manager Weishung Liu shares how a career delivering products and customer experiences aligns with her love of people and storytelling and how—despite efforts to defy the expectations that come with growing up in Silicon Valley—she landed in tech. Learn more: Weishung Liu at Microsoft Research Watch For | Project page Developer Tech Minutes: Watch For | Video, 2021

Social scientist and HCI expert Abigail Sellen explores the critical understanding needed to build human-centric AI through the lens of the new AICE initiative, a collective of interdisciplinary researchers studying AI impact on human cognition and the economy. Learn more: AI, Cognition, and the Economy (AICE) Responsible AI Principles and Approach | Microsoft AI The Rise of the AI Co-Pilot: Lessons for Design from Aviation and Beyond The Myth of the Paperless Office

Andrey Kolobov discusses WindSeer, a small CNN capable of estimating the wind field around an sUAV in flight more finely and with less compute and data than traditional models. The advancement can help support longer and safer autonomous flights. Learn more: WindSeer: Real-time volumetric wind prediction over complex terrain aboard a small uncrewed aerial vehicle

Jacki O'Neill saw an opportunity to expand Microsoft research efforts to Africa. She now leads Microsoft Research Africa, Nairobi (formerly MARI). O'Neill talks about the choices that got her there, the lab’s impact, and how living abroad is good for innovation. Learn more: Jacki O'Neill at Microsoft Research Microsoft Research Africa (formerly MARI)

Researcher Michel Galley explores how he and fellow researchers combined new and existing data to create MathVista, an open-source benchmark for measuring the mathematical reasoning capabilities of foundation models in scenarios that involve text and images. Read the paper Get the code & dataset

Energized by disruption, partner group product manager Rafah Hosn is helping to drive scientific advancement in AI for Microsoft. She talks about the mindset needed to work at the frontiers of AI and how the research-to-product pipeline is changing in the GenAI era. Learn more: AI Frontiers - Microsoft Research Responsible AI Principles and Approach | Microsoft AI

Tusher Chakraborty talks about the paper “Spectrumize: Spectrum-efficient Satellite Networks for the Internet of Things,” including a method for supporting communication between a large IoT-satellite constellation and devices on Earth within a limited spectrum. Read the paper

The new series “Ideas” debuts with guest Kalika Bali. The speech and language tech researcher talks sci-fi and its impact on her career, the design thinking philosophy behind her research, and the “outrageous idea” she had to work with low-resource languages. Learn more: The State and Fate of Linguistic Diversity and Inclusion in the NLP World | Publication, July 2020 Project VeLLM | Project page Kahani: Visual Storytelling | Project page Kahani: Visual Storytelling through Culturally Nuanc...

Principal Researcher Ida Momennejad brings her expertise in cognitive neuroscience and computer science to this in-depth conversation about general intelligence and what the evolution of the brain across species can teach us about building AI. Learn more: AI and Microsoft Research | Focus Area Evaluating Cognitive Maps and Planning in Large Language Models with CogEval | Publication, October 2023 Imitating Human Behaviour with Diffusion Models | Publication, May 2023 Navigates Like Me: Unde...

Senior Researcher Chang Liu discusses M-OFDFT, a variation of orbital-free density functional theory (OFDFT) that leverages deep learning to help identify molecular properties in a way that minimizes the tradeoff between accuracy and efficiency. Read the paper

Can how we think about our thinking help us better incorporate generative AI in our lives & work? Explore metacognition’s potential to improve the tech’s usability on “Abstracts,” then sign up for Microsoft Research Forum for more on this & other AI work. Read the paper

Partner Research Manager and developer experience expert Nicole Forsgren talks about the future of software engineering with AI, why she loves tech, and her reliance on a spreadsheet and her gut when making career-changing decisions. Learn more: Nicole Forsgren at Microsoft Research Nicole Forsgren website Quantifying the impact of developer experience | Microsoft Azure Blog, January 2024 Yes, good DevEx increases productivity. Here is the data. | GitHub blog, January 2024 Accelerate: The Sc...

Partner Software Architect Ivan Tashev talks about applying his expertise in audio signal processing to the design and study of audio components for Microsoft products such as Kinect and shares how a focus on what he can control has fueled professional success. Learn more: Ivan Tashev at Microsoft Research Distributed Meetings: A Meeting Capture and Broadcasting System | Publication, December 2002 Research Collection: The Unseen History of Audio and Acoustics Research at Microsoft | Microsoft...